Thursday, September 2, 1999

Carmack on the GeForce -- 11:07 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

John Carmack updated his .plan with a blurb on his impressions of NVIDIA's recently released GeForce 256. Here's a snip:

It is fast. Very, very fast. It has the highest fill rate of any card we have ever tested, has improved image quality over TNT2, and it gives timedemo scores 40% faster than the next closest score with extremely raw beta drivers.

The throughput will definately improve even more as their drivers mature.

For max framerates in OpenGL games, this card is going to be very hard to beat.

Carmack Interviewed on ZDNet -- 11:04 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I saw this, um, everywhere. ZDNet has some RealVideo interviews with id's John Carmack, recorded during QuakeCon. In one of the interviews he talks about the possibility of id's next product being single-player only. It would make sense because most games that try to do both suffer in single-player, multiplayer, or both.

Nose art? -- 9:45 pm CST, Update by The Master

Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart of Epic Megagames posted a .plan update today, with the following UT blurb:

One of the artists painted a happy face on the end of the flak shell. I was playing against bots the other day and I took a flak shell right in the face. Two frames before it hit me, I see this smiley face staring me down. Boom! Giblets bouncing everywhere. These artists think they're funny.

Heck, I think that's a riot! I think I may need to buy this game :-)

Thresh's GeForce Article -- 10:10 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I saw on interested article on NVIDIA's new GeForce 256 chip on Thresh's Firing Squad. Among other interesting tidbit, he mentions that Q3A benchmarks at 1600x1200x16 bit color were 33.1 for the GeForce and 17.5 for the TNT2 Ultra. He didn't say what CPU the benchmarks were taken on. However, id is making a higher-polygon-count version of Q3A and the benchmark differences there should be even more dramatic.

Wednesday, September 1, 1999

Graeme Devine .plan -- 6:59 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Graeme Devine updated his .plan explaining that empty servers are not showing up in Q3Test's server browser. this will be fixed in the next release. That explains why the EZ-Net server would go for days without anyone playing and then would have tons of people on for extended periods of time. He also issues a challenge to those to think that their past network code is better than the current (1.08) revision.

Almost Finished XWA! -- 11:34 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

After not playing it for a while, I picked up X-Wing Alliance again, determined to finish it. I got through the two very tough missions in Battle 6 pretty well. The last two missions in Battle 6 and the first three in Battle 7 (which set up your assault on the Death Star II) went very quickly. I made about six attempts at flying into and destroying the Death Star II last night but kept crashing into things. If you are a fan of the X-Wing series or of Star Wars in general get this game!

Update: I did it! I blew up the Death Star II! Now I can start bugging LucasArts / Totally Games to get an expansion disc out!

UT News -- 11:29 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I saw this on Voodoo Extreme, regarding the status of Unreal Tournament. Thus spake CliffyB (who, I recently found out, is much younger than I originally thought):

There are some bugs left! Duh. There was a minor TNT rendering glitch Tim had to fix. The Flak Cannon would get out of sync in netplay, Steve is fixing it. A hole or two in a level here and there. A guy was missing a face graphic in the HUD in the DM ladder. Stuff like that. Almost there baby.

Despite Unreal's sorry performance, I will be giving UT a shot on my system and see how it performs.

Madden 2000 Out Soon -- 11:24 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Whilst perusing the EA Sports site for any news of the NHL 2000 demo, I saw that their football sim, Madden 2000, is gold and should be in stores soon. There is a demo available. I'm going to download it and check it out. The last version of Madden was maddeningly (ha ha!) slow on my old system, we'll see how my new one handles M2K.

More NeoShogo Information -- 10:54 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I found out that the new mod NeoShogo will be client-side only. The weapon damage and firing rates will not be changed (so you can't cheat with this mod), but it will include new player skins, new weapon models and skins, and new explosion animations.

Carmack .plan Update -- 10:48 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

In his .plan, John Carmack detailed his efforts to reduce memory usage in Quake 3 Arena. He even talked about going to a skeletal animation system, which would seem to me to be a huge change this late in a project. But if anyone can pull it off, he can. In the process, he taught himself Perl. Must be nice to be brilliant.

New GLSetup -- 10:43 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Blue's is reporting that there is a new version of GLSetup available. It will determine and install the proper OpenGL drivers for you card. It is available as a small launcher which will then download the appropriate drivers or as a huge 40+M download with all the drivers in it.

Past Two Days' News

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