Thursday, December 9, 1999

Bot commands -- 4:54 pm CST, Update by The Master

Tim Willits of id updated his .plan with a BUNCH of comments on the email he's receiving RE: Q3A, and he had a post on bot commands I thought was REALLY cool. Here it is (for the rest, check his .plan):

I have noticed that people don't fully understand the power of our bots.

The bots in Quake 3 represent some of the most advanced bots in any game today. Our bots are capable of understanding and performing well over 50 different commands in the team deathmatch and CTF.

Using combinations of commands, it's probably well over that. The in-game menu only represents a extremely small set of commands which bots understand. They are the BASIC commands. For a more complete list check out the "bot commands" document in your Quake 3 start menu. Here are some examples of the things you can do with bots.

[Grunt and visor patrol from rl to rg for 5 mins]

Grunt and Visor will patrol from the rocket launcher to the railgun for 5minutes.

Or you can group them in teams and give team commands

[Grunt and visor are in team beta]
[Beta defend quad forever]

Grunt and visor will team up and defend the quad for the entire game.

If you are lost have grunt help you

[grunt lead the way]
[grunt get the plasma]

Grunt will find you, and then lead you to the plasma gun. If you get out of his view he will come back for you.

Experiment with the commands, set up a skirmish with the bots in a team game and have some fun.

Also, try chatting with the bots about anything, see what they will say. Our bots have approximately 200 pages of chats are responses. They might surprise you.

Daikatana Never Was Gold, But Soon? -- 4:39 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

As if things couldn't get any wackier over at ION Storm, Billy W. at VoodooExtreme sent email to John Romero himself about the status of Daikatana. Here's Billy's summary:

Regardless of anything that you may have seen (or hell, even kind of what we hinted at in a post late yesterday), I just spoke with Ion's John Romero regarding the release of Daikatana and apparently they have not sent out a gold master candidate that was rejected -- he went on to say "we're very close to creating our first one" (almost redundant there, but if they haven't created their first one yet, I think it's safe to say that they haven't actually sent one out yet). So, all sounds good still, maybe we'll see a gold announcement soon. Thanks for clearing the air John!

Soooooo, all the rumors about Daikatana being gold were apparently false, thus there was no gold master for Eidos to reject. The long and the short? Christmas is about two weeks away and Daikatana still isn't gold.

UT 402 version issues -- 2:26 pm CST, Update by The Master

It appears that the version 402 UT patches that made it to the web were not meant for distribution (then, please tell me, how did they get there?) and have been superceeded by revision 402A.

The initial Linux 402 patch was not meant for distribution. It did not contain an important fix for a problem with ngWorldStats crashes. The new 402A patch contains this fix and should be distributed. The Linux 402A patch can be installed over any previous version of Linux UT, including the old 402. Please download this patch. Server operators: the 402A patch fixes problems with servers crashing when ngWorldStats is enabled. There will be no 402A patch for Windows as the problem was Linux specific. Thank you.

You can find UT updates on the Unreal Technology Page. Thanks Blue.

CD Key warning from id -- 2:22 pm CST, Update by The Master

Update: Todd made an addendum to his earlier plan with the following:

Update on so-called KeyGen programs: These don't work. Trust me. The math isjust astronomical. They are Trojan Horse virus programs that will steal your (working) CD Key and email it off to some anonymous account or do something worse. They are getting passed around the Net and IRC. Please be wary.

Original Posting: Well, it looks like people are being taken in by the "This is id-send us your CD key" emails. Todd Hollenshead updated his .plan with the following warning:

Be smart. Do NOT send your CD Key to anyone. We will NOT contact you EVER asking for you to send us your key without you contacting us first. You should treat your CD Key like a credit card or your social security number andkeep it private.

My question is: Don't people recognize these scams? Or is this all 8-year-olds? Good grief . . .

Creative vs. Aureal -- 11:11 am CST, Update by The Master

There is a VERY interesting article on Vortex of Sound. The article discusses the lawsuit Creative brought against Aureal over supposed "patent infringement" in the Vortex chipset. If you ask me, I think this is a case of a spoiled brat not wanting to give up all their attention when the new baby arrives. Creative needs a good competitor in the sound market, and Aureal is a competitor by God. Otherwise we'd still be buying ISA sound cards from Creative at $300 a pop. I hope Aureal wins. Creative is too much of a monopoly in the sound card market anyway.

Unreal Tournament 402 patch release -- 10:47 am CST, Update by The Master

The Unreal Technolog page has the patch for Unreal Tournament to version 402. The Win32 version is 3.4mb, and the Linux is 2.0mb. If you've got UT, be sure to download these patches-I see a lot of performance improvements in the list of changes.

Bug fixes:

• D3D detection works properly
• Fixed NT crash on exit
• removed log warnings for players ghosting out of the level
• fixed saving last start spot for players
• timemessage sounds play correctly if viewing another player
• don't allow spaces in names when using console name or setname commands
• suicide can now end overtime of tied game
• fixed stuck animation if killed while coming out of feign death
• no connect time on team scoreboards in single player
• attach decals in post begin play when zone is properly set
• fixed player sounds appearing to change location when using 3d sound
• turn fog off by default for D3D - was causing texture thrashing w/ D3D drivers
• fixed CTF-coret alternate path problems
• fixed guided warhead blowing up if no client response with 300 msec after spawning
• players can no longer switch to illegal team if server is full and force team balance set
• fixed bots not always playing take hit sounds
• don't kill spectators in the pressure chamber!!! The Master comments: Hehehe

Server performance improvements:

I didn't include this list-the major jist of it is a reduction of network traffic and memory consumption

New features:

• Cache.ini file records all packages in your cache (whatever packages are auto-downloaded from servers)
• added flesh hit sound to bullets
• automatic path builder (documented in updated UT_AI.htm)
• postnetbeginplay() called for actors spawned on network clients
• Pawns use PostNetBeginPlay() to make sure they have a valid skin and mesh
• improved D3D texture pool allocation when world and actor texture detail is medium
• Pawns add momentum to velocity after effects of damage mutator
• Optional package downloading implemented. The Master comments: This is cool-especially since it makes it easy to mod your server and allow players to grab the mod without using a webserver/FTP

Wednesday, December 8, 1999

Daikatana Un-Gold? -- 9:25 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Evil Avatar is reporting that Eidos rejected the gold master of Daikatana and the game is in danger of missing Christmas. In which case, ION Storm had better be ready to kiss their rears goodbye. Here's a clip:

I also called some of the overworked guys at Eidos and they don't deny that the release canidate of Daikatana has been rejected and they said that the Daikatana team would be "burning the midnight oil and working on Christmas Eve if necessary" to get the game out before Christmas.

Chris O'Brien over at Voodoo Extreme sent an email to Brian Kemp, Eidos' "marketing guru," asking for clarification. Here's the Q&A:

Chris O'Brien: Any chance we could get a confirm/deny on this report?

Brian Kemp: Sorry Chris, can't do either. We're still pushing for Xmas here in the States. European dates are usually a bit different than US ones, and from what I've noticed, they're usually a bit later.

The Master comments: Bwahahahahaha! Here's all the comment I need :-)

Graeme Devine .plan update -- 8:42 pm CST, Update by The Master

Graeme Devine updated his .plan with a warning:

Cracked servers are no longer listed through the master. We're tracking these servers. We know your IP address, so if you have one running, I strongly suggest you take it down immediately.

Ummmm . . . DON'T YOU IDIOTS THINK ID ALREADY THOUGHT OF THIS?!? id didn't decide to do key protection on a whim. My guess? Unless you block all announcement packets coming from the server (which takes it RIGHT OFF THE NET) you're not gonna hide from id. There ARE no other master servers folks. Deal with it.

On Q3A CTF -- 10:08 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Todd Hollenshead posted a couple of messages in this thread on the Quake3World forums regarding Quake 3's Capture-the-Flag. Here's a couple o' snips:

Countering this [that Q3A CTF is much faster that Q2] is the fact that players (flag carriers) are more vulnerable to attack. No more autodoc+200armor+powerarmor+250cells = I AM A ONE MAN CAPTURE MACHINE! type stuff (and incidentally, no more powerup races for the doc and pain amp). Even with 200 armor and 200 health and a medkit, two people with RL's can beat the flag out of you pretty quickly. And of course on CTF3 and CTF4 you can be knocked into the void or the hellfog - and it doesn't matter how powered up you are - and the flag gets returned.

Even if Q3 CTF totally sucked (which I doubt it will) this alone would make it worthwhile. CTF is a team thing, not a "one man wrecking crew" thing.

The scoreboard stuff definitely will get fixed, and not just for CTF because people run off the scoreboard in games with a large number of players. This is a known issue.

Thank heavens. I never understood why they used such a huge font with so much space in between the lines.

The "forcejoin" option needs to be implemented, I agree, because you just can't count on people to even up the teams on their own. For some reason people always want to be on the winning team (I just can't figure out why ;-) I actually thought this was in. There is a way to bandaid this until it's implemented, however, with callvote because you can boot players that overload one team or the other.

People are so incredibly lame with this. Heaven forbid that we have to try hard to win!

Right now, I can't offer much more along the lines of commentary. But, I will have my copy of Q3A within four hours! Rapture! Expect a full run-down to be forthcoming.

Past Two Days' News

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