Thursday, January 27, 2000

CliffyB on the UT Bonus Pack -- 11:07 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Epic's Cliff Bleszinski updated his .plan with news on the munch-anticipated Unreal Tournament bonus pack.

I'd be a liar if I said the snow here hasn't slowed down the forthcoming free-release Epic Bonus Pack.

For those of you who are patiently waiting for this I can tell you that all the content is ready to go and we're testing it.

Apollo I remembered -- 9:00 pm CST, Update by The Master

I can't believe I forgot this one, but on this day in 1967, Virgil Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died in a flash fire onboard their Apollo I capsule. This was the first of two accidents in the U.S. space program to kill astronauts. May they rest in Peace.

This Week's Sign of the Apocalypse -- 6:23 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

According to this USA Today article (motto: what we lack in content, we make up in shallowness), the top selling video game of 1999 was, um, Pokémon with 12 million copies sold. The highest selling "M" (mature) rated video game was Half-Life with less than half a million copies sold. The article claims that it is a reaction against ultra-violent video games. I think it's a sign of increasing recreational drug use, but that's me. Thanks Shugashack for the link. I think.

Interview with Alan Willard -- 6:08 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Voodoo Extreme has slapped up an interview with Epic's Alan Willard regarding his work on UT and something about Monica Lewinsky (leave it to Billy W.). Thankfully, they do not ask him how he got into the business.

While this one is decent, I'm really getting sick of sycophantic interviews. If I read one more softball question no one cares about, I'm going to throw up. It seems that websites are in a rush to interview someone but forget that they really should think of something worthwhile to ask. Check the interview with Willits and Steed from yesterday for ideas on how to interview properly.

LithTech, Inc. created -- 4:14 pm CST, Update by The Master

Well, according to Jason Hall's .plan update, Monolith has spun off the LithTech engine into a seperate corporate entity entitled LithTech, Inc. Now we know what Monolith is doing! They're making .coms! Heh-actually-they're going where the money is-engine licensing. Here's a snippet:

This announcement is extremely significant. We have been working hard to make sure that LithTech is geared and ready for the future. This announcement shows that we are moving in the right direction.

It is the highest compliment to be able to attract someone of Dr. Whitten's caliber. This guy really knows solid technology when he sees it.

I am looking forward to watching LithTech grow and proliferate as a true 3D gaming operating system (3DGOS). The end result of all of this is an even more robust development toolset that has a clear direction and a solid future - and more importantly, great support!

Just try to ignore Jason patting himself on the back. I don't see what he's so proud of, considering Monolith's track record in game support, but hey, maybe they can turn it around. . .

A.T. Hun comments: Whoopdeedoo!

Mozilla M13 Binaries Released -- 3:28 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

The latest Mozilla milestone, M13, has been released. If you're running Win32, MacOS 8.5 or Linux, you can try out the alpha version of your next browser. Get it at the Mozilla site. Check out the Tucows review while you're waiting for the download. I'm running the Linux version, and it looks good and is much more stable than the last release. However, it does appear to have some rendering problems with The Haus! Still, it's worth a look.

A.T. Hun comments: First off, a big welcome to J.t.Qbe as another news guy! Check out his column if you haven't already. Second, as Qbe mentioned, this is an alpha release of Mozilla so stability should be much improved. There may still be some "show stopping" bugs though. Almost there!

Update: I just got M13 installed. I don't understand why the date bars aren't displaying properly on the news, but are displaying fine in the nav bar on the right. Wierd. ESPN.com still looks like garbage. Hopefully these issues will be addressed with Mozilla goes beta with M14. All in all, it seems to be much faster and more stable than M13.

Mod Power! -- 8:26 am CST, Update by The Master

Brandon Reinhart of Epic posted a .plan update writing about some games he's recently played, and a ton of stuff on the mod community in general. This is an excellent read, but it's very long. I have to agree with BR on much of it. As a longtime Quake(x) player, I have gotten maximum enjoyment out of the Quake series from all the mods. I played the original CTF (with the keys as flags!). I player Requiem (still my favorite mod). I played LFire Q2 CTF. I've enjoyed them all.

Thank you to the dedicated, mostly unpaid programmers out there who crank out great mods. You make the games we play all the more enjoyable!

Wednesday, January 26, 2000

Aussie Interview with Willits and Steed -- 6:13 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

PlayNOW! has posted an interview with id's Tim Willits and Paul Steed from when they were in Australia. The interview is quite long and filled with interesting tidbits. Steed even seems to be sober! Thanks Blue.

One Quadrillion Ops Per Second -- 3:07 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

In the February 8, 2000 issue of PC Magazine on page 80, there is an article on IBM's newest supercomputer project called Blue Gene. It will be the successor to Deep Blue, but its uses will be far more noble than making Garry Kasparov say, "Uncle!" Blue Gene will be used to model the folding of human protiens to help understand diseases and make new drugs. Blue Gene will take up 2,000 square feet, house 1,000,000 processors, be capable of 8,000,000 hardware threads, and perform 1,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second (that's one pentaflop, for those of you keeping score at home).

I can't help thinking that you could play a pretty sweet game of Quake III Arena on that bad-boy :)

I also can't help but think that if Moore's Law remains constant, I probably will live to see that kind of power in a desktop computer (assuming that I don't get hit by a blimp or anything . . .).

OpenGL is now Open Source -- 2:18 pm CST, Update by The Master

According to a news article on Blue's, Silicon Graphics has Open-Sourced their OpenGL Sample Implementation. According to their press release, this will open the way for OpenGL drivers for Linux. Good news :-) You can download the code, and view FAQs and articles on the OpenGL Sample Implementation page.

Sun to make Solaris easy to buy! -- 1:57 pm CST, Update by The Master

Sun Microsystems is planning to announce huge price slashing on their Solaris UNIX line, with the base price being $79 for bundled applications (read: the OS is FREE) and with the ability to modify the source. Wow. Excellent news for all those ISPs out there who run on Solaris. Saw this in an article on C|Net Thanks DT.

Qbe comments: This certainly will be positive for a lot of Solaris users (but Sun will still charge for machines with more than 8 CPUs). However, for at least the last year Sun has made Solaris available for "free" to individual users (you must pay for media and shipping, ~$20). If you want to run Solaris on your x86 or Sparc, you can get Solaris 7 and a preview of Solaris 8 at http://www.sun.com/developers/tools/solaris/index.html.

Running Solaris at home is cool and does look good on the resume, but Linux and BSD still give you more, IMHO.

Blair Witch Games -- 1:07 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Is there anyone beside me who thinks that three Blair Witch Project games are about four too many? At any rate, if you are a fan of the movie and looking for information on the games, PC.IGN has your fix. Thanks Shugashack.

Sweeney Interview -- 10:07 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Unreal Universe has posted an interview with Epic's Tim Sweeney. Topics include the final Unreal D3D patch and the future of the Unreal franchise. Most interesting was this comment regarding Mike Dussault's departure from Monolith:

I'm not too sure how things work over in Monolith land, but would any sane company license an Epic engine if I left the company, or license the Quake engine if Carmack left id? Sure our companies could hire more programmers and throw them on the project, but certainly the future of the Quake technology would be bleak without Carmack's vision to guide it.

I spent the better part of last year trying to read Monolith's mind regarding Shogo. Still haven't figured it out. Thanks sCary for the link.

Zoid Interview -- 10:00 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Mean Arena has a pretty nice interview with id's David "Zoid" Kirsch on his work with id and, of course, Capture the Flag. Thanks Blue.

Past Two Days' News

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