Monday, December 13, 1999

More Q3A Goodness! -- 11:32 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Am I just the wellspring of content today or what? I added a new page to the Quake III Arena part of our Tips and Tricks section. This page lists some handy console commands for your Quaking pleasure. I also updated the Q3A cheats page too.

John Bye .plan update -- 10:49 pm CST, Update by The Master

Okay, I gotta vent here. John Bye of The Coven posted a .plan update on the whole Columbine deal in Time. I found his .plan update to be very much in the same vein as my own personal feelings on this subject. I was one of the people in the "don't fit in dweeb loser" category in school and I suffered a lot of abuse from my supposed peers. I can understand someone snapping under the stupid childish pressure kids can apply. But what they did to vent their aggression will be forever wrong.

Here's John's plan update:

I loved this quote, where one of the other pupils tried to make out the school was really a nice place to be .. unless you're a "reject" of course...

"Evan Todd, the 255-lb. defensive lineman who was wounded in the library, describes the climate this way: "Columbine is a clean, good place except for those rejects," Todd says of Klebold and Harris and their friends."Most kids didn't want them there. They were into witchcraft. They were into voodoo dolls. Sure, we teased them. But what do you expect with kids who come to school with weird hairdos and horns on their hats? It's not just jocks; the whole school's disgusted with them. They're a bunch of homos, grabbing each other's private parts. If you want to get rid of someone, usually you tease 'em. So the whole school would call them homos, and when they did something sick, we'd tell them, 'You're sick and that'swrong.'"

Ah, I see. So it's a great place. No, really. Unless you're a "homo". Or wear different clothes. Or have a "weird" haircut.

No, really, that's fine. Don't mind me. I'll just be in the corner with all the other rejects.

America - home of the brave, land of the free, and piss off you rejects we don't want your kind here.

Tweak3D Demo for Q3A Revisited -- 7:30 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I ran the new Tweak3D "Crusher" demo for Q3A (story) on my system in a couple of different resolutions. With my standard settings (cf. the above story for more information): 14.3 fps. Same settings at 1024x768: 13.5. With "fastest" setting: 15.3. It seems that my processor is the bottleneck with this demo. It can't process all the data for all the bots quickly enough, so the graphics card never really enters the equation.

Clans O' Wankers -- 7:03 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Thrrrpptt! has written an article called How to Form a Clan of Elite Online Wankers: 10 Easy Steps as a follow-up to his earlier How to be an Elite Online Wanker: 8 Easy Steps (notice that a clan requires a full two extra steps). If you've ever met, admired, or played against wankers, or even wanted to be a wanker by yourself or with others, here's your chance!

Q3A for Linux Review -- 1:28 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Normally I don't post links to reviews unless I think they are especially noteworthy, and this is one of those cases. Redwood pointed me to this review of the Linux version of Quake III Arena. The author talks about installation, gameplay, and some "issues" with the current build. A definite must-read for Linux gamers.

New Hun-Speak! UT vs. Q3A? -- 12:47 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

With Epic and id's new cash-cows out on the market, there's huge amounts of debate all over the Net about which is better: Unreal Tournament or Quake III Arena? I don't intend to add to the noise, but to simply give what I think are the strengths of the two games and reasons why they belong on your hard drive. Check it out!

John Carmack .plan update -- 11:41 am CST, Update by The Master

John Carmack updated his .plan with a plea to any GL programmer/group that would be willing to become an OpenGL watchdog group. I'm all for this proposal, since it would finally get rid of all the half-a$$sed OpenGL implementations out there and force everyone to comply to a single, consistent OpenGL API standard. Here's a nibble of the update, but if your interested in this kind of thing read the whole post:

I think there is a strong need for a proactive, vendor-neutral OpenGL watchdog, or even a small group, especially in the linux space.

I have been working on the utah-GLX team for quite a while now, and while I have been very pleased with the results, I would like to see more effort spent on doing things as right as possible. Because the developers (me included) are basically just doing the work in their spare time, testingusually only consists of running their favorite OpenGL application, and a few of the mesa demos, or some of the xscreensaver hacks.
...
What we need is someone, or a group of someones, who can really exercise different implementations through all corners of the OpenGL specification and provide detailed lists of faults with minimal test cases to reproduce the behavior.

Q3A Sales Figures -- 10:02 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Activision has issued a press release with initial sales numbers for Quake III Arena. Here's a taste:

Based on Activision's internal sales data, the game has sold through 50,000 units in its first three days on store shelves, making it one of the most successful PC game launches for 1999.

I guess this doesn't surprise me too much because of the HUGE number of preorders out there. Looks like Carmack may be able to afford a new Kia! Thanks Blue.

Update: sCary is saying that the 50,000 does not include pre-orders. I didn't see anything in the press release that indicated that, but maybe I'm misunderstanding some of the marketing-speak.

Sunday, December 12, 1999

Stupid Grapple Tricks -- 8:48 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

OK, so it's a slow news day at the ol' Haus, so I decided to find out how to make use of the grappling hook code that shipped with Q3A, but isn't used in any of the maps. Do the following to try it out (enter everything at the console, natch):

devmap mapname (pick your favorite map for this)
give grappling hook

The grappling hook is bound to 0 (zero, not the letter o). Its physics are much like the Q2 grapple. Personally, I'm glad id decided to dump it for Q3A, but that's my $.02.

Webdog Moved to Blue's -- 4:57 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

As we all suspected, Webdog is now a part of Blue's News on the UGO network. Until the DNS stuff updates (hopefully tonight) our plan tracker and news tracker may be borked. I'll ask The Master when he gets home what the best course of action might be in the meantime.

The Master comments: It's gonna take awhile to fix this since the perl scripting for Webdog is still moving and being configured. I'd expect this should be corrected by tomorrow.

Update 10:00 P.M.: The Master worked that voodoo that he do so well and got everything running again! Hopefully between our new scripts and Webdog's new server we should be golden for a long time.

UT 402 Patch Workarounds -- 2:05 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Epic's Steven Polge has posted two workarounds for 402 patch-related problems for Unreal Tournament. If you have a minimum install of UT, the patch overwrites your CD drive location. If you have a foreign language install of UT, the patch overwrites your language information. Workarounds to these problems can be found on the Unreal Technology Page.

UT Map Pack -- 11:31 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Unreal Universe is reporting that Epic is planning on releasing a free map pack for Unreal Tournament. As if UT didn't have a zillion maps already! Free is good. Keep an eye on Unreal Universe for download locations (no word on when it will be available, though).

Doom Q3A Skins -- 11:02 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

For a blast from the past this website has red, indigo, and brown skins for the Quake III Doom model, just like in the original Doom multiplayer. Thanks Stomped.

Q3A FAQ -- 11:01 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

GameFAQs has put up a FAQ (frequently asked questions) file on Quake III Arena. Unlike other ones that I've seen, this one actually offers some good information on the game. Check it out!

Past Two Days' News

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