Friday, December 24, 1999

Merry Christmas! -- 11:51 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Since we are but moments away from Christmas Day here in Northern Wisconsin (where thankfully the temperatures should stay above zero Fahrenheit), I'd like to take this opportunity to wish all our readers a most blessed Christmas and a happy, prosperous, and Y2K-bug-free New Year. Prosit!

UT: Mine! -- 11:49 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, Santa (actually my bro-in-law and his wife) read my list properly. I am now the proud owner of Unreal Tournament! Whoop! Good thing that I already had the 402 patch downloaded.

NV15 in February? -- 10:10 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

In case you still had any doubts as to whether or not you should sell your 3dfx stock, Ace's Hardware is reporting that NVIDIA's "spring refresh" of the GeForce, the NV15, will debut as early as late January or early February. If the NV15 provides the same relative fillrate increase over the Geforce that the TNT2 does over the TNT, 3dfx is in some serious trouble.

The news item also mentions that NVIDIA plans to continue production of TNT2 Ultra and Pro chips.

The Master comments: Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimee

Hubble's Brain Transplant -- 9:55 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I saw on Slashdot that the new brain that space shuttle Discovery astronauts gave to the Hubble Space Telescope consists of three linked computers running on Intel 486 chips. They use older chips because they have to test them to make sure they can survive a shuttle launch and the extremes of outer space. These replace chips that were "1980s verions" (8088? 80286?). You can check out the full story on ABC News.com. And yes, I've got the song "If I Only Had a Brain" from the Wizard of Oz going through my head.

The Master comments: Actually, the old Hubble systems were i386 based. So the i486 upgrade is not REALLY a big deal. However, the i486 is 2-10x faster than a i386 at the same clock anyways, so it's a heck of an improvement over the old computers.

Thursday, December 23, 1999

Merry Christmas -- 6:58 pm CST, Update by The Master

I'm going to be away from my PC for the next couple days since family will be visiting. I want to wish every one of our visitors a happy, healthly, joyous Christmas. Enjoy the family, friends and music of the season. Peace and goodwill to all the people of the world.

DE UT Maps: Released! -- 4:55 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Digital Extremes has made two new Unreal Tournament maps available for download! One is CTF-Orbital and the other is CTF-HallOfGiants. They promise to release even more goodies soon on their Unreal Tournament page.

Thanks VE for the links.

Play Versus id in CTF -- 4:48 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Tim Willits updated his .plan with a challenge to the Quake III community:

Id CTF Challenge!!

If you would like to play against us connect to 192.246.40.223 right now.

We are all red so join blue.

We are playing Zoid's q3ctf2 map

I just checked in Gamespy and the server is packed. And, of course, all the id folks are serious LPBs.

Pondering the Imponderable -- 4:45 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I spent a bit of time today fiddling with the latest version of Q3Radient. Now I can see why mappers eventually go insane. I made a little two room map with a hall between them. It looks like crap, but it's a start. Hopefully after the holidays I'll have more time to experiment with it.

Free UT Levels from Digital Extremes -- 10:08 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Digital Extremes, the company who made Unreal/Unreal Tournament with Epic, has announced that they will be releasing some free levels just like Epic is doing. Gamefan has some screenshots to boot! It's really great to see DE and Epic supporting UT so much. Are you paying attention, Monolith?

Q3Radiant tools notes -- 8:44 am CST, Update by The Master

The Shack has a note from Mr. Elusive (did a lot of the 'bot code for id) on one of the tools (bspc) in the recent Q3Radiant download:

"The bspc tool can convert q1, q2, HL, Sin and Heretic2 bsp files to good map files. Q3A bsps can also be converted to .map files however all texture references are reset to one Q2 texture and all curves are converted to brushes. Converting a Q3A bsp to a map file is pretty much useless."

YO, A.T., we CAN convert Zig Vert. It could be lots of fun tho (not).

Zoid on the QW source release -- 8:21 am CST, Update by The Master

Zoid made a post to the Q3A coding forum replying to another post on the QW source release. Check it:

"Justin Miller" <gemiller@forcomm.net>

Ah yes, and those of us that still play QW are now preparing for the onslaught of hacked-up QW clients with cheats galore. Fun fun.

Cheating has always been an issue. I've gotten a bunch of hate mail the last couple of days from players screaming at me because now that the source is out, people are going to hack it like crazy.

Of course, you'd have to know how to program to hack it. Or get a programmer to hack it for you.

QuakeWorld has had a lot of cheating issues. I even placed measures in the code to try and curb it (pmodel/emodel checks). One of the reasons I pretty much stopped QW development about a year ago was because of all the hacks. I just ran out of energy trying to fight against it. The last thing I did was the remote screenshot feature and that was only for one of the last QW tournaments.

I think the benefits of the source release far outweighs that of cheating.

Past Two Days' News

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