Sunday, January 9, 2000

Q3A Tweak Guide -- 9:36 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Reverend has put up a very thorough and very sweet Quake III Arena Tweak Guide. Go and read. Good stuff.

Rant -- 6:21 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I'm not a 1337 haX0r. I don't have the latest and greatest system. That's why I cannot fathom how so many people are having problems getting Quake 3 Arena to run. It's worked smooth for me from day one. Sure, there have been some minor "issues", such as the bots not respecting my authoritah when I had the periods in my name (it worked by changing my name to AT Hun). But I have never experienced the catastrophic failures that so many have.

I also find it amusing when people post on the Q3World forums saying some variation of, "QUAKE III ARENA WONT RUN!!!! YOU SUCK ID!!!!" (they almost always use capital letters and lots of exclamation points to showcase their brilliant writing skills). Most of the problems I've found come from one of two sources:

1. People mistyping their CD Key. You would think that the thing was written in Sanskrit. And of course they adamantly deny that they could possibly have mistyped . . . until they discover that they did.
2. Poor OpenGL drivers *cough*3dfx*cough*

It's like this. Before you post your complaint containing several correctly spelled words, make sure you have exhausted every possible option on your end first. If you still cannot solve it, take a deep breath, post your problem in detail and give all the pertinent information for your system (video card, sound card, OS, memory, driver revisions, etc.). Then at least people can help you. If you post a message all in uppercase like the one above, expect to be ignored.

Gamespy Network Issues -- 12:53 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

According to PlanetQuake, the Gamespy Network (including almost all the Planet* sites and FilePlanet) is replacing all their web servers. That's why connections have been particularly flaky lately.

New Q3A Map: Anti-Logic -- 12:30 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Zoid made a new Quake III Arena map for Sonic Mayhem, who recorded some new music for it. It's a pretty sweet map (it is Zoid, after all). It's pretty big (12.4M) because of the new music track which is over 11M all by itself. You can get it from Shugashack, Quake, um, Stuff, Oxygen Tank, or Blue's News.

Saturday, January 8, 2000

Casio MP3 Wristwatch -- 8:46 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The perfect gift for the geek who has everything. Casio has announced a watch that can play MP3s. The 16M version will retail at US$199 and the 32M version at US$249. If this isn't the ultimate in geek chic, I don't know what is. Nothing says "geek" like having headphones attached to your wristwatch. Thanks Slashdot.

The Carmack on PowerPlay -- 8:38 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's John Carmack posted on Slashdot from his honeymoon in Hawaii (Anna K. must be a saint) to clarify why he does not wish to be a part of the PowerPlay effort at this time. Here's a snip:

I had a long talk with a couple people from Valve about the PowerPlay initiative, but they couldn't give me enough specific technical details for me to endorse it. I'm all for improvements in networking infrastructure, but at this point, there isn't anything actually there, just an intention to improve gaming. They need to tell me SPECIFICALLY what I am supposed to be endorsing. At some point, bits have to go into packets and routers need to make decisions on them. Changes at that level is what I want to hear about, not strategic company relationships.

He also adds some things about TCP/IP improvements that sound really cool but they went over my head so fast my hair got about three new parts.

Q3Control -- 1:26 pm CST, Update by The Master

A new remote control app called Q3Control has just been released in beta format. Looks very cool. According to the author, the program supports Quake2, Quake3: Arena, and will support QuakeWorld in a future release. Very cool. And it's free :-) Saw this on the q3servers mailing list.

PowerPlay -- 1:15 pm CST, Update by The Master

A new joint-venture between Valve and Cisco, which includes a bunch of other gaming companies, was just announced yesterday. You can check out this venture, called PowerPlay, at their Official online site.

The concept of PowerPlay is a combo hardware, software, and API system to be used from end-to-end in a game to improve the performance of online gaming. I can see this as a cool idea, but if ISPs have to shell out big bucks for new core hardware to support it, it isn't going to happen. I wish them luck.

New Qstat version 2.3e -- 1:13 pm CST, Update by The Master

I know I should have posted this yesterday, but there's a new version of QStat available for downloading. QStat is a command-line server status program. It's mainly used by server admins for putting up those cool server status pages.

Past Two Days' News

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