Monday, January 10, 2000

EAX for Q3A: Update! -- 11:23 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

After a little more experimenting with the Aureal patch, I discovered that sometimes sounds will not play in the game with A3D mode enabled. As a matter of fact, the weapon firing sounds rarely played. Combine that with the 19% framerate drop and I really don't think it is worth it. I just used the EAX controls to add about 15% of "Stone Room 1" reverb to give the sounds a bit more kick without the performance hit. It's not the same, obviously, but it helps.

UT 405B Patch Released -- 10:40 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Unreal Technology Page brings word that the 405B patch is now available. Check the above link for the list of features. It is a 4.5M download. You can get it from Unreal Universe, Unreality, 3D Action Gamers, Blue's News, Evil Avatar, and the mirrors that are FilePlanet (assuming you can get past the Gamespy Network's patented CrashyServer technology). It is network-compatible with versions 400 and 402 so you don't have to worry if your favorite server is slow to upgrade.

Free UT Maps: Be Patient! -- 9:15 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Epic's Alan Willard updated his .plan with a promise that the free Unreal Tournament maps are coming so just chill.

Rather than make a long boring post about some lame thing I found on the web, I'll just say this:

The long wait for the release of those free maps we mentioned awhile back WILL BE worth it.

'Nuff said.

Say, Monolith, isn't it interesting that id and Epic are releasing MORE maps, but you guys never got around to adding more start-points in Shogo. Wacky, ain't it? Not that I'm bitter . . .

EAX for Q3A -- 9:23 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

A website called T-Break has posted instructions (supposedly from Creative Labs) on how to get Q3A to use EAX-based sound cards!. It seems that Aureal put out a patch that will allow non-Aureal cards to play A3D 2.0 titles using DirectSound (of which EAX is a superset). I may just have to try this. Caveat emptor, as always. Thanks Blue's News.

Update! I did a little more research and found out that this patch is indeed legitimate. I found a readme for the patch on Aureal's website as well as the patch itself. Cool beans!

I downloaded the Aureal patch, installed it, and ran some timedemos. I ran Reverend's "Pumped" demo and DEMO001 that comes with Quake III. Here are the results:

• Pumped w/o 3D sound: 30.3 fps; with 3D Sound: 24.6 fps (19% loss)
• DEMO001 w/o 3D sound: 46.6 fps; with 3D Sound: 38.2 fps (18% loss)

As you can see, enabling 3D sound causes a substantial framerate hit. Does it sound better? Quite a bit! Is it worth losing that many fps? For me, probably not. Download the Aureal patch and decide for yourself!

AOL, Time-Warner to Merge -- 8:19 am CST, Update by The Master

According to a biz article on Yahoo!, AOL and Time-Warner to merge announces AOL's stock buyout of Time-Warner (which is the world's largest media company) for around $190 billion. This is huge folks.

Sunday, January 9, 2000

Q3A Tweak Guide -- 9:36 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Reverend has put up a very thorough and very sweet Quake III Arena Tweak Guide. Go and read. Good stuff.

Rant -- 6:21 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I'm not a 1337 haX0r. I don't have the latest and greatest system. That's why I cannot fathom how so many people are having problems getting Quake 3 Arena to run. It's worked smooth for me from day one. Sure, there have been some minor "issues", such as the bots not respecting my authoritah when I had the periods in my name (it worked by changing my name to AT Hun). But I have never experienced the catastrophic failures that so many have.

I also find it amusing when people post on the Q3World forums saying some variation of, "QUAKE III ARENA WONT RUN!!!! YOU SUCK ID!!!!" (they almost always use capital letters and lots of exclamation points to showcase their brilliant writing skills). Most of the problems I've found come from one of two sources:

1. People mistyping their CD Key. You would think that the thing was written in Sanskrit. And of course they adamantly deny that they could possibly have mistyped . . . until they discover that they did.
2. Poor OpenGL drivers *cough*3dfx*cough*

It's like this. Before you post your complaint containing several correctly spelled words, make sure you have exhausted every possible option on your end first. If you still cannot solve it, take a deep breath, post your problem in detail and give all the pertinent information for your system (video card, sound card, OS, memory, driver revisions, etc.). Then at least people can help you. If you post a message all in uppercase like the one above, expect to be ignored.

Gamespy Network Issues -- 12:53 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

According to PlanetQuake, the Gamespy Network (including almost all the Planet* sites and FilePlanet) is replacing all their web servers. That's why connections have been particularly flaky lately.

New Q3A Map: Anti-Logic -- 12:30 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Zoid made a new Quake III Arena map for Sonic Mayhem, who recorded some new music for it. It's a pretty sweet map (it is Zoid, after all). It's pretty big (12.4M) because of the new music track which is over 11M all by itself. You can get it from Shugashack, Quake, um, Stuff, Oxygen Tank, or Blue's News.

Past Two Days' News

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