Sunday, November 28, 1999

More on Q3A Data Harvesting -- 7:52 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

John Carmack has replied to some concerns about the fact that Q3A reports information about you to id's master server. Here's a (rather large) snip:

You can disable it by setting "cl_motd 0" when the game starts up if you really don't want to send anything or see our message.

We added the result of glGetString( GL_RENDER ) to get some much needed information about the distribution of video cards and drivers.

We can see how many people aren't following directions and running glsetup. This is a big support issue.

We can see how many people are running minidrivers, which are going to make our lives a mess in the future.

We can see how many mac (steady 5%) and linux (5% at initial release, tailed off to 2%, probably due to dual booting) people are playing.

Getting this information has been usefull. We can compare the numbers of people playing with a given card with the amount of support emails we field, so we know which vendors (3DFX) we need to give more crap about their driver quality.

My $.02? People are getting their undies in way too much of a bundle about this. I wish id would have mentioned it in a readme at least. But I think some of the Slashdotters have been watching too many Oliver Stone movies if they are ready to accuse id of using Q3A as a Trojan Horse.

Thanks Blue for the heads-up.

News for 11/28/1999

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