Thursday, January 13, 2000

NVIDIA 3.68 Drivers -- 9:13 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

NVIDIA has released new 3.68 Detonantor drivers for the TNT, TNT2, Vanta, and GeForce cards. You can download them here. I may try these out and see if my D3D performance slows to a crawl like it has with the other 3.x drivers.

NVIDIA NV15 Info -- 9:09 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

3DGPU.com posted this blurb regarding iXBT's NV11 and NV15 preview:

I just wanted to take a second and let everyone know that I have deleted our post linking to the recent "preview" of the upcoming NV11 and NV15 GPU's that was posted last night. After speaking with NVIDIA today, we were informed that the article contained not only unautorized information, but that some of it was just plain wrong. Due to this fact, the link has been removed. Stay tuned to 3DGPU for the "real deal" on NVIDIA's upcoming chipsets.

Q3A Point Release -- 8:53 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Quake III Arena Point Release (non-beta) for Win32 is out! You can download it from id Software, Stomped, Shugashack, Blue's News, 3D Gamers, and CD-ROM. id's Robert Duffy updated his .plan with the list of major fixes since the beta 2 patch.

The Point Release ( Win32 version ) is out. It should start appearing on mirrors soon.

The three primary fixes in this version over the 2nd beta are:

• crash when bots chat on dedicated servers
• crash when bots chat under linux
• bots no longer "keep" trying to score after they respawn if they died carrying the flag

UDP vs. @Home -- 4:45 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

There has been a call for the Usenet Death Penalty against @Home for failing to deal with people using their servers/customers to spam the Usenet. An article on Slashdot first announced this yesterday. This post is the official announcement, and this article shows that a whopping 39% of @Home Usenet traffic is spam.

Bill Gates Steps Down -- 4:32 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

In a surprise move, Bill Gates has stepped down as CEO of Microsoft. He will remain chairman, but MS President Steve Ballmer will take over his CEO responsibilities. This is, no doubt, a proactive move, fearing what the Department of Justice might try next. Rumor has it that the DoJ will recommend that Microsoft be broken up. Of course, the source for that story is USA Today, a publication known more for colorful charts than journalistic integrity.

The Master comments: To be honest, not much is really changing. Bill is keeping the Chairman title, which means he's still the "God" of Microsoft. This just means that Ballmer is having more senior people reporting to him, and Gates has about another hour in his day to be proactive.

Beat Q3A on Nightmare -- 11:30 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Robert Hengel, who has beaten every level in Quake III Arena on Nightmare, has posted strategies for every map as well as demos of him beating every map in Nightmare. If you are getting slapped around, check out his inexplicably named Squeaky Toy website for the goods. Thanks Shugashack.

Darkmatch for UT -- 11:15 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Both Epic's CliffyB and Alan Willard updated their .plans singing the praises of the new Darkmatch mod for Unreal Tournament. In this mod, the only light comes from a flashlight that you can turn on or off. You need to decide if you want to see (and be seen) or lurk in the shadows. The mod will now work with all UT levels and mutators.

On the UT Expansion Pack -- 11:07 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Epic's Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart updated his .plan with more information on the forthcoming Unreal Tournament expansion pack he talks, in particular, about the new runes system.

We'll soon be releasing an "expansion pack" for Unreal Tournament. Some of the fan sites have mentioned it and maybe posted a few screenshots, but nobody has really had many details. The pack is a freely downloadable set of additional toys for UT.

Its not a patch and its not a required download, but will have some cool stuff. New models, new maps, and our runes system. Some of the runes are classics, some are new.
. . .
This pack will be a free download. We are still playtesting the Relics so their rules might change over the next few days.

Check out the full .plan for details on all the relics.

UT Benchmarks: Update! -- 10:53 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Late last night (WAY too late last night) I discovered an error in the UT Benchmarks I posted yesterday (story). The error came about because I didn't realize that you need to restart Unreal Tournament to turn hardware 3D sound on or off. Imagine my surprise when I'm trying to play my newly-tweaked version of UT with a sudden, inexplicable 20% framerate hit!

At any rate, I've updated the benchmarks with the new figures and added a "change" column on the one table so you can see the performance difference more easily. My final scores with the new settings didn't change at all (because I really didn't have hardware 3D sound enabled, even though I thought I did). Enjoy!

This also explains why I'm getting such a late start today :)

Wednesday, January 12, 2000

NVIDIA's NV11 and NV15 -- 10:23 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

iXBT got the mother of all scoops with this NVIDIA roadmap giving details on the forthcoming NV11 and NV15 chips. Note: board manufacturers will have these chips THIS MONTH. Cards with these chips will be seen at CeBIT in March with the first cards being commercially available about that same time. Here's the specs:

Chip	Single Texel (mil pixels/sec)	Multitexture (mil pixels/sec)
GeForce	480	240
NV11	320	320
NV15	640	640
V5 5000	664	332
V5 6000	1328	664

Yes, you read correctly. Free multitexturing. The NV15 will have almost the same multitexturing speed as the Voodoo5 6000. I bet it won't cost $600 either. Thanks Shugashack for the link.

Update! Ironically enough, Planet GeForce pointed me to this page in Thresh's MacWorld coverage which states that 3dfx does not have samples of the VSA-100 chip (the basis for the Voodoo4 and 5) yet.

That's what we were wondering once we learned that cards based on the VSA-100 chip weren't on display at MacWorld. We learned that 3dfx has just taped out first silicon on the chips, they haven't received any samples yet. Keep in mind this is for the PC unit, not the Mac product which is even further behind. We pressed the issue a bit further and learned that 3dfx still feels they can have cards based on the VSA-100 processor available in retail channels by April for the PC, but exactly which Voodoo lines that will be is still unknown.

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Complex Doors in Q3Radiant -- 5:07 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Quake3Mods.Net (one of my favorite mapping sites) has posted a new tutorial on making complex doors in Q3Radiant, the Quake III Arena mapping tool. His English is a little broken (he broke it himself--actually, he's Swedish) but the information is all good and quite helpful. Thanks Wrynn.

UT Benchmarks -- 1:56 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

As promised, I ran many, many Unreal Tournament benchmarks on my system to test the effect that the various settings have on framerates. I have compiled the results and posted them here under our Tips and Tricks page. Enjoy!

Epic Chat Log -- 11:42 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Unreality.dk has posted a somewhat edited transcript of last night's chat with the Epic gang. The topics aren't particularly newsworthy, except these bits at the end regarding the upcoming free Bonus Pack:

The Bonus Pack should be out very soon.

3 new models in the bonus pack!

No HUMANS in Bonus Pack!

There will be a WarCow in the Bonus Pack.

New non-human player models! Coolness. Thanks Blue's News for the link.

Q3A Point Release Beta for Mac -- 11:35 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's Graeme Devine updated his .plan with this short, but sweet, blurb.

I just finished making the Macintosh point beta release. It'll be on the usual mirrors soon.

id's Christian Antkow updated his .plan with an eerily similar message:

The Mac version of the next point release beta is now available on our FTP site. Our mirror sites should have it available shortly.

Here's your list of mirrors: id Software, Blue's News, 3D Gamers, and the mirrors that are FilePlanet (which is back in working order).

UT Demo Playback Fixed! -- 11:10 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

One of the nicest things about the new 405B patch for Unreal Tournament is that demo playback is fixed now! This morning I ran a whole slew of timedemos to test the effects of the various settings. There's too much information to list it all here, so I will put it into a decent format and post it in our Tips and Tricks section. In the meantime, go and download Reverend's excellent Wicked benchmarking demo which is what I used for all my tests.

Sharky Reviews Cases -- 8:16 am CST, Update by The Master

Now, normally one would think, why review a PC case? Well, if you REALLY care about gaming, and overclock like crazy, this kind of stuff is very important. Check out sharkyextreme's review of the 3dcool Tornado 1000. I like Sharky's reviews-they're usually very clear on pros and cons, and he really knows his stuff.

Requiem for QuakeX -- 8:13 am CST, Update by The Master

Reqoning.com has announced a relase of Requiem for Quake2, and the news that Requiem is coming for Q3A. Now, most people don't know about Requiem, it's an awesome little mod for QW that adds bots, new killer weapons, and some neat gameplay. I'm looking forward to Requiem for Q3.

New QStat 2.3f -- 8:10 am CST, Update by The Master

There's a new QStat version 2.3f, which fixes some issues with Unreal and adds a couple of server status options. For those running Unreal/UT servers, this is probably a good download.

Past Two Days' News

The Haus is powered by:

All original information on this website is copyright © TheHaus.Net, 1999-2005. The use of original images, text, and/or code from this website without expressed written consent is prohibited. The authors of this site cannot be held responsible for any damage, real or imagined, which comes from the use of information presented on this site. All trademarks used are the properties of their respective owners. This site is not to be used as a floatation device (but if you try, I want a video tape of it).