Mail has been rolling in to the Blue Tower trying to figure out what's going on with the Master Servers over at id Software. Hearing the call, id Software Designer Graeme "Zaphod" Devine updated his .plan with word that the Master Server hasn't blown a master cylinder, but there is a problem seeing empty servers (which of course makes it hard for them to stop being that way to show up). This is going to be addressed in the next release. Here's the update, which also includes word of some new id servers, and the story of the mad mapper:

Some of you have commented on the master server being a bit odd right now. It's actually running just fine, it's just responding to queries for protocol 41, which is not entirely compatible with protocol 40. Only servers with people on there will actually show up. You can force showing the empty servers with the keyword "empty", but this isn't so useful since in 1.08 you can't combine that with game types (e.g. you can't say "empty tourney"). For completeness's sake, you can also say "full". But heck, if you type in "nude reptiles", you can scan that too and get exactly zip.

All of this is of course fixed in the new test and browsing gametypes, keywords, and so forth is easier than ever. You'll swoon. Trust me.

For those of you, and there's a bunch of you, who believe that our previous efforts had better network support than 1.08, we've set up servers here for you to get side to side experiences. Go try them and let me know.

Q3test 1.05 - 192.246.40.68:27961
Q3test 1.08 - 192.246.40.68:27960
Quake 2 version 3.20 - 192.246.40.68
QuakeWorld version 2.30 - 192.246.40.68
Quake version 1.09 - 192.246.40.68

We're pretty confident you'll be seeing things our way pdq.

Eric, our in house live human, bet Tim that he couldn't make a fun map in under an hour. Tim, being Tim, took him up (the exact nature of what was bet remains somewhat fuzzy, but it may have involved lunch). Forty-five minutes later we had "fun", which has remained interestingly addictive throughout the last week to the entire company (of course, listening to Tim tell this story, it's down to thirty-five minutes while he had no power, and the mouse was disconnected from his machine).

The lesson from all this is either that Tim really values something fuzzy to do with lunch, or that Quake 3 is so darn cool you can toss together maps in less than an hour. Okay, maybe knowing what Tim knows helps, so we're going to dissect his brain for science and get him working as our own personal AI (John swears it's possible) churning out 24 levels a day 24/7 until some odd Y2K bug causes him to make every telephone in the world ring at once. Oh wait, that was Lawnmower Man.