Monday, September 6, 1999

Madden 2000 Demo / NHL 2000 -- 8:27 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I don't know if I'm going to do a full review of the Madden 2K demo or not, but I will say this: I can't stop playing it. The player models and animations are very nice. It runs well on my Celeron 400, TNT AGP, and 128M RAM. If you are in the market for a football sim, I'd pick this one up.

While we're on the subject of EA Sports titles, the NHL 2000 demo is supposed to be out very soon. NHL-Online's new site, NHL 2000 Online is supposed to go online tonight at 11:30 Eastern. Will the demo be available then? We shall see (although I doubt it, since that means that they would have been working feverishly on it over the Labor Day weekend).

WraithAdmin 1.0 Released -- 9:35 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Wraith of BloodBath fame, has written a remote Shogo server configuration utility called WraithAdmin. Here's a snip from the BB site:

Remote administration of any Shogo server right from your telnet client...start a server (with any one of six config files), terminate a server, restart it. Lockdown your server remotely. Use your own username andpassword, and set the server on whatever port you want. Plus, everything is logged, with the ability to viewthe log remotely, achive the log, and view archive logfiles. Remember though...this is a beta, the final versionwill have a LOT more (like remote configuration, etc.).

I believe the one complaining was yours truly :) This will be a major help for those of us who don't have physical access to Shogo servers. Very cool! You go, Wraith!

Them Bones, Them Bones . . . -- 9:14 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

John Carmack updated his .plan (it'll show up on Webdog today, trust me), saying that they decided to move Q3A to a skeletal model system. Here's a snip:

It looks like we are going to go to a skeletal model system. Jim Dose of Ritual had already started on an exporter from character studio, so we decided to just meet in the middle.

I implemented the loading and rendering support this weekend and tested it with a couple hand-inserted bones, so now we just need to write the glue between character studio and the new .md4 format.

Just a warning: as usual, his update is pretty technically-oriented. My eyes glazed over in a couple places. I do know this: the new skeletal system will look basically the same as the old Q3Test, but will save a boatload of memory. I consider that to be a Good Thing ^TM.

The really weird thing is that his plan update has 7:31 AM Pacific as the time stamp and I read it at 7:15 AM (9:15 Central). Eerie, huh? :)

Sunday, September 5, 1999

So Ya Wanna Make A 'Net Game? -- 11:33 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

There's a pretty cool paper on Gamasutra called The Internet Sucks, Or, What I Learned Coding X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter. It talks about the trials of trying to make a decent multiplayer game, playable over a connection as buggy and error-prone as the Internet. It's targeted toward programmers, but it's still a good read for us non-techie types. I saw this on VE (BTW, Billy, barley is malted to make beer, not the hops :) )

mp3 tag editors? -- 3:12 pm CST, Update by The Master

You know, I've been frustrated by this for awhile.

Nobody has written a freeware tag editor tool that is integrated into Win9x explorer (pardon my sin, A.T., but I actually LIKE explorer-when it doesn't GPF that is...). I am going to remedy that. I am going to write a FREE and hopefully small utility that will allow a user to view and change the tags in an MP3 file right from the properties function in Explorer. It will also show all the relevent details of the file including bitrate, sample size, etc. Any suggestions? Contact me!

DX7 soon? -- 2:59 pm CST, Update by The Master

Seen some preliminary reports of Microsoft's DirectX 7 coming out soon. Check out GameSpot UK's ECTS99 coverage (thanks Blue's). The reports I've seen indicate either Friday or next Monday as the release date.

Commentary: Yay. Another buggy version of DX that we'll all HAVE to install. Or else.

A.T. adds: This new version should be cool because of the T&L code, DXTC (DX7's S3TC support), and (I think) increased use of EAX. Of course, if it's buggy, no one will care. Like with all these releases, I'll wait until I have a game that demands it before I install it.

Search functions -- 2:33 pm CST, Update by The Master

I've added news searching to the site. Why? Because I hate having to search through all the news postings by hand to link related news articles together, thats why :-)

If you have any issues with it, please be sure to contact me.

Past Two Days' News

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