Sunday, December 3, 2000

NFL Week #14 So Far -- 10:35 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

With one game left to go, I am 9-5 and Eeyore, um, isn't. Let's just say she had a rough early afternoon. Thus, she is 5-9. When I looked at this week's schedule, I thought that it would go to the best guesser. I just was fortunate enough to guess right on the four games we picked differently.

More Q3:TA News -- 2:56 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's Christian Antkow made a post in this thread on the Quake 3 World messageboards about the original Quake III Arena CTF maps in Quake III: Team Arena:

Yep. The 4 original CTF maps that shipped with Q3A will be included in Team Arena. We've made some nice changes to the maps. Added support for all the new game-types, added the team powerups to most of the maps, and changed the architecture somewhat (CTF1, 2 and 3 got overhauled rather nicely)

If you guys liked the original Q3 CTF maps, I think you'll really like the changes =)

Cool stuff. id's Paul Jaquays adds that these four maps are above and beyond the 12 new maps in Q3:TA.

Q3:TA FPS Issues -- 11:54 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's Robert Duffy made a rather long post on the Shugashack about framerates and the new terrain implementation in their forthcoming Quake III: Team Arena. It looks like they've gotten a lot of the framerate issues addressed. It also looks like it would be A Good Thing to own a GeForce2 . . .

NFL Week #14 -- 9:59 am CST, Update by The Master

Eeyore's picks for this week are as follows: Falcons, Cardinals, Bills, Saints, Eagles, Raiders, Bucs, Redskins, Rams, 49ers, Jets, Jaguars, Bears, Chiefs.

A.T. Hun comments: Heh, I almost forgot! Here are mine: Seahawks, Bills, Panthers, Redskins, Bengals, Saints, Bucs, Raiders, Titans, 49ers, Jets, Jaguars, Bears, Chiefs. Once again, I underlined the differences. We both correctly picked the Vikes on Thursday.

Alice Demo Impressions -- 12:11 am CST, Update by The Master

Played through the Alice demo-all I can say is WOW. Download the demo (story), and try it for yourself. I'm very impressed. The camera is NOT a problem, like some other games I've seen (*cough* Zelda *cough*) and the levels are incredibly detailed (and strange like you could never believe Wonderland could be). I'm going to buy this puppy as soon as I can scrape up the cash. Excellent work, Rogue, American McGee, and EA.

A.T. Hun comments: I've only played a little bit of the demo, but I'm impressed by what I've seen. It runs like a dream on my system and the EAX audio sounds terrific.

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.

Past Two Days' News

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