Sunday, August 6, 2000

New Requiem Beta -- 10:58 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Requiem (The Master's and my favorite Quake III Arena mod) team released version 0.8 of their mod today. It is now feature-complete. This version is just to shake out the last bugs before releasing 1.0. It includes three new weapons, a bunch of new cvars, and the ever-popular bug fixes. You can get it from the Q3A Requiem homepage. Thanks PlanetQuake.

R.I.P., Obi Wan -- 10:21 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

The BBC reports that Sir Alec Guinness died Saturday at the age of 86. Famous for a number of acting roles, he's most familar to our generation as Obi Wan Kenobi of the Star Wars series. You may also remember him from Bridge on the River Kwai. Undoubtedly he was one of the century's greatest actors.

The Carmack on Doom 3 Issues -- 4:53 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's John Carmack made a post on Slashdot talking about id's decision to use C++ and integrating the game editor for their next project, Doom 3. As usual, he backs up his decision with some pretty logical and practical reasoning. Thanks Blue.

Greene on Writers of the Lost Ark -- 2:35 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Our very own Ryan Greene got a horror short story posted on Writers of the Lost Ark. The story is entitled Coneface and it'll put you off dessert for the rest of your naturally born life. I think it should be required reading for anyone entering Weight Watchers or whose diameter exceeds his or her height.

Gamers Against Morons -- 2:28 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Our very own reporter of weirdness, Ryan Greene, wrote in to point to today's news on Penny Arcade. Gabe goes ballistic on jerks who join teamplay servers only to shoot their teammates. Thus he suggests forming G.A.M.: Gamers Against Morons to wipe out this debilitating social disease. If a cause ever deserved The Haus' full support, methinks it would be this one.

History today -- 1:32 pm CST, Update by The Master

Just finished rereading Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb last night, and realized that today is a day of infamy in history. At 8:06 am, August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first military atomic bomb, nicknamed "Little Boy", on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Over 200,000 people have died as a direct result of this weapon in the city of Hiroshima, and indirect effects are affecting people to this day. While atomic weapons have forced a kind of peace upon the world, we can never forget the drastic consequences of the weapons we have wrought upon the world.

J.t.Qbe comments: What a great book. Be sure not to miss "Dark Sun", which covers the hydrogen bomb. For fun, you could also rent "Fat Man and Little Boy" and pick out all the historical errors. After reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb, they'll be pretty obvious. . .

More id Interviews at QuakeCon -- 1:24 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Stomped managed to corner id's CEO Todd Hollenshead and tool guy Robert Duffy to talk about the new Doom, amongst other things. Hopefully they will get Team Arena out soon . . .

Return to Wolfie Preview -- 1:21 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

3D Action Planet posted a quick preview of Grey Matter's Return to Castle Wolfenstein, based on their impressions of the game from QuakeCon. id's original is still one of my all-time favorite games. I hope the new version can do it justice. Thanks Blue.

Saturday, August 5, 2000

Carmack@QuakeCon -- 5:05 pm CST, Update by The Master

sCary went to the Carmack lecture held at QuakeCon, and here's what he got from it. Good stuff:

• Doom will be going back to DLLs, and will be using C++ (except for rendering code) instead of C. Ed: Will be interesting to see what happens of this. Carmack has never been a C++ fan since C always did the job. This is quite a change for id programming.
• Carmack feels the visual 'wow factor' of the new Doom will be a greater jump than it was from the recent jumps between Quake/Quake2/Quake3. (Lots of neeto new effects), but it will also focus on actual gameplay instead of just that 'wow factor'
• Single player is the absolute focus, and Carmack feels it will be their best single player experience to date.
• The game and editor/tools are now combined. You'll be able to simply type doom.exe -editor for example (Or maybe even an in-game toggle)
• Spending more time on the sound code / game code with the new programmers on the team. Ed: Good news here as well. The sound code used by all the Q(x) games was the original Q1 sound code (with tweaks, of course) and it's about time id got away from .wavs.
• There probably wont be much discussion on the gameplay specifics since what made Doom so big is always a subject of arguments. (No talking about the game itself)
• All of the Doom code is being written from scratch. Rendering etc.
• It comes out in 2 years. (Maybe 3, maybe 1.5) Ed: sCary wrote weeks, I KNOW that's wrong.

PlanetQuake has a much more detailed version of the above bullets here.

Thief license now belongs to Ion Austin -- 5:02 pm CST, Update by The Master

According to a Looking Glass forums post, the Thief license, source code, and art are now owned by Ion Storm Austin. This is very good news for Thief fans, since I personally think Mr. Spector is a fine game designer to have on your side, especially when not so long ago it looked like the end was guarenteed. Thanks JCal of Stomped.

Newer Beta UT D3D DLL -- 9:46 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Unreal Technology page has word of a new beta Direct3D .DLL for you folks who are having D3D problems with the 425 patch for Unreal Tournament. This patch must've really blown things up, judging from this comment:

We plan to quickly address any performance, networking, and editor issues people may have with version 425 in an upcoming patch.

Oops.

Past Two Days' News

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