Thursday, August 5, 1999

God 1, Microsoft 0 -- 11:51 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

In a story that's almost too good to be true, I saw on The Shugashack that Microsoft's challenge to hackers to bring down a Win2K server was foiled when the router was fried by a lightning bolt. It just shows that you can mess with many forces in life, but you can't mess with God. If I were Bill, I'd be in the market for a personal lightning rod. For the full scoop, see News.Com.

Shogo Cheaters -- 8:17 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I've been told that the people who liked using the Shogo cheat rez have now stooped to an all-time low. They are now attempting to bring down the servers running the anti-cheating rez. Some of the server ops are switching to NT, but that's not feasible for the average hobbyist. I hope some IP numbers can be snagged so that these jerks can have their Internet service yanked and maybe even be prosecuted.

I'd also like to send out a great big thank-you to Monolith for doing absolutely nothing about this. If this is their level of commitment to every game they put out, I will certainly think twice about ever getting another one of their games. It would be terrible to have the Mac and Amiga ports of Shogo finally done but then have these new users find that there are no servers left to play on. I'm getting mad, so I think I'll stop now.

The Master comments: As long as there are no real serious net weaknesses in the Shogo code (and I doubt that's true) this should be controllable, but to be honest this happened RIGHT after the Quake 2 MP release, and took every server down for about a month-long period before id patched it. Gotta love script kiddies.

Dreamcast Emulation (Not!) -- 7:53 pm CST, Update by The Master

Okay-here's the newest bit of looniness on the 'net. CNET and Blue's News got taken in by an announcement for a fake Dreamcast emulator. What blows my mind on this one is that somebody of Blue's experience in the gaming world would fall for this one. The Dreamcast is based on the new PowerVR chipset, which is supposedly much more powerful than the Voodoo2 chipset listed as a requirement for this "emulator". Oh, well. We all gotta take a fall sometime :-)

PC Mag 3-D Card Review -- 2:07 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I just got my brand-spanking new (September 1) issue of PC Magazine. In their "First Looks" section they have a review of five cards: ATi All-in-Wonder 128, Creative 3D Blaster Savage4, Diamond Viper V770 Ultra, Matrox Millennium G400, and 3fdx Voodoo3 3000 AGP. The winner? The Viper V770 Ultra with the Voodoo3 3000 taking honorable mention. Check it out at a newsstand near you.

Graphics Card Round-Up -- 11:36 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Tom's Hardware has posted the first part of his incredibly huge review of 32 graphics cards. If you are in the market for a new video card, check it out. My $.02? If you really don't need a new card right now, wait until later this year when nVidia's NV10 and 3dfx's Voodoo4 come out. That way you can either get the latest and greatest card, or get a TNT2 Ultra or Voodoo3 for dirt cheap.

Q3Test 1.08 Console Commands -- 11:09 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I saw on Voodoo Extreme that Mad Dog has updated his Quake 3 console commands and variables list to reflect the changes made in 1.08. Both Mad Dog and The Reverend's sites are must-reads for any serious Q3Test fan.

Wednesday, August 4, 1999

The Haus of Shogo Has Moved Over! -- 9:21 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I moved my Haus of Shogo website to TheHaus.Net yesterday. Today I updated it, removing any information that is duplicated here. Never fear, Shogo fans, I will keep updating it. The main difference now is that all the news as well as Quantus and Joltox' columns are part of TheHaus.Net. We've expanded, but we won't forget our roots . . .

Commentary Section Online -- 12:54 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I finally have all the pages for our commentary section online! I brought Quantus' two columns and Ryan's two columns from the Haus of Shogo (check them out if you haven't already). The Master informs me that he's got some fire and brimstone ready for his first installment of "The Master .Plan". My column, "Hun-Speak", will not begin for a bit while I try to get the rest of these pages done.

The Master appends: The Master .Plan is online :-)

Anti-Lag in Q3Test; Sarge Revisited -- 9:49 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I posted this on EZ-Net's Q3 site previously, but it bears repeating. If you are playing Q3Test on a reasonably fast computer (mine is a Celeron 400, 128M RAM, AGP TNT) with a 56K or lesser modem, you may have problems with lag on some servers, especially if there are a bunch of lpb's around.

I've found that setting com_maxfps 35 (it defaults to 100) helps lag problems tremendously. Normally, my computer can get much higher than 35 fps. The problem is that my 56K modem (connected at 42.667K) cannot keep up with all the data necessary to maintain that kind of framerate. com_maxfps caps your framerate, making it much easier on your modem to keep up. 35 fps is still plenty fast enough.

I enabled cheats (using devmap) and put myself in third-person mode (cg_thirdperson 1) to watch the animation of the Sarge model a little more closely. While I don't notice it while I'm playing against others using that model, I did notice that Sarge runs like his fatigues are way too tight in the hips. His taunt animation is pretty sweet, though, so I'll cut him some slack.

Past Two Days' News

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