Tuesday, March 7, 2000

Daikatana Info -- 2:28 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

John Romero made a post on the PlanetDaikatana forums dealing with various gameplay issues. Included is the word on instant weapon switching, footsteps, and The Romero's next project (coming to a computer near you in 2005!). Thanks Stomped.

Christopher Blizzard on Mozilla -- 2:09 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

LinuxPower has posted an interview with Red Hat's Christopher Blizzard, whom the company has "lent out" to work full-time on Mozilla. It is a very interesting interview on where Mozilla has been and where it is heading.

If you read this page often enough, you know I'm a big supporter of the whole Mozilla open-source browser movement. I use the Mozilla M14 release for quite a bit of my browsing now. I like it because I want to be able to use a modern, standards-compliant browser in Linux. I also want to be able to never ever run Internet Explorer again on my Win98 box. Thanks Linux Today for the link.

NVIDIA in X-Box after all? -- 1:37 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

According to this EE Times article the forthcoming Microsoft X-Box gaming console will use an NVIDIA graphics chip, and not GigaPixel as had been recently rumored.

But on Monday (March 6), Microsoft selected Nvidia as the graphic chip provider for X-Box. [GigaPixel president and CEO George] Haber said he was summoned by Microsoft and told of its decision to work with Nvidia in order to minimize the variables and risk factors associated with the X-Box launch. "They obviously felt that Nvidia is a safer bet," he said, because it is a market leader and has closer relationships with software developers.

The box is supposed to be formally announced at the Game Developers Conference this Friday. Strangely enough, the article also says,

Current plans call for an X-Box launch in time for the Christmas 2001 selling season.

A year and a half away? Is that a typo? If it's that far in the future, it certainly won't be competing with Sony's Playstation 2 which was just launched in Japan. I guess we'll know for sure on Friday! Thanks Evil Avatar for the link.

Update! Jack at the Shugashack has pointed out that NVIDIA's stock has soared over 20 points (up 26 63/64 at 85 31/64 right now) on the strength of this rumor.

VeriSign to buy Network Solutions? -- 12:20 pm CST, Update by The Master

According to this Salon.com article VeriSign buys Network Solutions. According to the article, the $21 billion dollar deal will allow Network Solutions to sell more security solutions in addition to their DNS name registry services. Wow.

Salon on Daikatana Crunch Mode -- 10:11 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Salon has the first part of a two part series on cruch mode for Daikatana. The amazing thing is that the material for this article was gathered BEFORE Christmas. Since it's now March and the game still isn't out, there must have been some pretty catastrophic bugs in there. The article is an interesting look at the past three years in the life of Romero and why it really isn't surprising that Daikatana is 26 months late (and counting). Thanks Blue's News.

"Crunch mode" (working endless hours to finish a game) seems to run contrary to the way the human body works best. Lack of sleep and proper nutrition do not improve the body's ability to function. I wonder how many times cruch time is actually prolonged because of stupid errors either introduced or not found because their minds were not working at optimum capacity. I'm sure that game developers (if any of them read this, which I doubt) are preparing their flamethrowers. But I really wonder how counterproductive the "typical" game programmers lifestyle really is.

The Master comments: I'd say it's very counterproductive. I know if I stay up till 3am reading a good book, then try to program databases at 8am, I suck. And game programming is MUCH more strenuous. On this article, this comment caught my eye:

It's like game designer Tom Hall tells me half-jokingly outside his office one night: People don't become gamers for fun, "we do it to work out our pain."

Heh-I can relate to that :-)

Monday, March 6, 2000

Q3A for $29 -- 9:27 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

In case you don't have Quake III Arena yet, what have you been waiting for? Run, don't walk, down to your local Circuit City and grab a copy. They have it on sale this week for US$29 (Win32 version). No affiliation, yadda, yadda. I picked up an extra copy today so we can play vs. bots on the EZ-Net server.

Parsec Patch -- 7:56 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

There has been a patch released for the self-running Parsec demo that was released about a week ago (story). The patch fixes a start-up problem with Windows 95. If you aren't using Win95, you don't need it. And yes, the double meaning of that last sentence was intentional :). Thanks Frans.

SOF Final QA -- 4:48 pm CST, Update by The Master

According to John Scott's .plan, Soldier of Fortune is in final QA. Here's the short stack:

Soldier of Fortune is now with Release QA. This means that we have eliminated all known bugs found at Raven and by Activision's QAs around the world. Release QA verify that we have fixed everything and go through a set list of criteria that the game must pass. They also give the game a thorough QA pass making sure the regular QA didn't miss anything. The lawyers also get the last chance to stick a spanner in the works. If all goes well (which has never happened), this process will take 5-7 days. It is most likely that they will come back with a few minor issues and we'll have to start the process over again. If they found nothing, then they wouldn't be doing their job :)

Q3A Beta Point Release -- 4:15 pm CST, Update by The Master

Robert Duffy updated his .plan with word of yet another Q3A beta point release. You can get it at:

id's FTP site.
Win32: Blues Shugashack
Linux: Blues Shugashack
Mac: Blues Shugashack

Stuff fixed includes:

• Fixed Models and Skins not showing up when you have more than the max ( 256 )
• Fixed Single player loop issue when a bunch of pk3 files ( 100-200 ) exist in baseq3
• Fixed issue with greater than 1K server config strings, this only happens when you have several hundred PK3 files
• Added Q3Space_CTF, a 2 on 2 CTF modification of Q3Tourney6
• Updated bot behaviour to work better with the platform in Q3Space_CTF
• Turn off floating point exceptions ( fixes potential crash right after startup )
• Fixed unpure client bug when levelshots loaded out of secondary pk3 files
• Fixed connection issues for pure clients
• Fixed invisible player bug when clients connected during downloads

Here's the .plan:

A new point release beta is out and on the FTP. We anticipate removing the beta tag in the very near future. We have been doing a lot of testing on connection issues, cheat preventions, auto-downloading as well as running a lot of the new mods through it. Things look good, some of the mods heading our way look fantastic!

This also contains a CTF version of Q3Tourney6 which is tons of fun for 2 on 2 CTF.

One key thing is that when connecting to a pure server both sides will have to be using the latest point release as we updated the pak2.pk3. This is not much of an issue once this version propogates a bit but it is something to keep in mind.

There are 3 issues of note with this version ( 2 of them Linux only )

• ZFree errors, on some Linux systems you may see ZFree allocation errors. This happens mostly when fiddling with the mouse etc. during map loads. We are looking into this ( as is Loki ).
• Mods directory does not show mods ( Linux only )
• Starting a team game with bots does not automatically assign the player ( you ) to a team.

As before, please forward bug and other information to raduffy@idsoftware.com

Kingpin "Issues" -- 9:41 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ryan "Ridah" Feltrin, formerly of Xatrix, updated his .plan with the status of the sad situation that is Kingpin. Here's a snip or two:

This is something I have looked at several times, after hearing some negative feedback from a few users. Each time I've looked into it, I have failed to find any hard evidence of network code inefficiencies.
. . .
[T]he timing of the Kingpin SDK might not have been ideal, but given the release schedule of the binary patches, it just didn't make sense to put out the SDK until the game was all patched up. Unfortunately I was unable to compile the 1.21 release for Linux at the time of release, so that was left at v1.2, and the v1.21 SDK was released only with win32 components. This has left Kingpin in a state of dissarry.

I've never personally played Kingpin, so I can't comment. It DOES concern me that this new group that Feltrin is in is behind the upcoming sequel to Wolfenstein 3D called Return to Wolfenstein (story). Let's hope the same ills don't befall that project.

Past Two Days' News

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