Epic's Tim Sweeney made a massive (I mean massive) update to the Unreal Technology Page with a detailed explanation of their plans for licensing the Unreal Tournament engine for Playstation 2 games, pointing out that like Monolith, Epic is a licensed middleware provider. The basic gist of it, is that Epic plans to have their engine ready for developers to create launch titles for the US release of the PS2, but there's far more to it than that (including a rundown of the engine's advantages for PC developers). Here's a brief excerpt:

One of the great breakthroughs Sony is making with the Playstation2 is recognizing that engines and tools are becoming increasingly important as games increase in scope. Game engines are a relatively new market, informally established by id Software with the licensing of the Doom engine, and brought to the forefront by the "cold war" competition between the Quake and Unreal engines which both achieved tremendous success. Now, Playstation2 developers will have access to the same kind of engine choices and benefits through Sony's middleware program.

And the Playstation2 has become a major focus for us. The Unreal Tournament engine is highly modular and that modularity has really paid off with the Playstation 2. We got a fully playable game up and running in just a few weeks, which gives us a lot of time to focus on making the rendering technology fast and easy for a licensee to use. Now, we're attacking the Playstation2 technology on two fronts.

First of all, we're bringing our enhanced Unreal Tournament engine to the Playstation2, with some new, powerful and heavily polygon-exploiting features:

• Skeletal animated characters: So 2000 to 5000 polygon characters will be a reality for Playstation2 games and PC games targetted at 3D cards with hardware T&L support.
• A multitexture terrain / displacement-mapping system, enabling the creation of large outdoor areas with smooth shading and realtime displacement effects, such as procedurally animated, displacement mapped water waves.

Second, a larger-scale upgrade of the engine's world rendering architecture is underway, adding additional core rendering features like curved surfaces and an enhanced surface shading model. These features will be especially exciting on the Playstation2, which is a powerful but complex beast -- taking maximum advantage of the vector processing units will be the holy grail of Playstation2 engines.

We will have the enhanced Unreal Tournament engine ready for U.S. launch titles on the Playstation2, with a large-scale rendering upgrade soon to follow.

Monolith's Jason Hall updated his .plan with a "translation" into layman's terms of the press release about the availability of their LithTech 2 engine on the Playstation 2 (story). Here is an excerpt from the full explanation:

Something to know - there may be other engines out there that are currently being ported to the PSX2, but until they are approved, they are not able to be made available for others to license. This is why this announcement is significant. As far as I can tell, LithTech is really the one and only complete 3D game operating system available to license as a middleware solution.

Gamerush continues their weekly Starlancer gallery with a new set of in-game shots, as well as stills from as yet unseen movie footage.

There are three new Deus Ex screenshots on incitegames, showing off a few scenes from the 3D action RPG in development at ION Storm.

GameFan has posted an interview with Digital Extremes, revealing more details about Dark Sector, their recently announced online-only multiplayer sequel to Unreal Tournament. The article includes most of the concept art that was released last week, as well as three new pieces.

Rebellion has updated their Gunlok screenshots gallery with nine new game images starting here. Gunlok is their recently announced 3D action RPG set in a robotic future.

Also updated is Blizzard's Warcraft III Screenshots page, adding two new images of their upcoming 3D role-playing strategy game, available for online perusal or as high-res downloads.

A new version 1.6 of the Jumbot for Half-Life has been released. There are no major changes in this version, but, as the author puts it, "what it does add is pretty useful for crafting the bots to automatically work well on individual levels."

Monolith has announced that they have joined Sony's Playstation 2 middleware program, and will provide their LithTech 2 engine to developers for the platform. They've rewritten parts of the engine to work specifically with the PS2 hardware, as shown in this excerpt from the press release:

Built upon Monolith's LithTech PC foundation, the PlayStation2 and PC versions of LithTech will share many design and interface similarities allowing PC developers familiar with traditional 3D engines to easily switch to PlayStation2 development. However, to insure optimum performance with PlayStation2 hardware, the Monolith development team has re-engineered several parts of LithTech to maximize developer's potential with powerful features such as NURBs, displacement mapping and, most importantly, parallel processing. Designed from the ground up to be modular and extensible, LithTech's flexibility offers unprecedented power to create unique titles that push the technology envelope.

"Other companies have chosen to simply port their 3D technology straight from PC to PlayStation2. But, Monolith strongly believes a direct port will not provide game developers with a comprehensive, specialized set of tools," said Hall. "Our dedicated team of programmers, game designers, and technical support experts have customized the LithTech engine in order to take full advantage of the incredible power of PlayStation2. Additionally, they are continually refining, tuning and improving the engine to meet the rapidly changing demands of the videogame market."

AVault has received word from Interplay that Giants, Planet Moon's upcoming action/strategy game, has been delayed again. No formal release date has been set, but they have confirmed with the publisher that the game won't be out until the fourth quarter of 2000.

Stomped has posted a brief Q&A with Gearbox Software's Randy Pitchford, regarding the just-announced Dreamcast version of Half-Life that he's working on (story). Here's a quick excerpt:

...the focus of the Dreamcast game is to bring the complete, original Half-Life to Sega's next-gen console. Half-Life is being overhauled to not only function on the Dreamcast, but exploit the system's advanced features. The new episode Gearbox is creating is centered around the security guard because he's not only got a compelling story driving him, but he was in the center of the most exciting and amazing action in the Black Mesa Research Facility. Also, we think it's about time players got into the shoes of one of the most liked characters of the game.

Deus Ex Incarnate has posted version 1.0 of their Unofficial Deus Ex FAQ. The FAQ covers a number of different areas of interest related to the game, from its system requirements, to gameplay specific issues.

GameFan has posted a Direct3D tweak guide for Unreal Tournament. The guide has some game settings you can tweak, and also links to Epic's Direct3D page, which features a beta D3D driver for UT that according to the author of the guide boosts your framerate by as much as 5 FPS.

ATI has released new drivers for their Rage 128 and 128 Pro based video cards, which fix a ton of problems, including game-specific problems with the Messiah compatibility test, SpecOps 2, Revenant, and others (thanks Latch).

Following up on the news earlier today regarding Homeworld: Cataclysm, the upcoming official add-on for Homeworld (story), Sierra's official site has gone live, and they've posted the first handful of screenshots, as well as some conceptual artwork from the game. Update: GA-Strategy has been contacted by Sierra, who told them that Cataclysm is not an add-on, but rather a full, standalone new title.

HavenGames has posted a brief preview of Nihilistic's Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption, featuring five high-resolution screenshots from this spooky RPG. Update: it would appear that these shots have been posted before here, so if you've been keeping up with all the previously released screenshots from the game, you've already seen these.

Version 1.13 of The Unofficial GLQuake Project's version of GLQuake has been released, and is available for download on their homepage. This new version adds bump mapping and slipgate mirrors to their already impressive feature set.

Sierra, Valve, and Sega have formally announced that they are working with Gearbox Software (the developers of the Half-Life mission pack Opposing Force) and Captivation Digital Labs to port Half-Life to the Sega Dreamcast. This new port will feature a brand new single player mission featuring Barney, everyone's favorite multiplicious security guard. Here's an excerpt from the full press release, with some more details:

In development by Northern California-based Captivation Digital Laboratories in conjunction with Gearbox Software and Valve, Half-Life: Dreamcast is set to be even more extraordinary than the original PC version. The Sega Dreamcast edition will feature several optimizations, including higher polygon player characters, dramatic lighting and special effects, to showcase the power of the Sega Dreamcast and deliver a fresh and exciting player experience for console gamers.

Half-Life: Dreamcast will also feature an all-new single player mission that surrounds the Black Mesa Security Guard character, Barney. This special mission is being custom created for the Dreamcast by Gearbox Software, the Texas-based development team that created Half-Life: Opposing Force(tm), the official PC expansion for Half-Life and runner-up to 1999 Game of the Year by PC Gamer magazine (March 2000).

Todd McFarlane's toy company, Todd Toys is at the Toy Fair here in New York this week showing off their 2000 lineup, and amongst the toys being shown are figures based on the McFarlane-designed characters for Ultima Online 2. GA-RPG has posted some images from McFarlane's catalog, and for more coverage, you can check out the official Todd Toys Toy Fair site, which has more images, as well as a virtual walkthrough of their booth.

Version of the day for the Quake 3 Log Analyzer (Q3LA) is build 030, featuring a long list of improvements, changes, and fixes. To get an idea of how the output currently looks like, check out this sample page.

RTS Players has posted four new screenshots of Submarine Titans, the underwater real-time strategy game that is being constructed at Eclipse Studios.

GameSpot UK's Tomb Raider III The Lost Artefact Demos and Downloads has exclusive (albeit misspelled) downloads of the playable demo of Tomb Raider: The Lost Artifact, the add-on installment in Lara Croft's bouncy Tomb Raider III adventures from Eidos Interactive. The download is about 14 MB.

A post on GA-Strategy has an announcement from the Milia trade show in Cannes, France, of Homeworld Cataclysm, a new chapter in Sierra Studios' and Relic Entertainment's outer-space RTS that's in the works at Canadian-based developer Barking Dog Studios, and scheduled for summer 2000 release.

More RTS, this of the about-extinct 2D variety, as there are 14 Sudden Strike Screenshots on GameSpot UK to accompany their Sudden Strike preview which looks ahead at this upcoming World War II RTS in which the "finished game lets you battle with up to 1,000 separate units on the map at one time."

There are three new Devil Inside screenshots up on 24 Hour Gamer showing off more shotgun-toting gameplay from GameSquad's upcoming 3D horror/adventure game from the author of the Alone in the Dark series.

As I mentioned I would in Out of the Blue, I noodled around a bit more with the focus setting, something that's been bandied about here lately as a way to make the news frame scroll by default for those who desire it, but a problem for those who don't as it can pop your browser in front of your work as the boss walks by, among other intrusive side effects. In spite of not changing the scrolling behavior on any of my machines (or loony's), upon further experimentation it does seem to somehow alter the focus of the page (if I pull up the "focused" version of the page and switch away, the icon in my taskbar changes color), so to see if it offers the best of both worlds on this tiny detail, there is now an ugly temporary JavaScript drop down dealie on the left sidebar that will set a cookie to set the focus if you so desire. I've added a link there to user settings as well, but this is not among them, because to set it does not require registration. If it turns out this is all operating as expected for everyone (and what are the chances of that?), I'll work out a less uglified interface. Feel free to let me know how it works for you.

Calling it "the Zima of the shooter realm," Computer Games Online's Evolva preview looks ahead at this upcoming title from Interplay, which will be the first game developed by London-based Computer Artworks Ltd. Here's a bit to help understand the nature of this first- and third-person game:

Interplay is marketing the game as a strategic shooter, but really it’s much more of a straight-up action affair. From the safety of an orbiting mothership, you control a squad of four "Genohunters," a highly adaptive variety of alien warrior that possesses the rather unique ability to absorb the genetic material of its fallen foes and mutate to take on their characteristics. At any given time you are in direct control of one of the Genohunters—you can issue the commands either individually or as a group. You can also change which Genohunter you are directly controlling by hitting your F1-F4 keys.

Also at CGO is Computer Games Online's Flying Heroes preview and there's a Flying Heroes preview on Gamers Central as well, each looks at this upcoming 3D combat game from Hidden & Dangerous developer Illusion Softworks. The game, due for release this summer, is a deathmatch-oriented racing game, but with a twist that involves equipment upgrades. Here's the description from CGO of how that works:

The whole upgrade cycle, which superficially resembles the average race game, is what separates Flying Heroes from other deathmatch-centered games like Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament. You sign up for a league and then are faced with certain objectives for each tournament, which takes place in varied environments. In addition to just getting the most frags, there is also The Chase, which requires speed and dexterity, and some "last man standing" type battles. In between arena battles, you can choose to take on special quests and voluntary tasks to make a bit of extra cash.

• Thresh's FiringSquad interviews Peter Wicher, asking 10 questions of the 3dfx director of product marketing about progress on the Voodoo5 and stuff like that.
• The debut release of the InternetTweak 2000 utility to help fine-tune your 'net connection is now available as the sequel to NetMaster 99.
• The GeForce Guide by 3D Rage offers display setting tweaks, bios tweaks, and overclocking instructions and results.
• H.Oda's Homepage has a new version 1.7-g1 of the SoftFSB utility. Thanks ClockingFiles.
• Falcon Northwest's Talon 1.2 System is reviewed on Tweak3D.net.
• Hercules 3D Prophet DDR-DVI is reviewed on GA-Source.
• Aureal Vortex2 SQ2500 sound card is reviewed on Game Forces.
• ASUS K7M Athlon motherboard is reviewed on CPU Review.
• AMK-CO-AMK-2X60 heatsink is reviewed on Overclockin.com.
• 2Cool PC Plus Cooler is reviewed on The Tech Zone.

Don't be a stupid cupid: Alliance News has a dealie set up where you can send your honey a Quake III Arena-themed Valentine's card. Taking this a step further, the Destroy QuakeD Site has a level for those addicted to mapping-fire it up to show your honey your latest level, and surprise him or her when it turns out to contain your Valentine's Day wishes. There is only one spawn spot and no weapons, so this map is suited to love, not war.

There's a doctor in the house (actually a pair) as Bloodshot's BioWare interview talks with Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, the pair of physicians who are principles behind BioWare about what they're currently up to, which includes development on MDK2, Baldur's Gate II, and Neverwinter Nights.

Speedy 3D interviews Martin Kitney talking with the head of PR at Rage about progress on Hostile Waters and Incoming Forces. On the latter, Martin says it will look to add a stronger strategy element than Incoming, pointing out that although the original was marketed as an arcade shooter, it was criticized (or rather "criticised") for the lack of depth of its gameplay.

There are 12 new screenshots of Thandor on GA-Strategy showing off gameplay from this upcoming 3D RTS from Planet4.

The ClanRing Mod Development page has version 6.0 of the CRMod++ for classic old school Quake. The new version offers native ProQuake support, and "heavily optimized" code, "resulting in the smallest and fastest crmod ever to hit the streets."

A new version 1.5 of Weapon Mod is now available. The new release adds "some new menus, added ammo box amount and respawn time, health amount, toggle and respawn time, armor amount, toggle, and respawn time, degenerate health and armor, and holdable toggle and respawn time." Thanks Mod On Demand.

A post by id Software's Paul Jaquays to the Quake3World.com Forums details the file naming convention that id wants to support (from the original by Rogue-13 over at polycount). Also on the Q3A editing front, the relocated Q3 Build website celebrates its move with the release of a new installer program for their Quake III Arena map compiling GUI front-end. They plan on releasing a Q3Radiant plug-in version at about the time of the next release of Q3Radiant. Also, The Gathering of Disciples page has what they describe as a "breakthrough" for the design of maps for Rogue Spear: working landmines. Finally, the Q2Java website has the release of the MDLView and MDLMovie source code with the hopes that this code will be helpful to someone, since the project has been fairly abandoned because of time constraints. The release includes half finished Heretic II and 3DS readers.

A pair of releases of those off-topic, but oh-so-popular .mp3 players: The Winamp homepage has a new version 2.60 of the Winamp player. The new release offers updated support for MJuice and Audiosoft file formats, bug fixes and cosmetic improvements, a new "SuperPiMP" installation system, and more. Thanks Scott Baker. Also, there's a new beta version 1.5 of the Sonique .mp3 player (thanks File Flash), offering a "taste of things to come in the finished version," though apparently no "SuperPiMP" installation system, at least not yet.

• IntelliMouse Explorer on 24 Hour Gamer.
• LeMans 24 Hours on Actiontrip.
• Mindrover: the Europa Project on CTNews.
• Nox on DX Gaming Network and (the demo) on Gamesurge.
• Shadow Company: Left for Dead on The Wargamer.
• Shadow Man on Insane Gamers.
• Sid Meier's Antietam! on Electric Games.
• The Sims on ESCMAG.
• Urban Chaos on 3D Action Planet.

• Birdman's Lair has posted files with the "official" support for Quake III Arena using the ballsy Space Orb controller...
• Part five of Computer Games Online's Battlezone 2 strategy guide is online, and Star Wars Gamer's The Phantom Menace Guide is also now up...
• Another update to Painful Detail adds another 14 new Unreal Tournament skins, eight new voices and a new skin of the week...

I'm more than a bit confused... furn banged out a JavaScript dealie to allow you to deselect the news focus dealie, and in experimenting with it, I'm finding the focus works properly for me on every machine in the Blue Tower now whether I use the JavaScript or not (huh?). I'm not sure what's going on here, but for the moment it doesn't seem like there's anything to fix, but maybe it's something local on my end. I'll poke around with this today and try to figure out what's up.

Link of the Day: End Daylight Savings Time. There's even a petition to sign (I'm so behind this!). Thanks Kicker.
Image of the Day: APOD June 28, 1999 - From Mars with Love. Thanks Nok. Happy V.D. everyone!

A new version 1.1 of the S.H.U.D. modification for Quake III Arena is now available. This mod replaces the game's normal heads-up display (HUD) with one that offers real-time display of your number of shots fired, hits, hit percentage, and more. The new version adds in the scoreboard as well as accuracy info on your number of consecutive hits and maximum consecutive hits.

Unreal Universe and the Sled Dog is an interview with T. Elliot Cannon, AKA Myscha the Sled Dog, formerly of Epic Games, and now lead level designer at the Collective, where they busily buzz away on Deep Space Nine-The Fallen, the upcoming third-person Unreal-engine action game. The Q&A discusses Myscha's departure from Epic, Laguna Beach, some background stuff, and even a bit about the upcoming game, like whether you can add a "buck naked Kira" (strictly from the academic point of view about licensing issues, of course). Multiplayer is also discussed, with Myscha anticipating "some super relaxed fun multiplayer scenarios" to be created "once the single player game is finalized and tight."

More space (and Trek, for that matter): The Allegiance Zone interviews Joel Solap Dehlin, talking with the executive producer (and a designer) on Allegiance, Microsoft's space combat game, currently in open beta. They have also updated their Allegiance Tech Tree, added a page of Allegiance Commanding Advice, and posted some Belters Faction screenshots showing the high-resolution coolness seen when encountering this faction that occasionally pops up in the beta (apparently used by Microsoft to see how client machines handle the enhanced art). We also have a bunch of Trekkie stories, as Sci-Fi Gaming interviews Gary Wagner talking with the president of Gizmo Industries about Dominion wars, the upcoming Star Trek: Deep Space Nine game. Sci-Fi Gaming also interviews Liz Braswell talking with the producer on SSI's Warp 2, the upcoming sequel to Starship Creator that will now allow you to create Klingon and Romulan spacecraft in addition to Federation ships. Finally, the Strategies section on the Star Trek Armada site has been updated with some strategies for this upcoming Trekkie RTS, so if you think you will get the game, you can bookmark what would seem to be a case of premature strategization. Thanks Tymetodie.

Speaking of strategy guides (smooth like raisins through a goose with the segues this morning, eh?), parts two, three, and four of the Battlezone 2: Combat Commander guide on Computer Games Online are all up, following the part one mentioned yesterday. Also, the first update in a couple of months to the GameFAQs Thief Gold walkthrough adds loads of new stuff, three new areas have been added to the GameFAQs Ultima Ascension FAQ/walkthrough, various updates have been added to the GameFAQs Septerra Core FAQ/walkthrough and there's a brand new GameFAQs The Sims FAQ/strategy guide.

• Tech-Junkie's VideoLogic Site Visit offers Q&A with David Harold, VideoLogic "PR guru."
• MSI MS-6309 motherboard is reviewed on Thresh's FiringSquad.
• Supermicro SC-750A case is reviewed on BoomGames Interactive.
• 2CoolPC Plus cooler is reviewed on Overclockers Australia.

Beta Bites interviews Jim Tso talking with the senior producer for the US/Canada release of Earth 2150 (already available in Europe), the upcoming sequel to Earth 2140 described as the "first all-terrain, 3D real-time strategy game." In addition to the Q&A, the piece also offers up a bunch of 1024x768 OpenGL screenshots.

There are nine new Aquarius screenshots on GA-Strategy showing off gameplay from this upcoming 3D action/strategy hybrid where players vie for control of the planet "Aquarius."

It's Unreal Tournament map madness week over at deCyber, where they've released over 15 new UT maps. Also, ztn's page of utter crap-o-la has Beat Box, ztn's new Q3a map (thanks Cached). Also, a new single-player episode for Half-Life titled Deliverance is now available (thanks atomic8). As far as can be told, there's no squealing like a pig involved, but rather "you reprise your role as Gordon Freeman in a story set after the end of Half-Life."

A sort-of sequel to the low-poly love doll contest is up, as The Cute Doll Contest on polycount offers modelers the opportunity to square off (or would that be triangle off?) against id Software's Paul Steed in a contest to create a sub-1000 face model of "a CUTESY cartoon character based on a recognizable commercial property."

• 1602 AD on Glide Underground.
• Army Men: Toys in Space on GameSpot AU.
• Battlezone II: Combat Commander on GA-Strategy and GibWorld.
• Everglide Giganta mouse pad on GameWire.Org.
• Flanker 2.0 on Thresh's Firingsquad.
• Flight Simulator 2000 on PC.IGN.com.
• Hangsim on Adrenaline Vault.
• Nox on Daily Radar.
• Quake III Arena (Mac) on Happy Puppy.
• Soldier of Fortune Demo on Clan Nexus Network.
• Thief II Demo on 3dfxgamers.
• Unreal Tournament (Mac) on Happy Puppy.
• X-COM Email on Gone Gold.

• Dick Lee's web page has his Quake III Arena screensaver that displays "the various models/characters of Quake3 Arena randomly on your screen or bounces them off the edges of your screen"...
• As is their way, Painful Detail has posted still more new UT stuff, with four new player models, six new voices and two new tutorials...
• Teamplay.Net is putting together a Quake 3 map pack for use in upcoming events and are looking for submissions of professional-quality custom Deathmatch and Capture the Flag maps...
• The screenshots page on the Official UltraHLE Website has new OpenGL screenshots of an upcoming version of this currently Glide-only Nintendo64 emulator. Thanks EmulationHQ...

Blow out the candles, Blammo, as today is the first anniversary of the use of the Blammo news database here, meaning there is now one full year's worth of databased news in the archive to go along with the nearly three years of HTML news. There have been a couple of attempts to convert the old HTML to the new database to make it more searchable, but it's tough to say whether that will ever be practical. Being able to search the entire archive from the handy "Search!" box would help in cases like yesterday, though, when Slashdot posted an article on Textmode Quake, since this inspired a bunch of folks to send this in as news, while if the HTML archive was as searchable as the database, it would show that a story about the Text Mode Quake page appeared in August '98 (here), and probably serve as an aid to those who use the archive for research as well. On the subject of Slashdot, this also brings up something I've been meaning to mention, which is that we get occasional Link of the Day submissions of stories that have appeared in their pages (I believe the reverse happens on occasion as well), so I thought I'd mention that we'd rather not knowingly dupe up on these kinds of links (or "Oddly Enough headlines," etc.). The net certainly has enough wacky stuff out there that we should be able to manage something screwy enough on a daily basis nonetheless. Speaking of Blammo, I'm working with furn to see if we can add the JavaScript focus() dealie to a Blammo preference option so it won't impact those who find it troublesome (I've killed it in the meantime).

My fondest possible farewell to Charles M. Schulz, who died last night (CNN.com story-thanks Vad3R [DI]), creator of the most beloved comic strip of my youth.

Link of the Day: Furious George (and his cross-country crime spree). Thanks Josh Fletcher. It's a web-based game that includes a scoring system. It is a bit simple, but can be amusing (or disturbing) based on the number of different "atrocities" you can commit from their randomized database without duplicating yourself.
Story of the Day: Brain Activity is Visibly Altered Following Sleep Deprivation, and surprisingly, not always for the worse! Thanks armypants. We've had the coffee is good for you story, now the (sort of) sleep depravation is good for you story, now we need something covering junk food.
Image of the Day: Q Lopez. So why does Jennifer Lopez have the Quake logo wrapped around her face?