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Archived News:
SanQualis'
Ballerium Q&A features an English-language Q&A on this French site
with Eyal Natanel of Majorem, the Israeli company currently working on a
massively multiplayer strategy game called Ballerium. The conversation covers
some general topics, including the lack of a firm release date, as well as
specifics about how such an online RTS will work. Included with the Q&A is
un screen de l'Alpha et une séquence cinématique. There is also a Ballerium
Q&A on Stelle Danzanti that is the English version of another interview
(this site is Italian, so who knows what language it originally took place in),
with Eyal, asking a few different questions, including one about the advantages
and disadvantages of being a developer from their part of the world, and a
detailed question about the implementation of several aspects of gameplay.
There's a General
Status update on the Westlake Interactive site talking about progress on
their Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Forces Expansion Pack, which will offer 21 new
multiplayer maps, new missions, and OS X compatibility, saying "we think
owners of multiprocessor Macs are going to be especially pleased with this
one." That update also announces that the OS X version of Unreal Tournament
is Alpha, and that OS X versions of The Sims and its two Expansion Packs are now
available. Also, Spider-Man
Swinging to the Mac is Westlake's announcement of development of the
Mac port of the Spider-Man game.
The debut release of the Rocket Duel mod
for Quake III Arena is now available. This first public beta is said to be
"jam packed with cool features and additions and it still weighs in at
under 3 megs!" Here is the description of the various gametypes included in
this mod: " Instagib is fast action, Duel will test your
rocket skills, Carnage is bloody and chaotic, Pain Factor is about
fair scoring...the gamemodes can be played across the existing gametypes, to
create lots of different combinations like an Instagib Tourny, Homing CTF or
Carnage TeamDM."
A report on Garage
Games website (thanks PlanetTribes)
has news from Jeff "Lincoln" Tunnell that that V12 name they chose for
their licensable version of the TRIBES 2 engine, while a very clever engine
name (with its connection to the V-12, mother of all car engines, Garage Games,
and all that), turns out to have been already taken. They will therefore be forced
to make a rapid name change, the cost of failing to learn from the fate suffered
by Hipnotic Interactive and Dream Design, who were forced to change names to
Ritual and ION Storm, respectively, when it turned out both of those names had
already been snagged. Here's the update: Who would'a thought? We took
three random characters, V and 1 and 2, and added them together to make up the
name of our game engine. It kind of made sense because a V12 is actually a real
life engine. Get it? GarageGames, engine. :)
Oh well, somebody beat us to it, and their lawyers are not amused. So, we need
to change the name of the engine. As explained above the leading candidates are:
gV1 - Boring, but works because it is expandable. We will eventually have the
gV2 or the gM3.
SpankDog Engine - Meaningless, but fun! If the owners of the Wild Dick
microbrewry allow us to sell massive quantities of their beer, by the same name,
we're in. Tim, Rick, and Mark were undergoing intense, secret negotiations with
the brewery's owners last Friday night, making sure to sample as much of the
brew as possible in order to make sure it is appropriate for use as our name.
We figure naming the game engine after their locally famous brew will help them
create a national brand:) So, if they just agree to give us each a pint a week,
we're in:)
More seriously, we have to change the name of the engine. Our time frame is
short, since the owners of the trademark V12 do not like us taking most of the
top search spots on Google. If you have any opinions about gV1 or SpankDog, let
'em fly. If you have any other ideas that might make a good game engine name,
let us know.
Jeff Tunnell GG
A new Sunday development diary on the Croteam
website (thanks xxzen) has another update from Admir Elezovic that follows-up
on last week's diary ( story) talking about improvements to their
3D engine which should make licensees happy, an upcoming official announcement
about their next game that should make their fans happy, and a tiny print
hint that he is backing off from his previous mention that there will be no Egyptian levels in their
follow-up that may make obelisk fans happy. Here's the update: This
Sunday I will cover changes/additions to our Engine and Tools.
We are in final stage of having DirectX Beta version. Rendering API is almost
done which will make our Engine licencees very happy.
Network code has been upgraded and improved. With this, problems when playing
online over the internet should be marginal. We hired new people to team, whom
will take care of adding new features to Engine regarding network and online
play.
New ParticleFX has been added in Engine, allowing procedural effects of grass,
bushes, trees... with great control and tweaking for better performance/visual
look.
Finally, Serious Sam fans should expect some exciting news. Next week we should
have official press release regarding our upcoming game.
Have a good weekend,
Admir Elezovic
P.S. apparently there might be Egypt levels in this game.
The æon's stat website
has a new version 4.92 of the ÆStats log parsing program. The new release, available
for both Win32 and SUSU Linux, adds specific support for several different Quake
III Arena mods, including True Combat, PainKeep
Arena, HeadHunters III, and SuperHeroes,
along with a few bug-fixes.
According to the folks at Commandos: The Fortress,
they have received official word from Pyro Studios that Commandos 2: Men of
Courage is gold (thanks Smidge.Com). This
seems to fall in line with the news in the subsequently refuted ( story) report
from August 1 that the Spanish version of the
game was complete ( story), which reiterated that they are
shooting for a September release of the squad-based combat sequel. Update:
Rich from Gone Gold, who we regard as the
ultimate authority in these matters, says this report sounds more like a
"gold candidate" to him.
GameSpy.com's Soldier of Fortune
II Developer Diary Volume 5 offers more sound thinking from Raven's Zachary Quarles,
the sound designer on Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix. In this installment,
after relating the fact that he feels he is going insane with temporary
voice-over recording/placement, Zach goes on to relate his inspirations for
designing a piece of game music, discussing the added complications caused by
SoF2's dynamic sound system. The diary also has a batch of Soldier of Fortune
II sounds for download, and FilePlanet also has the SoF2 trailer
and the John Mullins video interview
from the SoF Platinum edition.
The Tom Ireland Interview on StarTopia Post features this programmer at Mucky Foot talking
about his work on the AI, among other things, on StarTopia, their space station simulator.
The conversation talks a bit about how the game turned out, and goes into some
detail about StarTopia's artificial intelligence, discussing some of the coding
issues involved in its creation. One topic of interest was a discussion of the
classic perception by lay people that every game's AI should be better than it
turns out. Here is the answer that touches on this perception: One
difficulty is that raw data and valuable information are completely different
things. Going back to chess, knowing what squares the pieces are on isn't enough
to make you a grand master - in fact it puts you about level with a photo. To
get anywhere worthwhile, you have to concentrate on far sketchier things - risk,
flexibility, weaknesses or what the human player might do five seconds or five
minutes down the line, and that's exactly the sort of vague, ill-defined,
wishy-washy stuff that computers have trouble with. Computers need absolutely
everything spelled out for them, and describing most AI problems accurately is a
pretty tall order, so AIs usually fall short. Once enough clever AI methods are
out there the standard will pick up, but it'll take a while! As faster
processors arrive, slower techniques will move into reach too, so the outlook is
good.
The Battle Realms Profile
of the Lotus Heroes on GameSpot caps off their four-part series examining
the four heroes that are the champions of each of the four clans in Battle
Realms, Liquid Entertainment's upcoming RTS game. The new installment looks at
the heroes of the Lotus Clan, "a nefarious group of people who practice an
arcane magic that was once forbidden because of its gruesome nature." The
preview looks at Zymeth, Koril, Issyl, and Soban, and as usual, in addition to a
description of each, also features a piece of concept art, and an in-game
screenshot.
A
new version 1.19 patch for Steel Beasts
is now available. "This upgrade adds over a dozen new features, including
an improved gunnery model of the M1A1, improved joystick response and joystick
centering, better control over infantry and more capable AI infantry, and new
missions. A complete list of fixes and new features can be found here."
Thanks GamePen.
A new version 1.90 of the CrazyLaunch Quake front-end is up on CrazyPete's Toolbox.
The new release has a new interface, and introduces Quake III Arena version
1.29h compatibility, and will no longer function properly with Q3A version 1.27
and earlier.
Exploring the Business Side of the Business of Making Games
on Gamasutra does just that, authored by Dianna Davies, an animator who has
worked on 20 games (16 that have shipped) over the last nine years.
Kirill Popov and Frans managed to explain to a monkey like me that Unix time
turned 1 billion yesterday (signifying the number of seconds since January 1,
1970). Since the highest number a 32-bit Unix system can register is
2,147,483,647, the Unix equivalent of the Y2K problem is on track for early
2038, when, unless 64-bit time, or some other innovation comes along, the time
on a whole lot of systems (including Blammo) will revert to zero (it'll be here
sooner than anyone thinks--we'd better get to programming now!).
A further commemorative note: Today is the second anniversary of the
Dreamcast launch, as the console system was released on the symmetrical 9/9/99.
The next date of note in the Dreamcast timeline will be January 23, 2002 which
will be the first anniversary of the first indications that Sega was killing the
system off (story). I believe the anniversary of the death of my
own Dreamcast will take place sometime this week, as it was one of those classic
moments of a product dying scant moments after it's out of warranty. The
anniversaries of the cancellations of all those DC games that were
in progress when the DC was canned will, of course, be too numerous to mention,
but the 16-month active lifespan of the system offers a different perspective on
the argument that the unified architecture consoles boast is an advantage over PCs,
especially since console manufacturers take a bath on each system they sell in
the hopes of recouping their losses on game licensing.
Link of the Day: Why I Lost That Deathmatch.
Thanks Dale.
Wild Science: National Security Nightmare
(CBS). Thanks Captain Kaos[doh].
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