Tuesday, December 21, 1999

UT Guide -- 11:41 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Gamespot has posted a gigantic Unreal Tournament guide covering just about anything you might wonder about UT gameplay. They offer it free on the web, but you can also buy it in Adobe Acrobat format (don't ask me why you'd want to pay for something free).

Quake I Source Released! -- 9:01 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

John Carmack updated his .plan with a bit of bad news followed up by some good Christmas news for you l337 haX0rs out there.

The Q3 game source code is getting pushed back a bit because we had to do some rearranging in the current codebase to facilitate the release, and we don't want to release in-progress code before the official binary point release.

We still have a Christmas present for the coders, though:

http://www.idsoftware.com/q1source/

Happy holidays!

Hopefully The Master has the protective tarp over his keyboard to prevent any drool-related damage :)

Q3A Point Release .plan update -- 4:38 pm CST, Update by The Master

Graeme Devine updated his .plan with the news of the point release fix list. Here's the scoop:

Here's the cliffnotes version of most of the bugs we're looking at. I'll make the actual feature database available as HTML at somepoint soon so everyone can take a look as to what issues we're addressing.

• New scoreboard.
• New team scoreboard
• Voting can change the gametype if the new map doesn’t support the current gametype
• Misc icon fixes
• Team overlay tidied up
• Spectators can go through doors
• Late player start on screen score display fixed
• Re-add mouselook
• Callvote nextmap
• Extra/different pakfile disconnect bug fixed
• Packetloss on the scoreboard
• Delay deferred loading of players until after death
• Server browser remembers “show full”/’show empty” status
• Server browser will not refresh on stopped lists
• Show IP address in server browser
• Compressed sound support
• JPEG from disk support
• Cache filefind results so we do not requery the filesystem every load
• Make 10.x.x.x and other public addresses not use auth server
• Protect CD key into a different file
• Improve overall error reporting to user
• Make sure everyone can command the bots
• Load/Save config re-added
• Bots don't start kill, hitnokill, or hitnodeath chats when there are nearby enemies
• Awaiting snapshot/gamestate issues resolved

A.T. Hun comments: You can thank me for finding the solution so that "everyone can command the bots." See this news item for my heroic efforts :)

Mozilla M12 -- 12:25 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Slashdot is reporting that the Mozilla Milestone 12 source code is now available on the Mozilla FTP server. Expect the builds for the various OSs to appear on the Mozilla website soon. I thought that M11 showed a lot of promise. Some are saying that M12 is quite a bit better. Mozilla is the open-source web browser project funded largely by Netscape. It will be the basis for Netscape Communicator 5.

Update 6:55 P.M. According to the Mozilla milestones page, M12 is an alpha release! The next milestone, due February 15, should be a beta release. As of right now, none of the M12 builds are on their website. I'm not adventurous enough to try to compile the source myself.

Graeme Devine .plan update -- 12:17 pm CST, Update by The Master

Graeme Devine made a .plan update indicating he's released a new master build for Mac Q3A to Activision after finding some bugs. He's also planning to post a list of fixes in the Q3A point release, and mentions his x-mas shopping.

You'd think that someday a game would get released without a point release a month later. . . Never mind, it works for Microsoft, why not anyone else :-)

"Pumped" Demo for Q3A -- 11:14 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Reverend has produced a demo called Pumped to torture-test your system in Quake III Arena. He uses the map Q3Tourney4 because it seems to be the most hardware-intensive map in the game. He uses this demo to show how much better the WickedGL drivers are than 3dfx's own drivers. Check out his site for more information on those drivers if you have a Voodoo-powered graphics card.

Best of 1999 -- 10:47 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Stomped asked several game designers and gaming webmasters for their 1) favorite game of 1999, 2) the game they are most looking forward to in 2000, and 3) what they really want for Christmas. Since The Haus is a little peon site, we didn't get asked, but I'm going to tell you my choices anyway:

1) Quake III Arena I've spent so much time on the tests, demos, and now the full version, it's almost silly. The others I've spent the most time on this year are X-Wing Alliance and NHL 2000 (and Shogo in the first half of the year).

2) Daikatana Can Romero and company actually get the game out? Will anyone buy it?

3) For all my credit cards to be paid off by the end of 2000.

Zoological Demo -- 10:44 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

As we hoped, NVIDIA has released the Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens demo which will stress out your video card, especially if you don't have hardware T&L. It's a 42M download, so pack a picnic basket.

Thanks Blue.

Q1 Map for Q3A -- 10:21 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Redwood has another Quake I map conversion available for download. This time it is Q1DM4. I mailed id's CEO, Todd Hollenshead, for his opnion on these maps, but I haven't heard back from him yet. Here's your obligatory screenshot from the original map:

Q1DM4

The Master comments: Now this is a map I want to play in Q3A with a bunch of bots. WHOOOOOOO!

Monday, December 20, 1999

Cool Q3A Binds -- 4:11 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Bind has some very slick binds for Quake III Arena. I snagged two of them for my personal use. One is Essobie's four group weapon switch. It allows you to control all the weapons with only four keys. I rewrote part of it so that q is bound to the lightning gun and the grenade launcher, e is bound to the rocket launcher and the plasma gun, and r is bound to the rail gun and the BFG (I use wasd for movement). The only one I didn't bind is the shotgun. Since it is normally bound to 3 anyway, that's close enough. That's now in my autoexec.cfg.

Another one I will use is Artist's model viewer. You need to enable cheats (using devmap mapname) for this to work, since cg_thirdPersonAngle and cg_thirdPersonRange are cheat-protected. After you exec this script, hit 5 on the numeric keypad to go in and out of the third-person view. Then use the up and down arrows on the keypad to zoom in and out, and the left and right arrows on the keypad to rotate one way or the other.

And yes, The Master, there is even a rocket jumping bind so you can actually do that now :)

Thanks Quake 3 World for the link!

GameTime with Devine -- 2:49 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Nothing like a snappy headline, eh? Anyway, id's Graeme Devine will be the guest on Gametime tonight at 6:00 P.M. EST. You will need RealPlayer or the M$ knock-off to watch. Thanks Blue.

UT Cheat Codes -- 11:33 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I saw on several sites that Game Sages have updated their list of Unreal Tournament cheat codes. Head over there and cheat to your hearts content.

NVIDIA Demos -- 11:30 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

VE is reporting that NVIDIA has released a bunch of GeForce demos to show how hot and spicy your new video card really is. Hopefully later today they will be releasing the very cool Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens demo.

New Column: Qbe Root! -- 11:03 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

As promised yesterday, The Haus is proud to present our newest column: Qbe Root! In Qbe (Cube) Root, J.t.Qbe (the best man in my wedding, a good friend for many moons, a fellow lover of good beer and Pepsi, and a Unix admin) will be bringing you all that's new, amusing, or amazing in the world of Unix. Check out his first column! Welcome aboard, Qbe!

Q1 Maps for Q3 -- 10:51 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Caveat Emptor: (update 3:00 P.M.) I suddenly have a somewhat itchy feeling about these maps. I'm no lawyer, but I've a feeling these conversions may be against id's EULA. If you also have a legit copy of Quake I, it probably isn't an issue. I'm sure someone from id will comment.

Redwood has posted a couple of map conversions from Quake I to Quake III Arena. The maps in question are Q1DM3 and Q1DM6. In case you've forgotten what those maps are, here are a couple of screenshots from the original maps:

Q1DM3
Q1DM6

I know that The Master and I would LOVE it if someone would convert e1m8 "Ziggurat Vertigo". Any takers?

Update! I downloaded and tried both maps. Both are pretty cool and bring back old memories. There are a couple of minor texture errors in places. I also wish the author would have made the water in Q1DM3 like the water in Q3A. Right now, it just looks like a bunch of textures from the surface.

php4 -- 10:33 am CST, Update by The Master

I finally got PHP 4 to compile. I didn't see this anywhere in the docs (granted this IS a beta) but you MUST install the complete binary distribution of mySQL version 3.23 in order to compile PHP4. Once I did that, I was golden. And PHP4 is FAST. I couldn't believe it. My old P200 may be capable enough with that sucker running :-)

Now, to convert The Haus's code to php. Gonna be a fun week.

RA for UT -- 10:24 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart updated his .plan detailing his efforts in helping crt produce Rocket Arena (the popular Quake 2 mod) for Unreal Tournament.

Hopefully, the first release of RA:UT will be in early or mid January. The game will include full bot support, all the classic RA gametypes, and some new stuff to boot. In addition, Epic will be adding some professional quality visual and audio content.

It's pretty obvious that Epic is bending over backwards to help out the mod community. After the whole Shogo fiasco, that's really nice to see.

Disruptor .plan Update -- 10:20 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's Christian "Disruptor" Antkow updated his .plan with information on how to make Rocket Arena-esque maps (where everyone spawns in with every item) in Quake III Arena. Follow his 14 step plan in his, um, .plan.

Past Two Days' News

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