Archived News:
PC.IGN has posted a new interview
with Human Head's Paul MacArthur, lead programmer on Rune, their upcoming
Unreal engine game of Viking bloody glory. While brief, the interview touches
on their reasons for selecting the Unreal engine, the various weapons in the
game, and some more gameplay-specific issues.
Also new at PC.IGN tonight, is the
latest installment of their Allegiance designer diary. Tonight's edition
features Curt Carpenter, the lead developer on this massively multiplayer space-sim
from Microsoft. Curt talks about the world of programming on the game, from
the level of their DirectX support, to a look back at the game's long development
("feels like almost three years").
GameSpot has posted an
in-depth preview of Anachronox, ION Storm's Quake II engine RPG, which is
based on a hands-on demonstration of the game. It's very detailed, and features
some new screenshots as well. They also promise an even more detailed preview,
which will be posted "in the coming months."
More 3D RTS viewing today, as incitegames has posted six new screenshots of Ground Control, showing off more scenes from this game that is under construction at Massive Entertainment.
Voodoo Extreme has posted two
shots from Quake III Arena, and two shots from Homeworld, taken from a computer
running 3dfx' VSA-100 chipset, which will be used in their Voodoo 4 and Voodoo
5 cards later this year. At the request of 3dfx the images haven't been downsampled,
but the images are in 640x480, so the download won't kill your modem.
There is a new preview of Earth 2150 on EuroGamer, offering a brief but hands-on look at the 3D real-time strategy game by TopWare and Mattel that should be released later this Spring in the US and UK, as well as a handful of new screenshots.
GameSpy has conducted a
brief Q&A with Jeff Strain, one of three former employees of Blizzard
Entertainment, who have opened up Triforge, a new development studio. They haven't
announced what kind of game they're working on, although Strain says in this
Q&A they plan to focus on, "strong multiplayer internet games."
Computer Artworks has revealed a new site for Evolva, their upcoming tactical action shooter. The site offers more info on the game, as well as a few new screenshots, and comes in Flash and non-Flash versions. However, the non-Flash links currently don't work, so you'll have to suffer the annoying browser shake effect to get to the main area.
The online Belgian magazine Infolder has posted four
new screenshots from Black & White, Peter Molyneux' upcoming strategy
game. The shots show off the game world during the day and evening, and during
a rainshower.
The weekly update to the official MDK2 site brings seven new screenshots, all featuring the Dr. Fluke Hawkins character, who obviously needs to rely more on brain than brawn to survive the game's huge levels. MDK, of course, stands for Me? Don't Know (or more accurately, last time I forgot ![=]](/miscimages/smiley4.gif) ).
Fox Interactive has announced that Die Hard Trilogy 2: Viva Las Vegas has shipped to stores in the US. The hybrid 3D action game, in which you act out John "yippie-ki-yay!" McClane in third-person action and driving missions, as well as first-person Virtua Squad-type shooting, was developed by n-Space, and on the occasion Fox has added several more movie trailers to their Die Hard Trilogy 2 website. Thanks GA-Source for the tip.
Gone Gold, somewhat of an authority in these matters, reports that Rogue Spear: Urban Operations has been approved for duplication, and should be on store shelves soon. Urban Operations is the official mission pack to Red Storm's tactical action shooter.
Just in time for the Game Developer's Conference, Numerical Design has
announced their NetImmerse 3.0 engine. This latest version of their engine
features curved surfaces, character skinning, continuous level of detail and more. It is also cross-platform, and supports PC, MacOS
(including OS X) and Playstation 2. Previous versions of the NetImmerse
engine have powered such games as Prince of Persia 3D, Panzer General 3D and
Simon the Sorcerer 3D amongst others.
German site GamesZone has posted a preview of Star Wars: Obi-Wan, the upcoming first- and third-person action game from LucasArts. Thanks to our affiliate JediKnight.net for the tip. The text of the article is in German, so AltaVista Translations may help you out there, but there are also four new screenshots (and two familiar ones), as well as galleries of motion capture images and concept sketches.
There are three new Ground Control screenshots on 3DGN, showing off a few more areas from the futuristic 3D real-time strategy game in development at Massive Entertainment.
Xroads Gaming has conducted an interview on Project Entropia, talking to Patric Sundstrom about the massively multiplayer online role-playing game in development at Swedish company Mindark. There is a variety of details about the project, including the fact that the sci-fi setting of the game will be rendered using the NetImmerse3D engine.
Yep, it's that time of the day again:
GameSpy's "engine week" rolls on, with today's
interview with BioWare's Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeshuk, talking to
them about their various engines, and their features and benefits. The company
has three engines: the Infinity Engine (used in Baldur's Gate), the Omen Engine
(used in MDK2), and a third, currently unannounced engine that is being developed
for use in their upcoming multiplayer RPG Neverwinter Nights.
A new
preview of Psygnosis' 3D strategy game Metal Fatigue has been posted at
GameSpot UK. This being GameSpot UK, they've also posted one
of their screenshot galleries, complete with a whole bunch of new screenshots.
Alliance CTF version 0.5 has
been released, and is available for download at
FilePlanet. The Quake III Arena mod features five CTF maps, two different grappling hooks, pre-recorded voice and radio sounds for team communication
and lots more.
Adrenaline Vault has posted an extensive feature on Thief II: the Metal Age, the hopefully imminent stealthy action game by Looking Glass. On offer are a detailed hands-on preview, an interview with developer Emil Pagliarulo (a former AVault editor), and a gallery of 21 new screenshots.
Completing a trilogy of camera mods, Quake III Camera is now available on the Q3Cam page. Created by the author of QCam and Quake2Cam, this mod brings third-person camera viewing to Quake III Arena games, allowing you to watch games live or record them for later viewing.
Digital Anvil goes back to the basics, Part 1 on CGO kicks off a preview of Starlancer, the space-combat sim being designed by Erin Roberts that is in development at Warthog and, naturally, Digital Anvil. This part focuses on the setting of the game, and the absence of full-motion video (which surely few will mourn over).
Gamers Central has posted part two of their BioWare feature, an interview with Greg Zeschuk, who talks about the history of the company, the games they created and are working on now, and more specifically about the games based on the AD&D universe.
Interplay has updated the official Star Trek: New Worlds site with four new screenshots and a FAQ page, addressing a large number of common questions about their 3D ground-based RTS, where you can side with the Federation, Klingons or Romulans.
id Software's John Carmack wrote one of his trademark .plan updates, talking at length and in great technical depth about "virtualized video card local memory." I won't pretend to understand more than half the sentences in this massive update, so here is
just how John kicks off the discussion:
This is something I have been preaching for a couple years, but I finally got around to setting all the issues down in writing.
First, the statement:
Virtualized video card local memory is The Right Thing.
Now, the argument (and a whole bunch of tertiary information):
If you had all the texture density in the world, how much texture memory would be needed on each frame?
Heart
in Darkness is the name of the second (and last) part of Salon's massive
article covering Daikatana's crunch time. This piece features more ION staffers
explaining what it's like to work on Daikatana (and on games in general), and
focuses on two members in particular: Luke "Weasl" Whiteside (a recent
addition to the staff), and Stevie "KillCreek" Case.
A new preview of Loose Cannon,
an upcoming action game from Digital Anvil and Tony Zurovec, the creator of
Crusader: No Remorse, has popped
up at PC.IGN. The preview is pretty large, and goes into great detail about
the aspects of the game that were shown at GameStock (which didn't include the
mulitplayer, although it is planned).
Friday could be D-Day for Microsoft, as the entire world seems to think Bill
Gates will be announcing their not-so-secret console system during his keynote
address at the Game Developer's Conference. While no official specs have been
announced yet, NVIDIA and AMD are said
to be providing hardware for the system, and their respective stocks soared
yesterday on the rumor. GameSpot
is reporting that Japanese developers Capcom, Konami, Koei, Enix, and Namco
are all lined up to make games for the system, which will reportedly resemble
a stripped-down PC.
GameSpy has conducted a
Q&A with David Allen, talking to Artifact Entertainment's Chief Executive
about their 3D RPG Demise: Rise of the Ku'Tan. Allen describes the game as,
"the old Wizardry/Bard's Tale games on steroids."
GameSpot News has posted new
screenshots from Terminus, Vicarious Visions' upcoming space sim, taken
from a month-old build of the game. The game boasts a 700 page script, and over
600 lines of dialogue, and each of their four factions have 90 individual, open-ended
missions.
Why the
Hasbro Lawsuit Should Terrify Game Developers - And What We Can Do About It
is the name of a new editorial at GameDev.net by Diana Gruber, a veteran developer
and author of books and articles on the gaming industry. The editorial deals
with Hasbro's announcement that they will be actively prosecuting games based
on their Atari properties, including Asteroids, Centipede, and Missile Command
( here's the news
story at Daily Radar).
New screenshots
from Shogun: Total War, Creative Assembly's strategy game that puts you
in 16th century medieval Japan, have been posted at GameSpot. According to them,
the game has been pushed back to Spring 2000, allowing them to double the size
of each battalion from 60 to 120 individual soldiers.
The results of the first round from TRIBES World, an international Starsiege:
TRIBES tournament, have been posted at PlanetStarsiege,
along with links to streaming media play-by-play of some of the matches.
Sorry to interrupt your regularly scheduled ramblings...yesterday proved to
be a strange day for all of us here at Blue's News. The fun started when Blue
came down with one of those bugs that seem to always be going around, but things
really got interesting when both Blue and myself found ourselves with dead ISDN
lines. He's still off-line (hence this morning's update) but I managed to get
myself back online by hooking my laptop up to my regular phone line, and sharing
that over my network. So I'm using a 56k connection, but hey...at least I'm
back online. Frans proved yet again that he's just The Man when it comes to
this stuff, flying solo on the site for the majority of yesterday afternoon.
While I'm back online, this whole ordeal has turned my apartment into a mass
of wires, and the only hope I've got that it will be fixed at any point in the
near future is my "appointment" with Bell Atlantic, which will occur
at some random time between now and this evening. Whee!
Link of the Day: Enabler
2000: The World's First Nonviolent First Person Shooter (thanks Robert
"Sgt. Hulka" Waring). Update: It would appear that this is a repeat link of the day...oh, well. It's still funny.
Story of the day: PS2 Memory
Card Recall. Actual quote from Sony boardroom: "Doh!"
A new preview of Earth 2150
has been posted over at PCGN, which appears to be based on a build of the full
version of the game, and as such is fairly well detailed. Earth 2150 is an upcoming
3D strategy game from TopWare and Mattel.
NovaLogic has again released a new Delta Force 2 patch for download on their ftp servers here and here (8.8 MB), as well as through the auto-update feature. At this moment, their developer notes page has not been updated though, so version number and changes in this patch are currently unknown. Update: Maagic sends word this is version 1.06.15, and merely fixes a couple of bugs.
incitegames has posted a
brief interview with Human Head's Tim Gerritsen, talking to him about Rune,
their upcoming Unreal-engine game of drunken Viking glory. Tim talks about why
they chose to base the game on Norse mythology, the game's multiplayer, and
more.
Another day, another postmortem, it seems, as Gamasutra has posted an article examining the remains of Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings. The article, originally printed in the January 2000 issue of Game Developer magazine, has programmer Matt Pritchard looking back at the development of Ensemble Studios' medieval real-time strategy game, and of course addressing the questions of what went right, and what went wrong during the project.
NovaLogic has opened a personnel page for Tachyon: the Fringe, featuring profiles and soundbites (how appropriate, today ) of the main characters in their upcoming mercenary space-combat title. The main character Jack Logan is voiced by Evil Dead actor Bruce Campbell, and naturally there are a generous five sound clips on offer from him.
The weekly update to the official Summoner site brings a new screenshot depicting the "Avrum Market", as well as an update to the character gallery to show off the Sornehan's Knight.
Undeterred by the recent demo release ( story), Interplay shows off more scenes from Star Trek: Klingon Academy on their screenshots page, presumably from areas not available in the demo.
Keeping with the themes of both previous stories, Star Trek and weekly updates, the official Star Trek: Armada site has also been updated with a new screenshot of the week.
GamePower has posted a hands-on preview of Evolva, featuring a handful of screenshots, a quick Q&A with producer Steve Baldoni, and a gameplay movie. Evolva is the tactical first-person action game in development by Computer Artworks, where you control a squad of so-called Genohunters.
Dynamix' Tim Gift updated his .plan with a new update on what's he been working on, mostly pertaining to the status of vehicles in Starsiege: TRIBES 2. It's a lenghty update, so check it out here.
SoF Center has posted an interview with Dan 'El Krem' Kramer, a programmer on Raven's mercenary shooter Soldier of Fortune. The talk covers a variety of topics, not all related to the game at hand, or equally serious for that matter, but there is a fair bit of info about his work at Raven.
A new set of Star Trek: Armada screenshots on incitegames show off more battle scenes from this real-time strategy game, currently in a space construction yard at Activision.
GameSpy has posted a
brief Q&A with Chris Taylor, the creator of Dungeon Siege (and prior to that, Total Annihilation). Dungeon Siege is an
upcoming isometric action/adventure game from Gas Powered Games.
A new version 1.0b of the Equilibrium mod for Quake III Arena is now available at its AZ Development Team page, providing the first non-beta, feature-complete version of this teamplay mod. Three custom maps for the Equilibrium Showdown mode are included, which is one of the four supported game modes (regular teamplay, CTF, Showdown, and Tournament).
The first alpha release of Zeroping, an Unreal Tournament mutator, has been released at the Zeroping site. This mod aims to bring LAN-like performance to UT players over any net connection, and needs only to be applied to UT servers, as "players can just connect to a Zeroping game and play."
GameSpy's "Engine Week" continues, with an
interview with Jason Hall, CEO of Monolith, the folk behind the LithTech
engine. Like yesterday's interview with Tim Sweeney, it reads a little like
promotional material for their engine, but also features some interesting comments
from Hall, such as this bit on the future of their engine: At this point,
our technology improvements are driven by licensee needs. We are very systematic
in our approach, not whimsical. Now I certainly could describe for you all the
neat little doo-dad features that we will be adding and give you tons of buzz
words, but to be honest, that is not what developers should be overly focused
on.
They can safely assume that LithTech will grow at the market's pace, and that
their technology requests will be considered and perhaps implemented immediately
if appropriate, but the real question to be asking is what is LithTech Inc,
going to do to increase its effectiveness at addressing the "golden reasons." To that end,
we are spending even more time and money on example applications, additional
documentation, more supplementary tools, etc. It will be items like this that
will be the determining factor in the future, not something like "Reflective
iso-linear-fluidic-radiosic-volume-mapping..."
Both Well-Rounded News and Adrenaline Vault report that Codemasters USA will be restructuring into an online gaming company, meaning that Navy SEALs, the tactical Unreal-engine shooter they picked up from Sierra last year ( story), has been cancelled yet again, along with any other single-player titles.
SimHQ has posted three more screenshots from Rogue Spear: Urban Operations, the upcoming expansion pack to Red Storm's tactical shooter (thanks SpecForce). This set shows off the RPD light machine gun, a new weapon in the pack.
ION Storm's John Romero wrote a post on the PlanetDaikatana forum addressing a series of questions regarding his first-person shoooter, as it is nearing the end of its three-year development span (thanks Stomped). There are several details about the game's content and features, as well as this bit about their post-release plans:
We will be splitting the one team into two teams. The bigger team will be working on a Fifth Daikatana Episode, marketed as a mission pack. We will start working on our next big game after finishing the 5th episode.
Quantic Dream has released nine more soundtrack MP3's from Omikron: the Nomad Soul, their 3D action/adventure of last year. The tracks last from 35 seconds to 4 minutes, and like the first three tracks, most are faithful to the quirky looks of the game.
A new version 1.1 of the Hulk mod for Quake III Arena is now available for download on the Hulk project page at Reactive Software. This version fixes several bugs and includes a sample config file for servers.
Red Storm has
announced Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Covert Operations Essentials, an upcoming
title in their Rainbow Six series that is being developed by Magic Lantern (the
company behind the LithTech engine title FORTS and the Unreal engine RPG Second
Genesis). Covert Operations is more of an interactive guide than a game, as it
features video interviews with counter-terrorism experts, information on the
making of Rogue Spear and Rainbow Six, an interactive "Officer Candidate School"
as well as "specially created game levels." A complete description
of the title, which will use Magic Lantern's ShowTech environment, can be found
in the
full press release.
Sierra Studios' official Homeworld: Cataclysm site has been updated with more on this stand-alone sequel to Relic's space-based RTS, currently in development at Barking Dog. There is now a full story write-up, and six new screenshots and eight concept sketches have been added as well.
Adrenaline Vault has posted a new set of screenshots from Kingdom Under Fire, an isometric role-playing RTS game by Korean developers Phantagram, which is scheduled for a release through Gathering of Developers this Fall.
How do game developers hack it?
on Salon Technology is on the subject
of game development crunch time (thanks elvis). The piece is part one of a
two-parter, focusing on the efforts being made at ION Storm to finish off
Daikatana, starting off calling crunch time a death schedule: "All-nighters,
18-hour days, sleeping at the office -- John Romero's posse keeps up a 'death
schedule' to get Daikatana out of beta."
Old Man
Murray's SWAT Guide is online, and as you might imagine given the nature of
the old curmudgeon, it's a bit unusual (but funny, of course). Also, Hellhound's
Q3A CTF guide is up. Finally, the Allegiance Vault's
Deployment guide offers tips on becoming an expert at deploying bases in
Allegiance.
Version 1.0 of T.E.C. for Quake III Arena
is now available, offering the first release of a mod that adds the four techs
familiar from Quake II CTF to Q3A, along with four additional techs, and a
grappling hook. The mod also offers a full-featured "Rocket Arena
style" overtime for team games.
The FragLan website has a
new version 0.90 of the FragLan mod for Quake III Arena, described as a
"major release." Like the T.E.C. mod mentioned above, FragLan adds
runes (techs) and a grappling hook, along with all manner of tweaked out
armaments.
Version 0.61 of the Admin Mod for Half-Life is now available on Alfred's Page,
offering a plug-in for Half-Life server operators that can give selected
administrative server functions to certain users, without giving them access to
the server's RCon. The new release adds a workaround for a Counter-Strike bug,
and adds the "admin_ban" and "admin_unban" commands.
Westwood sends along news of what seems to be another update to Command &
Conquer: Tiberian Sun, on the heels of the version 2.02 patches last week ( story).
While not yet available as a separate patch for download, the new version is
available through the in-game auto-update feature, and adds the ability to save
skirmish games, the ability to select all units of a type or types on the
screen, and more.
Seems I'm a bit under the weather, which is thankfully something that I don't
usually have to worry about noting in this space any more (along with other
mundane problems of life that would occasionally be mentioned), since loony and
Frans are both around these things don't usually result in interruptions in
coverage, and this won't either, but I refer to it here just because of
yesterday's mention of attending the GDC, which is at risk if I'm sick... I
guess I'll just have to play that by ear at this point.
Link of the Day: The Trepanation Trust.
If you are familiar with this bizarre subject, you'll already know this isn't
one to check out while eating. Thanks waterhouse. Please don't go drilling
brains in your head after reading this.
Story of the Day: Internet access over power lines nears reality.
Thanks CiKoTiC. Bringing us a step closer to the day when troubleshooting your
'net connection will finally include an enhanced risk of electrocution.
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