Monday, November 22, 1999

New Master .Plan -- 11:31 pm CST, Update by The Master

I've posted a new Master .plan. Warning: Not for the easily depressed :-) I'm actually going someplace more upbeat with this, but I need to hit the bottom first (kinda like Empire Strikes Back)

Linux UT released -- 11:30 pm CST, Update by The Master

The Linux version UT binaries have been released on Fileplanet. These will allow a Linux user to play UT using the commercial Win32 CD.

New Quantus' Qorner! -- 9:43 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Just when you thought it was safe to visit The Haus, we get some more (gasp) original content! (pause for wild, sustained applause) Our own Quantus has updated his Qorner with a little ditty entitled Wallet and Mind Overload! If you've ever stood in a store with two shrink-wrapped boxes in your hands, trying to decide which one to choose (and if you will need any new hardware to support your choice), Quantus feels your pain.

John Carmack .plan update -- 8:52 pm CST, Update by The Master

John Carmack updated his .plan with some post-Q3A thoughts. Gotta love that. Check it:

d:>mkdir research

Ahhhh....

I am very happy with how Q3 turned out. Probably more than any game we have done before, it's final form was very close to its initial envisioning.

I will be getting all the Q3 code we are going to release together over the next week or so. I will write some overview documentation to give a little context, and since you can do game mods without needing a commercial compiler now, I will write a brief step-by-stepto modifying the game code.

I'm looking forward to what comes out of the community with Q3.

The rough outline of what I am going to be working on now:

We will be supporting Q3 for quite some time. Any problems we have will get fixed, and some new features my sneak in.

I have two rendering technologies that I intend to write research engines for.

I am going to spend some time on computer vision problems. I think the cheap little web cams have some interesting possibilities.

I am going to explore some possibilities with generalizing 3D game engines into more powerful environments with broader uses. I think that a lot of trends are coming to the point where a "cyberspace" as it is often imagined is begining to be feasible.

I am going to spend more time on some Free Software projects. I have been stealing a few hours here and there to work on the matrox glx project for a while now, and it has been pretty rewarding. People with an interest in the guts of a 3D driver might want to look at the project archives at http://glx.on.openprojects.net/. The web pages aren't very up to date, but the mailing list covers somegood techie information.

NVIDIA Gobbling Up DDRAM -- 8:43 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The good folks over at Björn3D posted this Reuters news article saying that NVIDIA is buying up DDRAM like it is going out of style. Here's the goods:

The world's largest dynamic random access memory (DRAM) maker Hyundai Electronics Industries Co said on Monday it has agreed to supply one million double data rate (DDR) synchronous DRAM chips to U.S.-based NVIDIA Corp NVDA this year.

"The first deliveries of DDR SDRAMs are being shipped to NVIDIA Corporation and will be used to support their industry-leading high performance graphics processors," Hyundai said in a statement.

A DDR DRAM, also known as double-speed DRAM, provides double the data transfer speed of a regular synchronous DRAM chip.

The chips are mostly used in high-end graphics cards requiring a faster data transfer speed.

Hyundai said it expected to reach an additional deal next year with the Santa Clara, California-based graphics processor developer to supply 1.5 million units of the chips per month.

It seems like those GeForce DDR boards won't be in such low supply as we may originally have thought.

UT Release Party -- 6:10 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Don't forget PlanetUnreal's webcast of the Unreal Tournament release party! To take part in the fun, you'll need to download RadioSpy and WinAmp. They will also be giving away all kinds of goodies to people on their IRC server. Check the link above for all the details!

No More Shogo -- 5:32 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, kids, last night Shogo was officially uninstalled from my system. I haven't played it in a long time and the disk space could be put to better use. Sadly, the cheating and lag issues were never addressed by Monolith which pretty much destroyed any online longevity the game might have enjoyed. I'd slam Lith for bailing out on Shogo prematurely, but what's the point?

The Haus of Shogo will remain online, but will no longer be updated. To be honest, there's been nothing much to update for the past six months anyway. I'm in the process of reforming my Shogo-MAD, The Old Married Guys [RIP], into a Quake III Arena / Unreal Tournament clan. More news on that as situations warrant.

id switching ISPs-Q3ADT Down -- 4:51 pm CST, Update by The Master

Christian "Xian" Antkow updated his .plan to indicate an outage from id's system tonight for an ISP switch. Check it:

Nov.22.1999 @ 4:17pm

We're going to be off the net at 4am on the 23rd (read: In about 12 hours) for an ISP switchover. No ETA on how long we'll be down. Just a heads up in advance to let you know all the demotest clients will fail authentication as a result of our outage.

-Xian

ToddH on Q3A Availability -- 4:03 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's CEO, Todd Hollenshead, updated his .plan on when to expect Quake III Arena on shelves. Here's the scoop:

Thanks for the mountain of congratulatory email. As of this very moment, I don't have a confirmed shelf date or availability date from 1-800 idgames. I'll post that information here just as soon as I get confirmed dates for you guys and girls. As John indicated, it may be a few extra days before we get confirmation on Linux and Mac due primarily to logistics.

My guess is that you will see Q3A on your local software purveyors' shelves next week or the week after--at least in the United States, anyway.

Q3A CTF -- 2:14 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

loonyboi sent email to id's David "Zoid" Kirsch asking for information on Capture-the-Flag in Quake III Arena. Here's loony's summary:

Fans will be pleased to know that there are four CTF maps included in the game right out of the box, and they are accessible from the game's menu system. As for the bots, they do play CTF, using the commands listed in the Demo Test. For those wondering, there are no plans at this time to release a CTF enabled version of the Quake III demo.

Nothing terribly new there. I am a little disappointed that there will only be four CTF maps included. I'm sure the mod community will take care of that shortly.

Update! Along these same lines, sCary gives us the final count on the maps to be included with Q3A:

26 DM maps: Q3DM0-Q3DM19, Q3Tourney1-Q3Tourney6,
4 CTF maps: Q3CTF1-Q3CTF4.

Sharky Gets Annihilated -- 9:17 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

OK, so Q3A is gold. Now you need a new video card to display that sucker in all its 32-bit glory. The answer may very well be the Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator. Sharky puts the board through its paces in his own inimitable style. Two words: Me want!

Q3A Opponents Shots TGAs -- 9:15 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

As promised, Blue has posted the original TGAs of the Q3A opponents shots he posted in JPG form yesterday. You can snag those bad-boys here (1.5M).

Pondering the Imponderable -- 9:06 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

What a terrible night to get tired early! Oh well, at least The Master was still up to report the glorious news of Q3A's goldenness. I would assume, then, that there will soon be a new non-test demo released. Hopefully there will be a patch for those of us with the DemoTest. I also assume that there will be a formal announcement of Q3A going gold soon, including the day we should see it in stores.

Oh, and did anyone notice beside me that UT and Q3A went gold before Daikatana? Remember Daikatana?

More Q3A Character Renderings -- 8:43 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Redwood has posted a whopping great six more Q3A character renderings. Include in this bunch are my man Doom (I like Redwood's comments on this one: "He's back and he can aim vertically now!"), Hunter, Keel, Sorlag, Patriot, and Uriel. Check them out!

John Carmack .plan update -- 7:09 am CST, Update by The Master

John Carmack updated his .plan today with another worklog. Boy, he just doesn't get excited about little things like his game going gold :-)

• fixed not-telefragging bug
• disabled flood protection with local clients
• fixed headoffset and gender on some model changes
• init cg_autoswitch cvars in cl
• fixed clearing of vm bss on restart
• fixed hang when looped part of song isn't found
• fixed two NAT clients connecting to same server
• fixed warning on random once only triggers
• added "g_allowVote 0"
• added developer background sound underrun warning
• move sound loading before clients so low memory defer works across maps
• changed cgame load failure to a drop

Sunday, November 21, 1999

Xian .plan update -- 11:35 pm CST, Update by The Master

Christian "xian/disruptor" Antkow updated his .plan:

Nov.21.1999 @ 11:17pm

Gold!!!! ph34r!!!!!!!!

-Xian

Q3A GOLD! -- 11:18 pm CST, Update by The Master

Quake 3 Arena GOLD!

According to Kenneth Scott's (skin artist at id) .plan. Check it:

11-21-1999

We're Gold!

I love you sweetpeach. :)

Q3A Bounding Boxes -- 10:12 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

There was some concern expressed that the larger models in Quake 3 Arena (like Tank Jr.) would be larger targets than the other, shorter models. Quakeheads contacted id's Paul Jaquays who spake thusly:

They'll [larger models] be easier to see ... but the bounding boxes are the same size.

A bounding box is the invisible box around a model that the game uses for collision detection (with another player, a rocket, or whatever). Thus it will be just as easy to hit Daemia as it will be to hit Tank Jr. Of course, you aren't going to be able to hide as Tank Jr., either.

Björn3D on Voodoo4/5 -- 9:57 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Jim Macintosh at Björn3D has written the first in a series of articles on recently-announced VSA-100-powered Voodoo4/5 cards from 3dfx. In this part he gives an overview of the chip itself and the different cards. Even though Björn's site is geared toward NVIDIA products, he does attempt to give some unbiased thoughts and opinions on the future. It's a good read.

Q3DemoTest Networking -- 7:42 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Master and I have been playing some Q3DemoTest against some bots with my system as a non-dedicated server. It works rather nicely, even with me only connected at 33.6K! (I did that so I could have 33.6K upload instead of 28.8K if I connected at 56K).

I am pleased to report that the lagging out problem I had on EZ-Net's server (see this news item for the info) with Q3Test 1.08 is now gone! Suffice it to say, I'm pretty geeked.

Special thanks go out to Jeff and Carl at EZ-Net for all their help with the Q3DemoTest server and keeping The Haus running smoothly behind the scenes. If you live in NE Wisconsin, you must use EZ-Net as your ISP, or at least send them large stacks of cash.

Q3A Opponents shots -- 10:24 am CST, Update by The Master

Blue has scored some rendered images of some of the new Q3A tier bots. The newest pair are of tier 2 (Bitterman, Hossman, Hunter, Daemia, Grunt) and tier 3 (Gorre, Angel, Klesk, Slash, Wrack). The pics are are jpeg'd for download, and tomorrow Blue plans to post the TGA format images.

Q3A Powerup Screenshots -- 10:21 am CST, Update by The Master

The Shugashack has some screenshots of the various powerups in the demo pak files. Check them out.

Q3ADT for Linux released -- 10:19 am CST, Update by The Master

Well, we missed this one last night (looks like a lot of folks in the news community did :-) but the Quake3Arena Demo Test Linux version has been released. There are two versions available. Downloads:

• TAR.GZ Format
• RPM Format

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