Friday, February 18, 2000

LithTech Online in 2002? -- 10:37 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Evil Avatar pointed to this particular passage in Gamespy's interview with Monolith's Jason Hall regarding the non-availability of the tools for the recently announced LithTech Online engine (or whatever):

GameSpy - How long does LithTech Inc. anticipate that it will take to complete the LithTech Online tools?

Hall - To complete the first version of the online package, we anticipate it to take a minimum of 24 months. There is much more to LithTech Online than just tools however. I will be discussing more of this at our GDC session in a few weeks. People should come if they are interested. There will be more disclosure then.

Can you say vaporware? I knew you could!

AppleWin emulator resurrected! -- 5:48 pm CST, Update by The Master

Discovered this Monday, but forgot to post. A group of programmers has resurrected the AppleWin project. AppleWin is an Apple // emulator for Windows 9x, and is my personal favorite emulator. This makes me very happy :-)

New Qstat version 2.3g -- 5:39 pm CST, Update by The Master

There's a new version of QStat available. For those who run servers, or like to monitor servers, qstat is a must-have. I'll be updating The Haus to qstat 2.3g ASAP.

Thursday, February 17, 2000

Windows Open Source? -- 10:03 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

According to this News.Com article, Bill Gates is reportedly willing to "open the source code" to Windows to help settle the U.S. Department of Justice's case against Microsoft. Now THAT would be interesting. Suddenly, millions of lines of spaghetti code for all the world to see. Thanks Slashdot.

The Master comments: Oh. My. I don't think Bill really wants to do that. Microsoft will be ridiculed forever. Course, I'm sure the comments in that source are VERY intriguing :-)

Update! Linux Today is reporting that Microsoft's lawyers have said, "liar, liar, pants on fire" to this report. After all, then Bill might lose money, meaning he'd have fewer servants to flog. And we don't want that, do we?

The Master comments: Ironically, Windows is not where M$ makes the big bucks. That'd be Office. At $1000 a pop for the full suite (which many companies install everywhere) versus the $89 (Win9x) to $399 (Win2K) for Windows.

Linux Q3A server notes -- 9:55 pm CST, Update by The Master

Zoid updated his .plan with some info on custom maps on the Linux Q3 server not working with auto-downloading. Here's a nibble:

Just a note to linux server operators who are putting custom maps on for autodownloading. The current Linux server binary doesn't check for the file in the basepath, but in the cdpath. That this means is downloads try to come from $HOME/.q3a/baseq3/ and will fail (the client ends up with a zero byte file).

Jason Hall .plan Update -- 9:46 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Monolith's Jason Hall updated his .plan to challenge Epic's Tim Sweeney to a knife fight. Sadly, I'm lying. He announces another licensee (go fig!). Gotta give Lith credit, they obviously have a spectacular sales pitch. Here's where his .plan gets interesting:

The last LithTech product that was released into the market was done so quite a long time ago. From the gamer's perspective, the last thing they saw of LithTech was Shogo and Blood 2. Both games did not sell "millions of copies" and they certainly had some issues (one product more than the other). Given that's all the experience the vast majority of the game community has personally with LithTech, I can totally understand the rampant skepticism with regard to our new announcements.

This is at least a moral victory (although obviously it's a pyrrhic one). Hall admits that Shogo had problems. Of course, he is also tacitly admitting that they either refused to fix it or were incapable of fixing it. And yes, this is why I and countless other Shogo/Blood fans are extremely skeptical when anyone from Monolith promises anything. Once bitten, twice shy.

Beta Q3A point release Mk 2 -- 8:50 pm CST, Update by The Master

Robert Duffy updated his .plan with news of the beta point release for Q3A:

The point release is now available on our ftp site. It is marked as a beta as there are a lot of functionality changes and we have a finite number of machines and scenarios we can test with. The included readme contains a lot of information, please review it. The release is available for all three latforms, Win32, Macintosh, and Linux.

If you encounter problems or bugs, please e-mail them to me at "raduffy@idsoftware.com"

Here's a list of the fixes:

• fixed splash damage trading armor for health bug
• fixed hang at gamestate/snapshot when server restarts during long map load
• fixed auto-download time remaining bug
• fixed callvote exploit
• fixed no longer take falling damage when wearing the powersuit
• fixed no longer able to do damage with the gauntlet while in chat/console mode
• fixed curve lod's are more correctly represented in certain cases
• fixed win32 executable will recognize a Linux Q3A cd
• fixed dll's load from fs_game path
• added min/max pings to server settings
• added ping information to server browser
• added mod ui
• added auto-downloading
• added allow downloads to menu
• added cl_paks only sent to pure servers
• added make sure file system restarts if a pk3 was auto-downloaded
• added server browsers shows mod running

A.T. Hun comments: They fixed the Q3DM9 "walk into the curve by the railgun bug". I'm pretty geeked about that, since that is my favorite map. But that's also why the patch is so big--brand spanking new copy of q3dm9.bsp and .aas.

NVIDIA W2K driver release -- 7:20 pm CST, Update by The Master

NVIDIA has released Release Candidate 3.78 Detonator Drivers for the TNT, TNT2, and GeForce 256 chipsets on the Windows 2000 O/S. Thanks Blue.

Say what? -- 6:38 pm CST, Update by The Master

Graeme Devine updated his .plan tonight with word on the point release of Q3A. I think.

The pre-release of the alpha for the forthcoming beta of the pre-build of the next point release should be out tonight. Details to follow from Robert Duffy.

Q3A for cheap! -- 2:17 pm CST, Update by The Master

Todd Hollenshead updated his .plan with news of a bargain price for Q3A online:

I just received word from the Mplayer Store folks that they've put Quake III Arena on sale for $31.99. That's the cheapest price I've seen so far and you might not see it that low for a while.

http://store.mplayer.com/catalog/Software/PC_Games/Action/
1000505/product.html

The page shows $49.99 but it's $31.99 once you "add to cart".

Four Weddings and a... -- 11:11 am CST, Update by The Master

Check out this excellent article over on ArsTechnica called "Four Weddings and a... nah!". They discuss the whole AMD versus Intel, PC versus Webtopbox, etc etc. Great article. I wish some of these supposed experts predicting the end of company-x would read this one over :-)

Updated Creative Drivers -- 10:49 am CST, Update by The Master

Creative has posted updated drivers for the TNT, TNT2, GeForce, ad infinitum to their Driver Support Area. I'm going to pull down these suckers tonight and try'em out on my PCI TNT. Thanks Blue.

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