Wednesday, May 15, 2002

ThreeWave 1.5 Tomorrow! -- 8:53 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Just when you thought nothing more could be done with Quake III CTF, the ThreeWave team pushed the envelope further! Tomorrow they will be releasing ThreeWave CTF 1.5! Here's what it will include over the previous versions:

Packed with the best CTF yet and 8 new maps, Threewave CTF version 1.5 is guaranteed to give you back that tingle in your special place. Sharpen up your grapple, and spend some quality time with your family while you still can, because CTF lub is on it's way.

I guess I'll wait until tomorrow to reinstall it then!

Pondering the Imponderable -- 5:18 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I think I've almost got Red Hat 7.3 where I want it--which is a good thing since I had to reinstall today (caused by a classic case of PEBKAC). I also bought a SoundBlaster Audigy. I am pleased to report that the open source drivers work reasonably well for it. I am having some minor performance problems with disk access right now. I don't know if it's a RH7.3 thing or an Audigy driver thing or what the problem is. Hopefully I can nail it down.

Heaping Helping of Morrowind Reviews -- 2:10 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

I know that many of you have been waiting breathlessly to hear the verdict on Morrowind, and the reviews are starting to roll in already. Three good ones are at alloutgames, Gamespy, and Games Domain. Oh yeah, Gamespot published one last week too. The overwhelming opinion is that Bethesda has delivered just what it promised.

That may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what you like in a game. Morrowind follows in the footsteps of Arena and Daggerfall (its predecessors) in delivering a huge fantasy world with a million things to do, cutting edge graphics (for an RPG, anyway), and a unique character development system. All in all, Morrowind is a complete world which lets you do whatever you wish, however you wish. It's totally nonlinear; you never even have to begin the main story. You can strike out on your own and make a name for yourself in whatever way you wish. If you're a fan of the Diablo or Baldur's Gate games, you may not like this nonlinearity.

The game is huge. It's guesstimated that no single gamer will ever see it all. And to lengthen its life, a game editor is included which allows players to create their own additions to the game.

Some have experienced technical problems with Morrowind. It seems that system tweaking can fix most of them. I spent a week searching out tips for a playable framerate and finally got one, but ended up getting a new video card and will probably add another 256 megs of RAM too.

My own take: if you like games which give you total freedom to do whatever you want, you'll love Morrowind. If you loved Daggerfall and/or Arena, you'll love Morrowind.

Tuesday, May 14, 2002

Washington Post on OpenOffice -- 4:35 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

OpenOffice is a free, open-source replacement for Microsoft Office (for those who care, it's a fork of StarOffice). Yep, we've heard that one before, haven't we. But the new release (OpenOffice 1.0) seems to be a contender for "best-yet". A few days ago The Washington Post published some very favorable impressions of this software in an article entitled The Office Suite That Lets You See Past Redmond. Quoteworthy:

It's hardly perfect, but somebody in Redmond ought to be worried about this program.

So what? Big deal? Well, this is a very interesting time. Microsoft has set a mid-summer deadline for its new licensing scheme: pay a subscription fee for regular upgrades, need 'em or not, or pay a lot more when you finally do upgrade. A large number of big companies are very unhappy with this coercion and are checking out alternatives.

And in the end the question is: who owns your data? Is it locked up in a proprietary Microsoft file format (Word, Excel, etc) which can change at any time without warning or notice, and which can only be read by costly Microsoft software? And if so, doesn't that bother you?

Past Two Days' News

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