Saturday, May 27, 2000

Requiem Beta 3 Released! -- 10:35 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The third beta of The Master's and my favorite mod (at least until Wraith gets done with Bloodbath), Requiem, has been released. You can download it from their website (duh). Included are some major code tweaks, including a revamped flamethrower (oh yeah . . .) and smarter bot play. Thanks Stomped.

OpFor CTF Interview -- 11:36 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Planet Half-Life has posted an interview with Gearbox' Randy Pitchford regarding their Capture The Flag add-on for Half-Life: Opposing Force. Here's a snip:

PHL: We've heard that OpFor CTF will be including a few HUD enhancements, could you tell us a bit about some of them?

Randy: There is a lot of new data on the HUD that helps players easily see the state of the game. There's traditional CTF HUD elements like score, but we've included some new features like targeting info (which can also show you what power-ups your target is carrying). There is tons of information in the scoreboard now too, including a display of which players own what power-ups and who's carrying the flags. The new HUD feedback provides information to players in a way that isn't overbearing, but easily available. It tends to make the game more fun when you can easily know what's going on all over the map.

Thanks, LadyICE, for the email.

Voodoo5 Problem Found -- 12:57 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Voodoo Extreme got word that 3dfx has found the source of the problems on some systems with their new Voodoo5 AGP video cards. Here's the word:

We have identified the problem. Yes, there IS a problem. We have isolated it and have a test in place to catch all the boards with the problem. As expected, this problem only affects a small percentage of the boards so we expect to be able to resolve this very quickly.

The Shugashack is reporting that retailers are being told to expect a two week delay.

The Story of Daikatana -- 12:13 am CST, Update by The Master

There's an article online entitled "Knee-Deep in a Dream: The Story of Daikatana". This is the story of John Romero, and the making of Daikatana. Interesting read so far-but it IS huge.

The Master comments: Okay, it's 1:30am, and I finally finished this thing. Good read. Pack a lunch.

A.T. Hun comments: Man, that's an awesome article. It's time well spent. It should be required reading for anyone considering "going pro" in the gaming industry.

History today -- 12:10 am CST, Update by The Master

• 1647: First recorded American "Witch Burning".
• 1936: The Cunard Liner Queen Mary leaves England on her maiden voyage.
• 1937: The Golden Gate Bridge is opened to traffic.
• 1941: FDR declares an "unlimited national emergency". In addition, the German Battleship Bismarck is sunk, with the loss of 2,300 lives.
• 1985: Britain and China exchange instruments of ratification of the pact returning Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997.
• 1995: Nobel-prize winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn returns to Russia after two decades of exile.

Friday, May 26, 2000

Marketing BS -- 8:29 pm CST, Update by The Master

Recently, the Marketing pukes over at nvidia stated their new GeForce 2 GPU was a "major step" towards the goal of real-time "Pixar-level animation.". According to this post on SiliconInvestor, it ain't quite so:

`Pixar-level animation' runs about 8 hundred thousand times slower than real-time on our renderfarm cpus. (I'm guessing. There's about 1000 cpus in the renderfarm and I guess we could produce all the frames in TS2 in about 50 days of renderfarm time. That comes to 1.2 million cpu hours for a 1.5 hour movie. That lags real time by a factor of 800,000.)

Do you really believe that their toy is a million times faster than one of the cpus on our Ultra Sparc servers? What's the chance that we wouldn't put one of these babies on every desk in the building? They cost a couple of hundred bucks, right? Why hasn't NVIDIA tried to give us a carton of these things? -- think of the publicity milage they could get out of it!

Don't forget that the scene descriptions of TS2 frames average between 500MB and 1GB. The data rate required to read the data in real time is at least 96Gb/sec. Think your AGP port can do that? Think again. 96 Gb/sec means that if they clock data in at 250 MHz, they need a bus 384 bits wide [this is typo. 384 _bytes_ wide!]. NBL!

Now, A.T. and I are huge Nvidia fans, but you have to remember, don't believe everything you read :-) Thanks Shugashack.

Bloodbath: Young Gods Info -- 4:39 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Wraith has posted some more screenshots and information on the mod he's working on for Quake III Arena called Bloodbath: Young Gods (hosted right here at The Haus). Included are some screenshots of a new level that Ghost in My Shell is working on--a Q3A conversion of Shogo's OF-Quaker.

As some of you may know, Wraith is the coder behind the popular Bloodbath mod for Shogo. Now he is turning his considerable skills toward Q3A. The Master and I have been doing some alpha testing for him. I think a lot of people are going to like this mod when it is done.

Q3Fortress Review -- 4:32 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Our very own J has sent over another review! This time he takes on beta 1c of the Q3Fortress mod for Quake III Arena. Team Fortress-style gameplay is all the rage online now. How does Q3Fortress stack up? Read the review and find out! You can find this and all over reviews on, appropriately enough, our reviews page.

John Romero's Next Project -- 10:56 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Something Awful got the scoop on the next project for John Romero and the Daikatana team. It looks like it will be, um, a game. The comments on the Shugashack were typically philosophical and well-worded.

New CL NVIDIA Drivers -- 9:27 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Creative Labs Asia Pacific new files page has a link to some new drivers for CL's NVIDIA-powered graphics cards, including the TNT, TNT2, TNT2 Ultra, GeForce, and GeForce2. You can download them directly here. I downloaded them and looked at the file dates and sizes. These appear to be based on NVIDIA's recently leaked 5.22 drivers (story). I'll try 'em out and get back with you (I'm feeling adventurous today). Thanks Blue.

It appears that the nvOpenGL.dll file in the archive is corrupted. I replaced it with the one from the NVIDIA 5.22 reference drivers and ran the installation program manually. Then I found out that the Blaster Control files are a separate download . They are separate programs now instead of being in the "Display Properties" dialog. All told the drivers seem about as fast as the 5.13s were. NHL 2000 runs just fine. Other than the installer problem, everything seems dandy.

History today -- 8:17 am CST, Update by The Master

• 1805: Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned King of Italy.
• 1865: Arrangements are made in New Orleans for the surrender of Confederate forces west of the Mississippi.
• 1868: Impeachment trial of Pres. Andrew Jackson ends with his aquittal on all remaining charges.
• 1940: Allied troop evacuation from Dunkirk begins.
• 1967: Beatles release "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." (Hey Eeyore! How's this one? :)
• 1969: Apollo 10 returns safely to Earth from its test run trip to the moon.
• 1981: 14 people killed in a Marine aircraft crash on the USS Nimitz.
• 1991: lauda Air 767 crashes in Thailand, killing all 223 aboard.

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