Wednesday, October 20, 1999

UT 348 for Linux -- 5:25 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

FilePlanet now has the Unreal Tournament v348 Demo for Linux available. All you Linux guys go suck it down and enjoy the fruits of GreenMarine's labor. Thanks Blue.

UT Demo Playback Fix -- 5:22 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

A patch was added to the Unreal Technology Site which corrects an error when playing back demos in the latest UT demo (348). You only need this patch if you plan on playing back demos.

DooM For System Administration -- 12:52 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Christian Antkow updated his .plan with a link to this cool new tool that uses Doom for system administration. Basically the monsters represent the various tasks and the rooms are various machines. To kill a task, well, kill it! Pretty interesting stuff . . .

The Master comments: Oh, MAN is that cool. And if you aren't interested in the whole Linux sysadmin angle, read the rest of the article for a discussion of the issues involved in an "intuitive GUI interface" for complex tasks like network administration. Heh. Now, somebody do this in UT (mutators for growing the big process monsters :-)

New UT Demo on My System -- 11:08 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, I ran the same map (Tempest) with the same number of bots (five) and the same graphics settings as I did with the previous UT demo (see this news update for details). My framerate went from 33 with no HUD to 36-37 with the new, improved "mini-HUD". Quite the speed-up! I'll have to run a couple more tests to be sure, but it looks like the new demo is a must-have to play UT in D3D! Even better, UT no longer crashes when I exit!

Just to repeat my system specs: Celeron 400a, 128M PC66 SDRAM, SB Live! Value (Live!Ware 2.1 drivers), CL AGP TNT (2.08 drivers), Win98.

New UT Demo v348 -- 9:16 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Unreal Technology Page has been updated with news of a new version of the Unreal Tournament Demo (version 348). There is a list of mirror sites here. You can also check out the list of changes and the list of known issues. The updated demo is available as a 53M full download or a 9M patch.

The list of changes is unclear as to whether or not there is a speed increase with the HUD in D3D with the new version. There is a newer, smaller version of the HUD available that just gives you the basics (frags, ammo, health, armor). If nothing else, it will give the information you need without causing a massive slow-down.

Of utmost importance is the fact that this new version is not network-compatible with the older versions. Wanna play online? Download the new version!

Tuesday, October 19, 1999

Ryan's Room Has Moved -- 10:51 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Since Ryan "Joltox" Greene no longer will be updating his Ryan's Room column, I have moved all his old columns back to my Haus of Shogo for permanent archiving. You can get to his columns directly here.

SBLive! Live!Ware 3.0 Downloads -- 10:30 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

At long last the Live!Ware 3.0 downloads are available. The good: they wised up and have them available on an FTP site. The bad: the FTP server has a 50 user maximum. Doh! I may be ordering that CD after all . . .

NHL 2000 Patch Status -- 5:19 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Here's a blurb I saw on NHL 2000 Online regarding the patch for EA Sports' NHL 2000:

They are hoping to have it out today but that is not 100%. Here is a quote from the Producer; "Sorry for the delays, but we did not want to rush it out, and just have more problems occur, we wanted to make sure the fixes were good, did not create other problems, and we were dealing with the issues that affected most of the fans of our games."

I just checked EA's FTP server and it's not up there yet. Hopefully soon . . .

CL Annihilator on Thursday? -- 5:12 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Many, many websites are reporting that Creative Labs will begin shipping their NVIDIA GeForce-based Annihilator graphics cards on Thursday. Check your favorite shopping website or computer megastore for the goods!

Mac Half-Life Now No-Life -- 5:05 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Blue's News is reporting that the port of Half-Life to the Macintosh has been cancelled, citing compatibility issues that just could not be worked out while still keeping the product economically viable. Here's a taste, from Valve's Gabe Newell:

However, as we got closer to shipping the product and reality set in, it was increasingly obvious that in order for us to break even on the Mac version, much less be profitable, we were going to have to cut some corners. OK - I guess we won't have Team Fortress Classic available at shipment. Maybe people will accept it if we update them with TFC later. OK - I guess I understand why we don't have an automatic update facility. Maybe people will accept that they have to manually update. OK - I guess I understand why we might carve out a separate multiplayer space for Mac users from PC users because of the on-going interoperability issues. Maybe that won't be the disaster I think it will be. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that this was nonsense.

Check out the rest by clicking on the link above.

Unix Unreal Tournament -- 4:59 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Epic's Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart updated his .plan with some good news for all you Unix afficionados. Here's a snip:

And guess what? Are you guessing? UT for Linux will be on the retail CD. The installer will be on the first CD's root directory with a nice fat README on how to get it working.

I think GreenMarine wins the "learn Unix in 30 seconds" award :)

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