Wednesday, September 29, 1999

id .plans -- 12:26 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Graeme Devine updated his .plan regarding the hubub about no grapple in Q3. Technically, that is not correct. The grapple code will be in Q3, but none of the CTF maps that ship with Q3 will make use of it. He also mentions that the author of the Q2 Gladiator bot is in Texas helping John Cash finish the bot AI.

John Carmack updated his .plan talking about some issues with display lists in OpenGL. I read it and, frankly, it gave me a headache. Thus the wisdom of Carmack the Magnificent.

Redwood on Q3Test -- 10:04 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Redwood posted a most excellent article on Q3Test 1.082 which he got to play on a visit to id last Friday. He goes into a lot of detail on the changes and seemed to be particularly impressed with Capture-the-Flag. Here's a peek:

Even though it was in one of the CTF maps I played, id will most likely NOT have a grappling hook of any kind in their CTF. When Graeme first asked me what I thought about this, I told him flat out "it sucks." That was my gut reaction and more of wanting the traditional in id CTF. Graeme told me the levels have been designed for not needing a grappling hook.

I liked the grapple in QuakeWorld CTF, but the one in Q2 is next to worthless. The tractor beam (= grapple) in Shogo really gives LPBs a major advantage because it can react very quickly and HPWs have a hard time accurately predicting their movement. The problem with turning it off is that many levels were designed with tractor beam use in mind. Oh well.

Tuesday, September 28, 1999

UT Revisited -- 10:39 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

After playing some more UT, I found that going to Advanced Options -> Audio and setting UseDigitalMusic to False gives me a pretty good framerate boost and it also enables UT to close down properly. Under Audio there is also an option Use3dHardware that you can set to true if you have a 3D sound card.

Also, if I start a game, then hit esc and go to Advanced Options, the game crashes, apparently because it cannot go into windowed mode anymore.

Update: Setting UseDigitalMusic to False does allow UT to shut down and return you to the desktop, but it remains crashed (the Task List says it's not responding). You need to kill the task manually to get it to go away.

My Thoughts On UT D3D -- 4:46 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, I got the patch installed and played a little UT in D3D. I played in 640x480 with medium textures and 32 bit color. With those settings, some of the textures would flash bizzarely. Moving to high detail textures made it much worse. Moving the color to 16 bit took care of the flashing altogether. It is faster in D3D than it was with the Unified drivers and Glide, but not as much as I would have expected.

I didn't notice any major changes with the sound, even though it supposedly supports EAX now. I did get the "lockup" that was mentioned on the Unreal Technology page that happens to some people with Win98, Sound Blaster Live!s, and nVidia-based graphics cards. I had to manually end the task (twice) to get my computer back.

Last night The Master, Crawl, and I played Q3Test online. One thing I noticed immediately is how much smoother Q3Test is on my system than Unreal Tourney. I can get framerates of 44 on Q3Demo1 with "High Quality" settings (except at 640x480). I can't even average over 35 against one bot at 640x480x16 with medium texture detail in UT. In firefights (remember, it's against only one bot) my framerate drops into the teens. Unless the D3D situation improves, UT will disappear off my hard drive once the next Q3Test with bots comes out.

More Mirrors on Stomped -- 3:22 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Redwood has posted some more mirrors for the full Unreal Tourney demo as well as the patch.

UT Demo on FilePlanet and UnrealFiles -- 2:04 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

FilePlanet and Unreal Files are busy updating all their mirrors with the UT Full Demo and the patch. You can get the full demo from FilePlanet or Unreal Files. You can get the patch from FilePlanet or Unreal Files. Thanks PlanetUnreal for the FilePlanet information.

UT Demo on CDROM.com -- 1:57 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Gigex links don't seem to be working for some reason. So much for "unlimited bandwidth." The full demo just made it to CDROM.com (I refreshed it until the full thing was there!). You can download it here. Hopefully the patch will be forthcoming.

UT Full Demo Is Out! -- 12:08 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Unreal Tournament full demo and patch for the Glide-only version is out! I'm working on getting a list of mirrors . . .

Update #1: The patch that is available on Avault does not contain the new map. They are making a new patch as we speak. I've seen links to what is supposed to be the full demo, but I'm not so sure I can trust them.

Update #2: Here are the links, directly from Unreal Tournament.com:

Full Demo (55M)
Download with Gigex, Download without Gigex

Patch for Glide-Only Demo (10M)
Download with Gigex, Download without Gigex

Please note! If you see a site that has a 7M patch, DON'T DOWNLOAD IT! It does not contain the new map. They also added this little incentive:

Win some UT goodies: If you download either version through Gigex, and provide your email address, you could be one of 50 lucky winners (chosen at random) to receive a long-sleeve, black UT T-shirt or be the one lucky winner to get a very exclusive Unreal Tournament leather jacket! Details appear with the download.

Carmack .plan Update -- 12:04 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

John Carmack updated his .plan with a new worklog and the news that the next Q3Test is still a little ways off. Of special interest to the biggest whiners in the community is the following:

* removed tripple bunny-hop protection, it was too arbitrary and didn't accomplish it's goal

Soon you'll be able to hop around like grasshoppers on speed again. Sigh. This was one area where I agreed with Carmack. It's really stupid to play when all you hear is "Huh huh huh huh huh" from everyone jumping around.

Past Two Days' News

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