Archived News:
Edited chat logs of yesterday's multi-developer space sim chat are now online in HTML
format and in plain
text, with the HTML version color-coded to make for easier reading. Games
covered in the chat are Deep Space Nine, Klingon Academy, Millennium 3, Parsec,
Silent Space, Starlancer, and Terminus.
Strength of Character
on GameSpy.com is an essay by Valve Designer Marc Laidlaw to wrap-up their
Developer Week. The article talks about character creation in games, going into some of what's behind Half-Life's Gordon Freeman, at one point paraphrasing F. Scott
Fitzgerald on the difficulty in creating a character (I'm
guessing game designers usually just use Fitzgerald as an inspiration at the
bar): F. Scott Fitzgerald
said something to the effect that if you try to create a "real"
person, you'll be lucky to end up with a character. But if you try only to
create a character, you'll end up with a caricature…something two-dimensional
at best. We must aim high. It's a challenge that many of us take seriously.
There's a 16 page Quake
III Arena strategy guide on GNN offering separate sections on general
deathmatch strategies, one-on-one strategies, and weapon strategies. Also, GameSurge's
Quake III Arena weapons guide is up, just concentrating on the work of Q
Branch. Finally, One
Sick Team's TimeDemo Tutorial shows how to benchmark your system using
Unreal Tournament.
Much to the consternation of some U9 fans, a post to the Ultima IX Ascension Discussion Forums
announces Origin "will be closing the Official Ultima Ascension Boards,
leaving the Technical Solutions forum, the Technical Issues forum, and the
Spoilers and Hints forum open as read-only for those who can benefit from the
information there." This move came just two days after the release of the
most recent patch for the game, though they say they "will be providing
solutions in (their) Technical Solutions forum" for software and driver
incompatibilities.
The Digital Paint
page has a new version 1.6 client update for Digital Paint's Paintball mod
for Quake II. The new release doesn't really alter gameplay, but rather adds
several new maps, one of which, Psychosity, has its own disclaimer warning about
side-effects.
ShellShock's Crater has a new
version of the Q3Offline utility that enables offline games of Quake III Arena
to be quickly set up with fully configurable map rotation and bots. The new
release adds a "bot editor" for creating new bots from existing models
and skins.
A new version 0.96B of Beryllium
for Quake III Arena is now available. This is a highly configurable server-side
modification that is described as "basically lots of mods rolled into one."
The new version includes an off-hand grappling hook, and various options allow
the flexibility to make it "an Instagib mod, a LowAmmo mod, or just plain
old Q3 without the campers."
Enough stuff to require a Stuff Accelerator™:
- Part II Of the FvF World
Q3A Programming Tutorial teaches how to modify the Plasma Gun to return
the planned FlameThrower to Quake III Arena.
- Calrathan's Quake3 Ladder Code
shows how to add a ladder to any Quake III Arena mod.
- A new version 1.31 of the AntiElvis' Half-Life Compilation Controller is
available on GracelessLand
and the Half-Life Editing Resource Center.
"The HLCC is of course that baby-butt smooth, but grandmotherly wise
map compiling front-end for Half-Life."
- Also on GracelessLand is
Mission Control Panel v0.1b, offering an update to this
Half-Life/Quake III Arena Development IDE that offers 24 different file
types for each game, allows mappers to use their favorite tools, and
provides drag-and-drop version control.
- A new version 0.7 of Nightrunner's Quake3 Animation Helper is now
available on the NightRunner for Quake3 Downloads
page. This is a plug-in for 3D Studio Max to speed up the process of Quake
III Arena character animation by switching between the animation sequences
in a model's animation.cfg file.
- TABUN SoftWare has some new
tutorials on Quake III Arena skinning.
The Man Or Mouse Tournaments has expanded to
most of Europe with ladders in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, UK, Netherlands,
Germany, France, with plans to introduce a Clanwar section later this week with
ladders, leagues and tournaments.
Today is Super Bowl Sunday, the Sabbath of marketing here in the US, a day when
fans and non-fans of American football subject themselves to what seems like a
12-hour broadcast. Amid star-studded song-and-dance routines and
multi-million-dollar ad campaign launches, they will manage to squeeze in the
NFL championship game. It's an interesting occasion: loonyboi is not a football
fan, and he tells me he will be attending a Super Bowl party that will be
completely populated by others likewise indifferent to the game, a fairly common
occurrence. And while TV viewers usually complain about commercials, the
broadcast of the big game is considered to be a showcase to debut new ad
campaigns, and in keeping with the bizarre nature of the whole event, newspaper reviews of
those ads are an
expected part of the annual event's recap. It was during the 1984 Super Bowl
that the famous "Big Brother" Macintosh ad aired, a one time showing,
that I won't say actually overshadowed the game, but I do wonder how many folks
who remember seeing that famed single commercial actually remember what teams played in the
game surrounding it.
Link of the Day: Live
Forever: Uploading the Human Brain, on Psychology Today Online. Thanks Ant.
Story of the Day: Ignorant
or lazy? You make the call. Related to yesterday's bank robber who wrote his
stick-up note on his personal check. Thanks willde.
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