Tuesday, August 24, 1999

Today's Sign of the Apocalypse -- 8:14 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I saw in the paper that Tiger Woods will be restructuring his deal with Nike for an estimated $85-90 million dollars over the next five years. Remember that the next time you wonder why you have to drop a C note for some sneakers.

The Master comments: A C-Note?!? You mean one? How long ago could you get Nikes for piddling change like that A.T.?

WraithRez -- 5:15 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Wraith has released not one but two new versions of WraithRez, a GUI for Lith's LithRez tool (kind of like what WinZip is for Pkzip). You can get the latest version here or check out his BloodBath website for the most up-to-date news. This will be mainly useful for mod makers or for people who like probing around in various rezs.

Monolith Teams Up With Fox -- 5:08 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I saw that Monolith and Fox have signed an agreement. Fox Interactive will produce and distribute Sanity and No One Lives Forever (or whatever they are going to call it). Maybe this will let Lith focus on the games and keep either of these titles from dying the early death that Shogo did. Thanks PlanetShogo.

loonyboi, Day Two -- 1:17 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

loonyboi's Day Two report whilst following the Q3A bus (The Who's "Magic Bus" keeps popping into my head) in now online. Check it out!

Light Flares in Q3Test -- 12:17 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

After I dusted my system, I ran some Q3Test timedemos to see if the complete reinstall helped any. To my amazement, I gained between 2-3 FPS (a 4% speed-up)! I didn't think that was right, so I double-checked my settings. To my amazement, the difference was light flares! Having them disabled gave me that much of a speed increase, an even greater increase than switching to vertex lighting from lightmaps! Do some timedemos and check for yourself.

Windows 2000 Excuses -- 10:59 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

My super-secret operative in the Twin Cities (hi Joe!) passed along this little gem. It's the Top 10 Items to Memorize If You Upgrade to Windows 2000. It's geared more toward IS professionals, but I found it amusing nonetheless, especially #1.

The Master comments: Personally I liked #7 and #4 myself :-)

Monday, August 23, 1999

Big Brother's back in town -- 11:33 pm CST, Update by The Master

Saw this article on zdnet on a new attempt by the Department of Justice to get access to private citizen's PCs without their knowledge under sealed warrents and remove any security softare so that the DOJ can spy on them without their knowledge.

Okay, I can see the need for the DOJ to be able to get access to the machines of drug traffickers and stuff. But this is a bit broad, isn't it?!? And wouldn't it be just great if the DOJ broke all your security on your system and thus made it possible for REAL criminals to attack, take over, and turn your machine to illegal use while the DOJ is watching? Wonderful. It's amazing how totalitarian a democracy can be (the evil goodness is?)

NV10 Soon? -- 4:44 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The rumblings are getting louder that NVidia will announce the NV10 at the end of this month. Other sources say that the NV10 is already in production. It's getting to the point where graphics chip product cycles are about three months (throw Moore's Law right out the window). That means you may just want to hold off purchasing that TNT2 Ultra for a few weeks, they will be getting much cheaper soon.

This move will give NVidia a couple of months' head start on 3dfx. I'm also hearing that there will be another new chip planned for early 2000 (probably a .18 micron NV10). Methinks it may be time to buy some NVidia stock.

Follow-up: I just saw this on NV10.net: Elsa is saying that their NV10-based card could be out by the middle of October. Their "base card" will have 64M on board. Erp. Wow.

UT Mutators -- 2:32 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

PlanetUnreal has an interview with Epic's Jack Porter about what I think is one of the coolest features of Unreal Tournament: mutators. Mutators include InstaGib (one shot death), various "Arenas" like RocketLauncher Arena (only uses that weapon), and one that I'm sure The Master would love: LowGrav.

Porter talks about playing LowGrav InstaGib CTF. That sounds like a riot.

Survived My Dusting -- 2:27 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I completely dusted my system last night, FDISK and all. Now I'm pretty much up and running again. The only problem I encountered is that my Quicken backup disk was bad. Most of my data was OK, but a couple of accounts got munched. That's all fixed now. Now I just have to figure out what I haven't installed yet . . .

loonyboi, Day One -- 2:22 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

loonyboi gives his day one report of his trip on the Q3A bus. He also passes along some pictures of the goings on, including screenshots (well, a digital camera pointed at a monitor) of the new Oorb (Orbb?) "walking eyeball" model.

Kevin Lambert .plan-and Monolith -- 2:20 pm CST, Update by The Master

Monolith's Kevin Lambert updated his .plan today with the following observation:

It's nice to see Sanity and NOLF included in the PCParadox viewer's choice poll. Considering that the marketing campaign hasn't even really started with these titles yet, it pleasantly surprised me that we're acknowledged out there. Sure, there are a lot of gaming sites that follow our games in general, but I wasn't aware how dedicated all the gamers out there are to the titles that they're looking forward to... So I just wanted to say thanks to all the gamers out there who support us and our titles. We'll do our best to deliver the goods as long as the government doesn't find out about our plans to hack into the pentag... er...nevermind that.

What bothers me is Monolith really doesn't deserve this level of following in the industry. They've been horrible at supporting their fanbase, and as far as I can tell seem to care less than nothing about them in general outside of the financial gain of selling to them.

I have been an observer in much of the Shogo debacle, and if that's any sign of Monolith's support for the game industry they'd REALLY have to impress me to get me to buy a game from them. Maybe give away the source for their engine free so I could actually create good add-ons and fix stupid bugs that they don't care about after the profit margins decrease...

Okay, I'll get off my rant-box now.

Past Two Days' News

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