The Haus

Tuesday, November 30, 1999

New SoundBlaster Live! Drivers -- 11:09 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Creative Labs has released updated Live!Ware 3 drivers for their SoundBlaster Live! series of cards. these drivers improve 3D sound effects in various games. Included among these games is Shogo, whose 3D sound could use major improvement. Amazingly, the drivers are downloading at a peppy pace for me right now. Thanks Billy W. for the heads-up.

Quake III Arena Friday? -- 9:19 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

sCary said that he's been hearing from retailers that Quake III Arena will be showing up on shelves on this Friday (or almost certainly by Monday). He also heard that Q3A may have an inital pressing of one million copies! Urk! I guess Carmack can afford a new Ferrari. Yes, I will have my copy faster than you can say Eric Robinson.

Update! Evil Avatar and VoodooExtreme have both said the same thing, citing their various "inside sources". Note to self, must get some of these inside sources.

Shields Up! -- 8:56 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

My best man (and soon-to-be-contributor to The Haus) told me about this link called Shields Up! It was started by Steve Gibson, the man behind Spin-Rite. The site can check your I.P. to see if your system has any ports open for crackers to misuse/abuse your system. Check it out to make sure you aren't giving people an open invitation to your machine!

New glDoomLegacy -- 7:20 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Beta 15 of glDoomLegacy has been released. DoomLegacy was created to add a bunch of cool features to Doom when id released the source code. glDoomLegacy is an OpenGL version of the same. Ever since GLDoom closed up shop, I've been looking for a good alternative--I think I found it. If you long to play Doom or Doom II on today's machines, check out glDoomLegacy.

Asus V6600 Deluxe Review -- 1:31 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Riva3D has slapped up a review of the Asus V6600 Deluxe, Asus' GeForce-based video card. It comes with just about every option imaginable: SVHS In/Out, RCA Video Out, and 3D Glasses support. As if that weren't enough, it's also the fastest non-DDR board out there. Definitely worth a look.

10K! -- 1:27 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Haus has hit 10,000 hits today! The Master and I would like to thank our loyal visitors for making this site more successful than we could have imagined. Stay tuned for some sweet new stuff coming from us very soon!

New Creative Labs NVIDIA Drivers -- 1:12 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Creative Labs has released new beta drivers for their NVIDIA TNT/TNT2/GeForce cards based on NVIDIA's 3.53 reference drivers. You can download them here (That's Creative-Asia. For some reason, it's not on the US site yet). I downloaded them and tried them out on my TNT. I had the same problems that I had with the NVIDIA 3.53 reference drivers. OpenGL performance was slower and D3D performance is abysmal (NHL 2000 looks like a slideshow). The 2.08 drivers seem best for me. I've heard that the 3.53s work very nicely with GeForce cards, so if you have a CL Annihilator, you might want to check them out. Thanks VE.

On Q3A Bots -- 10:40 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ever wonder about the Q3A bots? Wonder if they cheat? The good folks at Clan Nexus did some research on the subject. You can read the fruits of their labors here. Of particular interest is that chart of the various bots' abilities in the Q3ADemoTest.

Talking about fighting Major on the first level, he says, "I really don't know why they chose to start you off on a 1 vs. 1 level with the hardest possible bot." One tactic that seems to work well against Major (at least on Hardcore or below, haven't tried it on Nightmare) is to force her into close quarters, such as the hallways between the two rooms in q3dm1. She likes to jump around a lot and is deadly accurate all the while. By closing her in, she is more susceptible to splash damage from rockets or to shotgun pellets, making her "bunny-hopping" far less effective.

It's a good article, but I'd like to know who decided that a black background with small, dark gray text was a good idea.

The History of QuakeWorld -- 10:13 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Gamespy has posted an brief history of QuakeWorld. It's hard to believe that it has only been three years since QW's initial release--it seems like eons ago. QW will go down in history as the first game to make Internet multiplayer a reality. Since then, any game that expects to have any kind of longevity must have stable and reliable netcode. Today QW's grandson, Quake III Arena, and Unreal Tournament have taken multiplayer to the next level by making it the main focus of the game. Check this article out and take a stroll down memory lane . . .

Tim Sweeney Tech Notes -- 8:31 am CST, Update by The Master

I don't know how many people recognize it, but there is a level of brilliance in Tim Sweeney's current technology notes that has been overshadowed by John Carmack in recent years. Tim has really got his stuff together, and I truly look forward to what he's going to do with game and engine technology in the next couple of years.

Another brilliant programmer who's time will come is Corrinne Yu, formerly of Ion and last reported working at 3DRealms. Read some of her .plan updates. Wow. Feel the pain :-)

Monday, November 29, 1999

New UT Linux -- 11:48 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart updated his .plan to announce an updated Linux distribution. Here's the goods:
Jack is going to put the new Linux UT distribution up on unreal.epicgames.com soon. Everyone should download this. If you already have UT installed, just unarchive the LinuxCoreSystem.tar.gz file in your UnrealTournament directory. Otherwise, install as normal.

This version fixes problems with the installer. I've had a couple people outside Epic test it and they say it works great. Send feedback or questions to utlinuxbugs@epicgames.com.

Remaining Q3A Characters -- 10:45 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's Paul Steed sent Redwood shots (from the Q3A manual) of the remaining three characters that will be in Quake III Arena. They are: Bitterman, Bones, and Crash (think DoomChick). Stomped even is running a poll, asking what your favorite character is. All told there are 32 characters in Q3A, including 23 different models. The rest of the characters are just a different skin on the same model.

Because I know you care (not) here are my favorite characters in no particular order: Doom, Klesk, Sorlag, Tank Jr., and Bones. I will most likely be playing as Doom.

Do the Linux, Be the Linux -- 10:22 pm CST, Update by The Master

Have I mentioned lately just how cool Linux is? Just thought I'd make that statement. Watch here for further developments on just how cool Linux is :-)

Red Hat to Back Mozilla -- 6:32 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

ZDNet is reporting that Linux distributor Red Hat is planning a "major investment" in the Mozilla open-source browser project, founded and sponsored by Netscape. Hopefully this will speed up Mozilla's progress.

Call it delusions of grandeur if you want, but Red Hat CEO Bob Young says, "Our competition is not the other Linux distributions. Our competition is with Microsoft." Whether or not Young's company can bring down "The Man" remains to be seen.

Thanks Slashdot.

Good News! -- 4:42 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Good news #1: I got my free Quake III Arena hat in the mail today. I got it by sending in a little coupon that came with Quake II (yes, I'm probably the last person in the world to buy Q2).

Good news #2: I fired up Mozilla M11 today. It's obviously not ready for prime-time yet, but it's also obvious that it has potential. The new layout engine (Gecko) is much faster and supports more features than Netscape 4.x. There are plenty of features to be completed and bugs to be squashed, but it seems clear that Mozilla (and therefore Netscape Communicator 5.0) has a bright future.

Daikatana News? -- 12:52 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Since this seems to be the day for hearsay and innuendo, The Shugashack pointed me to Evil Avatar, who posted this "inside scoop" on Daikatana.
Eidos has a release canidate of Daikatana. They are still doing testing, but the game is unofficially "Gone Gold".

The Daikatana launch party is December 17th.

Daikatana will ship on Monday December 20th and be in stores starting as early as December 21st.

Eidos has said that if bug fixing cannot be finished in time for the December 20th ship date, they will just ship the current release canidate and "patch later".
None of this is official, but it certainly makes a whole lot of sense. It will be interesting how Romero's much-maligned brain-child sells, since it was beaten to market by both Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena.

The Master adds: And is based on the Quake 2 codebase. Will be interesting to see what Ion's programmers have been able to do with the Q2 engine, especially since they've turned over senior programmers at least twice

Update! Billy Wilson at VoodooExtreme has posted that his source at ION Storm confirms Evil Avatar's report. Expect to see Daikatana on shelves the week before Christmas (and expect an immediate patch).

More on Windows and OpenGL -- 10:45 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

A Win2K beta tester emailed Blue's News with some information on the status of OS's OpenGL support. Here's the whole deal:
...I would like to set the record straight. I am a beta tester for Win2K. Not only will Win2K not ship with OpenGL drivers it will not ship with Direct3D drivers. The OS supports both DirectX and OpenGL, however, video card manufacturers have/were not able to kick out stable drivers in time to make it to RC3, (the cut-off was actually RC2). MS is pushing stability so they will not be replacing the current drivers that support only standard 2D desktop graphics. I am using Win2K beta drivers for my TNT2 Ultra and many games run fantastically on Win2K with it. I am using NT4 glide and opengl drivers for my voodoo2 board and I am able to play Ultima9 acceptably, (it runs under Win2K better than under win98). You can be sure that when Win2K is on the shelves most of the card manufacturers will have Win2K drivers with D3D and OpenGL support available.

When will the unfounded rumors cease? BTW, the Fahrenheit project was for DirectX 3D technologies and has nothing to do with Windows 2000 or any Microsoft OS per se.
Once again, it seems that The Registry is reporting half-truths instead of actually getting the story. Caveat Surfor (Let the web-surfer beware).

The Master adds: Considering the current M$ attitude of "if it ain't Microsoft, it ain't," I wouldn't have been surprised if The Registry had been accurate on this one. However, the reasoning behind Microsoft's decision on this one is completely understandable, and a GOOD thing. Thanks to Blue and his intrepid readers for setting the record straight.

Pondering the Imponderable -- 10:05 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Just a couple of points I need to get off my chest:

Micro$oft boots OpenGL -- 9:10 am CST, Update by The Master

According to The Register (not necessarily a completely reliable source) Microsoft is pulling support for OpenGL in W2K. Here's the most telling snippet:
Do not let your personal preference for the Quake family of games dominate your understanding of this market. OGL is not strategic for us... as the last three years of history in the multimedia space have shown...
Now, why would THIS be? BECAUSE OF MICROSUCKS DIRECT-X! How do you compete with Micro$oft? You don't.

Thanks sCary.

A.T. adds: I can't really imagine this being too big of a problem. It's not that Win95/98/NT's built-in support was a whole lot to write home about. On the other hand, The Registry could've pulled this one out of their rears again. It seems that far too much of the stuff they post has some basis in reality, but little else.

Paul Steed interview -- 9:08 am CST, Update by The Master

VoodooExtreme has a great Q&A interview with Paul Steed. Check it. Good stuff. Beware, PS doesn't pull punches or censor language :-)

Even more Q3A data harvesting -- 9:04 am CST, Update by The Master

Well, there's been a few more posts to the SlashDot Forums from John Carmack on this whole Q3A Data issue. I think he's got a point. Need to have a lawyer review those readmes from now on :-/
When the article first showed up, I thought "It IS documented in the release!". I went and looked, and unfortunately, that documentation from the previous release didn't make it into the latest release. Sigh. Our fuckup.

Apropriate quote: "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence".

I remain unconvinced that we have done something morally offensive.

Yes, we could have (should have, meant to) included a notice that it was going on in the EULA, but honestly, how many people carefully read and consider every line of all the EULA's they click through? How much of a difference would that have made to people?

I dislike lengthy legal verbiage, but it is reactions exactly like these that cause them to grow. Every time someone says "Sue 'em!" over something, a lawyer proposes another paragraph in a license document.

The most upstanding thing to do would be to have explicit UI that asks on installation if you don't mind sending your data when you play multiplayer games. I would consider that justified if we were sending a detailed system spec. That is something we may want to do in the future. Data like that is helpfull in making good development decisions.

But this is just a driver string riding along with your game version. It just seems silly, like requiring you to acknowledge before leaving your house that someone might see you. I would rather have fixed a bug somewhere.

I can see that it is a slipperly slope to be on, and I can easily project it to a scenario that I would be offended by, but I just can't convince myself that knowing the reletive distribution of different OpenGL implementations is violating people's rights.

The system was set up to allow us to notify people with a one-line message when their versions are out of date. I imagine some people are offended even by that, but I consider that a positive service to the community.

Including the renderer string was an afterthought to get some good unbiased data to help make future decisions on. Every once in a while we tally up the numbers, then dump all the logs. That's it.
From the FWIW department: MicroSoft claimed the same thing when they were caught harvesting GUIDs from IE when users entered Windows Update. 'Course, GUIDs uniquely identify the users. IP addresses (unless static) DON'T. And there's nothing in the data id is collecting that identifies users either. And WHO CARES about a GL_RENDERER string? Good grief...

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