Saturday, December 2, 2000

Spot the Space Station -- 10:23 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Once the Space Shuttle crew gets the solar panels installed on the International Space Station, it should be visible from Earth with the naked eye. Heavens-Above helps you pinpoint the station's location in the sky so you can see for yourself. Thanks Slashdot.

Wolfie Screenies -- 10:18 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Achtung Wolfenstein posted seven new screenshots of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, currently in development by Gray Matter Studios. Included are some pretty sweet shots of the flamethrower. Thanks Evil Avatar.

Mac Build notes for Q3TA -- 2:30 pm CST, Update by The Master

Graeme Devine updated his .plan with word on the pending Mac build of Q3TA

Where is the Mac build!

I've been getting a bunch of emails on this lately. I was waiting on Apple to publicly release OpenGL 1.2.1 on www.apple.com/opengl and through software update, but it looks like that's going to be a bit, so I'm reverting back to linking with OpenGL 1.1.2. Both the Team Arena demo and the final point release will be released for Mac OS 8.6/9.04 and Mac OS X PB.

The Mac OS X build really shows off the new OS nicely. Building between Classic and X is really really easy.

I'm finalizing the QVM compiler now for the PPC. My recent battle cry at the office has been pretty much several four letter words followed by "PPC assembly code sucks". If anyone has some good pointers on books or websites besides my coffee stained "PPC Assembly for Intel programmers" and the tortured Motorola Specs I'd appreciate it.

Terrain in Q3: Team Arena -- 2:28 pm CST, Update by The Master

Robert Duffy updated his .plan with word on the changes in the TA engine allowing some massive outdoor maps in the new TA release coming soon

I've had a lot of requests for info on the terrain stuff that Todd mentions in his plan and which is visible in the demo movie.

Several things are going on with the terrain stuff. There have been quite a few updates and enhancements made to the engine for TA but the engine has always been quite capable of the triangle counts necessary for terrain.

Jim did some amazing work that allows the terrain brush conversion along the other support necessary to do the texture blending etc. The size capabilities are quite vast. The old restraints in the editor were +/- 4096, the new restraints are +/- 131072. Now there would be some pretty substantial floating point precision errors seeing that distance but the fact is you can make HUGE maps. As long as you have valleys and canyons or buildings etc. you can do some truly amazing things. John pointed out that people will possible run into surface count limitations and so on but this should not be much of an issue.

As far as FPS issues go, the map with the large gothic looking castles runs about as fast as many of TA's indoor maps, not all of them but based on how they work they are not too hard on system performance.

To give an idea on size, the largest q3a map is tiny compared to the smallest terrain map in TA and that map itself easily fits inside the center section of the largest terrain map in TA. And to put that in persepctive, that map looks like a postage stamp in the +/- 128K area.

The playground just got a lot bigger.

The major complaint against Quake games has always been their very poor support for large outdoor maps. Guess the problem has been solved :-)

Bleh -- 2:25 pm CST, Update by The Master

Well, I've been offline since around 10:30 last night, since Road Runner, NorthEast Wisconsin appears to be sucking major swamp muck right now. I'm going to attempt to get some news online, but don't count on it since I don't know how long my connection is going to hold up.

Friday, December 1, 2000

Q3:TA Movie Released -- 8:55 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id CEO, Todd Hollenshead, updated his .plan with word of a new movie containing never-before-seen footage of Quake III: Team Arena. Here's a snip:

Even if you have played the demo 18 hours a day, for the last 9 days, only taking breaks for bathing, food, and familial Thanksgiving responsibilities, you should still check this out as it contains scenes from our new large scale, terrain based maps. That's right, included in Team Arena are a number of never-seen-anywhere- before-now huge maps. These maps include castles, watchtowers, rivers, bunkers, forts, mountains and just about anything else you could want in battlegrounds of this magnitude.

Here's the link to the 21M mpeg on pc.ign.com. It should be showing up on Quake III Arena.com soon.

Alice demo released -- 8:35 pm CST, Update by The Master

EA and Rogue have released the demo of American McGee's Alice. I'll get more mirrors up as they pop up, but for now here's the 2 I have. The download is 79 MB, so pack that lunch.

• FilePlanet, which, as always, sucks. When will they ever get off those NT machines?
• Electronic Arts FTP, which appears to be overwhelmed at the moment.
• 3DGamers Alice page

LucasArts Interview, Pt. IV -- 6:52 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Gamecenter posted the fourth and final part of their interview with Simon Jeffery, the president of LucasArts. In this installment he talks about the balance between Star Wars and original titles and plans for future games, especially Episode II games.

GameSpot commentary on Alice -- 1:32 pm CST, Update by The Master

GameSpot has a preliminary commentary on American McGee's Alice online that pretty much reinforces my feelings on Alice. This looks to be a VERY intriguing game - freakish environments with plenty of dark and twisted characters to haunt your dreams. Cool :-)

Past Two Days' News

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