When we started Ritual Entertainment 4 years ago, the 6 of us made a pact with each other never to let business affect our personal lives. We have definitely had some tough times during that period and we've had to swallow our pride on more than one occasion. For the most part though, we have managed to stay good friends with each other and we hope that never changes.

It is with some sadness and a lot more jealousy that I must report that our friend and chief technologist, Jim Dose' is leaving the company to join Id Software. Jim has had a tremendous effect on how Ritual Entertainment has turned out and he will certainly be missed. We could be upset with Jim but consider these three facts:

1. Jim is leaving the company to join Id Software.
2. Jim is leaving the company to work on the next Doom.
3. Jim is leaving the company to work on the next Doom.

Everyone at Ritual wishes Jim the best and we thank him for everything he has done to make Ritual the company it is today. As we see it we aren't losing a part of Ritual, a piece of Ritual is joining Id Software.

I personally want to thank Jim for teaching me so much about software development over the last 4 years, it has been a pleasure working with you.

Maybe Jim will now get the chance to race his Z3 against Carmack's F50. :)

Mark D
Ritual Entertainment

It seems like every id game is marked with some great conflict. Paul Steed is one of the most vocal and controversial people in gaming. Therefore, it is not surprising that his departure from id would also be controversial.

John and I have strongly disagreed in the past. We have worked out our disagreements and we will do so again. In the end we are all excited about working on DOOM and committed to making a great game.

Although Adrian and I alone made the decision to fire Paul, it is the general opinion among the rest of id that we made the right decision. Paul was not fired as a result of his support for DOOM. Other people at id supported DOOM in the exact same manner. For several reasons it was time for id software and Paul Steed to part company.

This should have no reflection on Paul's talent as an artist. It goes without saying that he is one of the best modeler/animators in the gaming business.

As owners of this company, it is our responsibility to make these types of difficult decisions. Adrian and I made the decision we believe is in the best interest of the company.

John and I have agreed to disagree, put our differences behind us and move on to make DOOM the best game we can make it.

The main tool is Embrace, which is based on the QERadiant tool used at id. It is similar in function, but we have added a few things specific to our game, such as our sector-based format, the idea of "sets" of objects in the same level and the essential tie-ins to our scripting. But it is still going to be real familiar to experienced QERadiant users. Additional tools include: the NOT Editor, a simple tool to design new objects for the game; the NOD Viewer, which loads .NOD object files and .NAD animation files and allows users to rotate and inspect them. We might also release our MAYA object export plugin, but we are still doing research to ensure we can do that.

Westlake has the source code for the latest 420 PC update to Unreal Tournament, although we have not actively started merging it into the Mac source. The vast majority of changes for 420 are PC-specific (fixes for the installer, Direct3D bugs, etc), so we are not rushing into another Mac update so soon after 413. We do plan to update the codebase to 420 in the next couple months, to gain any fixes that are useful on the Mac, and to keep the UT engine up to date. 420 is not needed to play on any existing UT servers (PC or Mac).

Many people have been emailing us and asking about plans to port UnEdit to the Mac (especially since a new C++ beta version was released with 420 on the PC). Westlake does not have any current or future plans to port UnEdit. It is a huge project (extremely Windows-specific), and there is no publisher willing to pay for it. There is one group of hobbyist programmers attempting to port UnEdit to the Mac, but that is about the only chance it will happen. Please do not email us asking/demanding UnEdit, it was never part of the original Unreal or UT Mac contracts and we have no plans to port it.

• AMD's Thunderbird to debut Monday (CNet) announces the landing of AMD's latest. Thanks a-mammal.
• Though not yet up on the ABIT Computer Corp. website, a press release rolled in called ABIT Announces VH6 Motherboard with news on their upcoming VIA 133-based mobo. Also, ABIT Launches Siluro™ GF256 GTS and Join the ABIT SETI Team Get a Chance to Win Some Cool Prizes are two more new bits (or ABITs) that they do have posted already.
• Sharky Extreme's Weekly CPU Prices have been updated.

• Battlezone II: Combat Commander on GamesMania.
• Evolva on Daily Radar.
• F1 2000 on PCArena.
• Imperium Galactica 2 on Daily Radar.
• Martian Gothic: Unification on Gamecenter.
• Motocross Madness 2 on GameSpy.com.
• Rogue Spear: Urban Operations on GameZone.
• Tachyon: The Fringe on GamePower.
• Unreal Tournament on Intelligamer.

• A post to the id Software Announces Development Of Doom III thread on Slashdot by former id Software (and current TransMeta) programmer Dave Taylor gives ddt's take on the big story of the day yesterday, in a reply titled "Wish I'd seen that before I hired on."...
• The Mushroom's Legit Section interviews Graeme Devine of id Software, with barely a serious question in the bunch...
• LMNOpc Games and Utilities has a new version 1.1 of Disasteroids 3D, an OpenGL take on the arcade classic asteroids...
• Bobby Prince's MP3.Com site is up offering the chance to get the Doom music on CD, or in .mp3 format. Thanks Doomworld...

A couple of alert readers have pointed out the small coincidence that yesterday's announcement of the firing of Paul Steed comes one year to the day from Brian Hook's announcement that he was leaving id (story).

We had what seems to be a breakthrough yesterday in terms of Blammo! database performance and reliability. For a couple of hours in the afternoon yesterday all the scripts here became pretty unusable, which has, unfortunately, been a fairly common occurrence here. The root of yesterday's problems seemed at first to simply be the Slashdot effect, as they linked to John Carmack's .plan file about the big Doom sequel/Paul Steed firing announcement (story). For a while there it really seemed like we were not going to be able to update the site, much less serve up things already here, like the messageboards and that .plan update. The good news is, we (if I say we in any programming sense, chances are I mean Furn) discovered that the number of SQL connections the system was allowing had not been adjusted from the default after the last time the server was rebuilt, so rather than being load related, it was a fairly simple configuration problem (which helps explain why the rest of the site remained so rapid while the scripts were failing). It's too early to say for sure, but it seems this has cleared up a ton of problems, because since limit was tweaked the .plan updates and messageboards now seem to crank out like there was never a problem (even after we were later /.ed a second time). In a further effort to clear up these things, yesterday we converted the BlueTracker .plan files to output static HTML, so in the future even if the database chokes on the backend, there should not be a problem continuing to serve .plans that have already been updated. As always, any patience you have had to spare for us as we've been working out these kinks is greatly appreciated, but I have my fingers crossed that we may have finally "broken the code" to paraphrase my dad.

Link of the Day: Emode.com Personality Tests and Quotes (includuing "Are You Loony"). Thanks Corey C. Lapeyrouse. Now you're set in case it's a quiet weekend.