Wednesday, November 10, 1999

More Q3 Models at Stomped -- 2:27 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Redwood has posted shots of two new models that will be included in Quake III Arena. The first is the well-known (from the Test) Visor model, the second is the eyeball-on-stilts Orbb model. I assume that I'm not the only one who can't wait for this game!

Q3Demo Rumors Squashed -- 12:12 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Someone at Activision UK was quoted as saying that the Quake III Arena demo would be out within days. Redwood immediately emailed id's CEO, Todd Hollenshead, who replied thusly:

That person has no idea what they're talking about and that's really all there is to say about it.

Nevertheless, I can't imagine that Q3Demo or the full game are very far off. Only 45 days until Christmas, don'tcha know.

Gamespy and Tim Sweeney -- 8:27 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Gamespy has posted an interview with Epic's Tim Sweeney about the changes made to the Unreal engine since Unreal 1's release, what's coming up in their next-generation engine, and his vision of the future of 3D computing. Thanks Blue's News.

Blue's Q3A Screens -- 8:25 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's Paul Steed sent Blue a couple of screenshots from the cutscenes in the game. One features a Klesk having a little, erm, snack. The other is a group shot of your next five opponents (including Doom Guy and Quake I Marine).

As an aside, I have this feeling I'm going to be using the Doom Guy model a lot in Q3A. Ahh, memories of Doom . . . (on a 386SX-16, no less)

The Master comments: Heh. I remember playing Doom on my old 486SX-33 :-) And Wolf3d. And Scorch! Hehehehe

Tuesday, November 9, 1999

John Carmack .plan update -- 10:56 pm CST, Update by The Master

Yet another .plan update from the mighty Carmack:

• fixed spinning barrel on respawn issue
• clear eflags before intermission
• shutdown menu on starting a cinematic
• mask name colors to 0-7 range
• fixed jpeg loading alpha channel
• try for not-nearest spawn twice instead of once
• made unzoomed exactly identity mouse modifier
• cl_debugmove [1/2]
• m_filter
• fixed time warnings
• allow timelimits to hit with only a single player
• filter local games with different protocol versions
• fixed bad arg 0 after sysinfo configstring
• removed unneeded svc_servercommand at start of command strings
• fixed redundantly loaded level bug
• fixed journal playback from demo build
• removed background image from viewlog window

Gibson Research-source of awesome software -- 10:12 pm CST, Update by The Master

I don't believe I've ever mentioned him before, but Steve Gibson Research is a must-have link for those looking for finely crafted, FAST, solutions to problems. He wrote the only tool I know of to check for "click death" in Iomega Zip drives. Check his site. Highly recommended.

Beer! -- 8:49 pm CST, Update by The Master

Saw this little ditty on Jerry Pournelle's website, and I KNEW A.T. would appreciate it:

The beer in your hand is in the processor's registers.
The beer in the cooler next to you is in the processor's cache.
The beer in the fridge is in RAM.
The warm beer in the garage is on the hard disk.
The warm beer at the beer distributor is on a server on the Internet.

BTW: Check out the rest of Jerry's site. He's got an interesting series of emails on the whole Micro$oft deal, and he raises some interesting points on why M$ has been GOOD for the computer industry. (I STILL wish they'd get off their butts and fix some of these darn security issues. How many classic buffer overflows do they need to have to get a clue in M$ programmerland?)

I'82: Gold at Last -- 6:06 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Blue has linked Gone Gold's report (how's that for convoluted?) that Activision's long-awaited follow-up to Interstate '76, appropriately titled Interstate '82, has gone gold! It should be on your favorite software retailer's shelves soon. I'll do some digging to find out if there is a demo forthcoming . . .

New Email Virus -- 5:06 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Shugashack pointed me to this article on Network Associates' site about a new email virus called "Bubbleboy." If you use IE5 and Outlook or Outlook Express for your email you are vulnerable (unless you have IE5's security set to "High"). You don't have to run anything for the virus to activate, just opening it (even just previewing it in Outlook Express) will activate it.

It doesn't do anything damaging, but it doesn't take much to realize that this could become much worse than Melissa. All it would take is someone to take the code and make it do something destructive or that compromises security.

NOTE TO MICROSOFT: If you can find the time whilst dodging DoJ attacks, then FIX THE SECURITY HOLES IN WINDOWS! Some of them are big enough to drive a truck through! Any questions on why I use Netscape for browsing and Agent for email?

No Skeletons: Confirmed -- 4:46 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Our man Redwood fired off an email to id's John Carmack to confirm the rumor mentioned previously that a skeletal animation system would not be in Quake III Arena after all. Here is the Carmack's succinct reply:

The game fits in 64 megs without it, so we are probably going to ship that way.

The skeletal animation system was proposed to save memory, especially on computers with 64M RAM. I guess it either wasn't worth the effort or would require changing too much code thus pushing Q3A's release date back too far. Thankfully, my 128M renders it a non-issue :)

High Speed Wireless -- 2:35 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

According to this CNet article, Qualcomm has announced a new "high-speed wireless Internet wireless technology" which allows for transfer rates up to 2.4 megabits/second. The company hopes to use the technology to compete with cable modems and DSL. Heaven help you if you drive through a tunnel though :) Thanks Slashdot.

The Master comments: I believe EZ-Net already uses a form of this technology to connect their offices. It's an incredibly cool way to network :-)

loonygames Chat Transcript -- 2:06 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

sCary has posted an edited log of the chat with various industry luminaries (Romero, Steed, CliffyB, Zoid, etc.) to celebrate the new issue of loonygames. Lots of good information there. Of particular interest: confirmation that CTF will not be in the Q3Demo, it seems that the skeletal animation system was dropped in Q3A (Confirmation! I want confirmation!), and that Unreal Tournament is thisclose to being done (stop my if you've heard that one before).

loonygames Klesk Screenshot -- 2:01 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

loonygames has posted a screenshot of the new Klesk model to be included in Quake III Arena. Make sure to check out all the goodness in the new edition of loonygames. Good stuff.

UT Server Patch -- 1:56 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Unreal Technology Page has posted a patch for Unreal Tournament Demo v348 servers which will hopefully improve server performance, especially regarding memory usage. Thanks Blue for the tip.

John Carmack .plan update -- 8:48 am CST, Update by The Master

John Carmack once again updates his .plan worklog today. Love these bug-fix updates :-)

• check for bad weapon number in non-3d ammo icon on death
• fixed plane catagorization
• error command does an ERR_DROP if given a parm
• don't load high LOD models if r_lodbias
• nobots/nohumans options for player spawn spots
• prevent voice rewards on frag that enters intermission
• dissallow native dll loading if sv_pure
• loaddefered cgame command, issued on addbot
• drop the weapon you are changing TO if you only had a MG or gauntlet
• fixed bounce pad event prediction for all angles
• allow empty tokens in map files
• fixed infos exceeded warning on bot parse
• warning on mismatched mipmap/picmip/wrapclamp image reuse
• fixed pain echo sound after predicted falling damage
• move sound to hunk
• move vm to hunk
• restart game vm in place for map_restarts
• avoid all lightmaps entirely when using vertex light
• pretouch all images after registration
• pretouch all known in-use memory before starting a game
• on error, shutdown client before server, to be more likely to get out of fullscreen before a recursive error
• new pre-allocated memmory manager to crutch up mac
• meminfo command replaces hunk_stats and z_stats
• adjusted scoreboard titles
• no guantlet reward on corpses
• fixed snd_restart when paused
• PRE_RELEASE_DEMO hack

A.T. adds: I still haven't seen a fix for the networking bug that Crawl and I reported. Grr.

Past Two Days' News

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