Tuesday, December 14, 1999

The Final Hours of Q3A -- 8:03 pm CST, Update by The Master

GameSpot has posted The Final Hours of Quake III Arena: Behind Closed Doors at id. Awesome article. Go there now.

Creative vs. Aureal verdict -- 4:15 pm CST, Update by The Master

Well, it looks like Creative's corporate greed didn't quite pull it through in the courthouse. Aureal was cleared of all charges, and posted the following to their website:

Fremont, CAâ€"December 13, 1999â€"(OTC Bulletin Board: AURL) Aureal Inc., a leader in digital audio imaging, today announced a clear jury verdict against Creative Technology Inc. and its subsidiary Emu Systems. The federal court jury unanimously rejected Creative's claims that Aureal's Vortex chips infringed the Creative 5,342,990 patent. Creative brought this case against Aureal in February, 1998, one day after Aureal announced that its Vortex chip would be used by Dell Computer in the Dimension product line. The patent claims brought against Aureal by Creative in this case were all rejected by the jury.

"Aureal has said from the start that the Vortex products do not infringe the patent and that the case is motivated by Creative's need to diminish competition in the marketplace at all costs" said Kip Kokinakis, CEO and President of Aureal Inc. "It is a great victory for Aureal, but also a victory for innovation and competition that we did not yield to a company with vast resources and an intent to eliminate our ability to bring new and exciting products to the market. We can now turn our undivided attention to compete in the marketplace where our products and technology speak for themselves, rather than in the courtroom."

Now, personally, I like my SB: Live! Value. And I like Windows NT. But I don't like monopolists. And Creative has been one in the sound market for WAY too long...

Q3A IRC Chat -- 3:13 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Quake3World has put up an edited log of the Q3A Australia chat with Paul Steed and Tim Willits (Australia, Australia, Australia, we love you! Amen.). Included is an answer to my no crosshairHealth issue:

Where is the crosshair health function which was in the test?

<Willits> it was removed to simplify the structure of the game.

I must confess that I don't understand how it "simplifies the structure of the game." I guess I'll just chalk it up to one of life's many mysteries.

After reading the log, I'm rather surprised that they didn't start making Steed's comments go through a moderator too. :)

Christian Antkow .plan update -- 11:41 am CST, Update by The Master

Christian Antkow updated his .plan with information on exactly who did that Q3A music. Here's a nibble:

A frustrating part about reading reviews on Q3A, is how reviewers don't state the correct facts sometimes. 98.2% of the reviews I've read state that Sonic Mayhem did the background music for Q3A. This is only 50% true =) There are 12 background tracks in the game. 6 were indeed done by Sonic Mayhem, and the remaining 6 were done by Bill Leeb and Chris Petersen of Front Line Assembly / Delerium fame.

If you view the PAK file with WinZip under baseq3/music, you'll see 6 sonic*.wav tracks and 6 fla*.wav tracks (Some of the FLA tracks were broken up into two parts for an intro and a repeating loop part)

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.

Past Two Days' News

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