Sunday, January 16, 2000

Barry's World Q3A Demo -- 4:02 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The folks over at Barry's World have created a benchmarking demo for Quake III Arena. The demo is a 32 player fragfest on Q3DM1. FWIW, my system got 28.7 fps.

The Master comments: On my system (Celeron 300A), with gibs ON, I got 15.1. Ick, but I LIKE the gibs :)

A.T. Hun comments: I'm guessing that cg_gibs 1 in a demo like that will slaughter your framerate. Too much stuff flying around for your video card to keep up. Gibs are cool and all, but IMO it's the worst thing to have on because it eats frames-per-second when you need them the most.

The Master comments: I'd agree with that-what I really wanted to see was what would happen with my current game config. Obviously, you need a heck of a CPU or GPU upgrade to get away with much in Q3A once the number of players gets very high.

Mozilla/Netscape 5 Status -- 1:48 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

BrowserWatch posted an email from a Netscape employee regarding the the current status of Mozilla, the open-source browser project which will be the basis for Netscape Communicator 5. None of the information is official, but it seems like we may see an alpha/beta version of the browser soon. I've been using Mozilla's Milestone 12 release for a while and it seems very promising. Either Mozilla or Netscape 5 will definitely be my next browser. Thanks Slashdot.

Rocket Arena for UT Update -- 1:26 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Epic's Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart has posted a big status update on the Rocket Arena for Unreal Tournament website. Included is information on voice work and planned gametypes. Should be fun! Thanks Shugashack for the heads-up.

crt on the Q3A Source -- 1:12 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

crt, the man behind the popular Rocket Arena mod, has been voicing his displeasure over the current state of the Quake III Arena source code. Upon talking with Graeme Devine, he feels a bit better knowing that these issues will be addressed. Check it out on the Rocket Arena homepage.

InstaGib for Q3A -- 12:39 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

When I first started playing Unreal Tournament, I really liked using the InstaGib mutator. Everyone gets enhanced shock rifles with unlimited ammo and no powerups. One shot kills. You are either alive or dead. I thought, this would be pretty cool to do in Quake III Arena with a railgun! Fortunately, someone with programming ability thought the same thing. Thus was born Q3A InstaGib a mini-mod that will be a part of the carnageArena mod. Cool stuff. Thanks Blue for the link.

Update! I downloaded and installed the mod. It is a blast! If you need to work on your railgunning skills (or your railgun avoidance skills) this is the mod for you. It works with all of Q3A's gameplay variations too! InstGib CTF anyone? <evil grin>

Saturday, January 15, 2000

D3D Quake -- 6:56 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Version .03 of D3D Quake has been released. What is D3D Quake? I'll let the author explain:

D3DQuake is GLQuake modified to run on top of Direct3D 7.0 instead of OpenGL. GLQuake uses a fairly small (50 function) subset of OpenGL. It only took a few days to write Direct3D versions of these calls.

Back to Normal? -- 6:24 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

There are a couple "behind the scenes" loose ends that still need to be tied up, but everything here at The Haus seems back to normal (whatever that means). Our SSI stuff is fixed. Some scripting bugs were squished. Feels like home! If you find a broken link or something that doesn't seem to be working right on our site, email me.

Converting Q2 Models to UT -- 9:57 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

UnrealModels has posted a way to convert Quake 2 models to Unreal Tournament! (Ed. note: As of this moment, the document is down for revising because he found an easier way to do it. It should be up again soon.) This should really open the floodgates for some high-quality models in the UT Universe. To prove his technique, he has converted the very sweet Darth Maul model.

Update! The skin on the Darth Maul model looks a little blurry (even with skin detail set high). Not sure why. Also, to install it you need to double click on the .umod file, hit next, then give it the location of your UnrealTournament directory (NOT your system directory). UT will take it from there.

Allegiance Beta -- 9:44 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Microsoft has formally started their open-beta test of Allegiance, their "massively multiplayer" (the buzzword quickly replacing "multimedia") space combat sim. The Daily Radar is the sole source for the download, which weighs in at 55M. It sounds cool. I've downloaded the beta to check it out for myself.

Past Two Days' News

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