Saturday, January 22, 2000

UT Maps at Nali City -- 9:58 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Whilst cruising around cyberspace and trying to avoid doing honest work, I ran across a site called Nali City which specializes in Unreal and Unreal Tournament maps. They have scads of maps to download with reviews for some of them. They've been suffering a bit from the GameSpy Network's flakiness of late, but that hopefully will soon be remedied.

Interview with Juan Eekles -- 9:35 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Unreal Universe has a interview up with Digital Extreme's Juan "Pancho" Eekles. Topics include Unreal Tournament (duh!), level design, and future game ideas. A nice read. Thanks VE.

DSL Woes -- 4:31 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

DSL: Darn Stupid Line is a Wired article dealing with people's problems getting DSL lines installed into their homes and ISPs' problems keeping them running. Thanks Stomped for the link.

Of course, where I live CenturyTel would need to replace the switch with a digital one before we could even start to think about getting DSL. Since I have a hard time getting a phone line half the time because they are too incompetent to add more circuits to our current switch, I think I will have high-speed Internet access right about the time the Sun super-novas and engulfs the Earth. I have heard rumors that ISDN service may be available here within the year, but I have full confidence they will find a way to screw that up too. Not that I am bitter about regional telcos or anything . . .

Updates and Patches -- 4:16 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

There is an ngStats patch for Unreal Tournament that fixes several bugs, some of which were introduced with the 405B patch. There is also a new version of D3D Quake available. As you may recall, D3D Quake is an attempt to get the original Quake to run using Direct3D instead of OpenGL.

Thanks Blue's News for both of those items.

AOL 5.0 = "Upgrade" O' Death? -- 10:54 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

CNN is reporting that the new version 5.0 of AOL's software can render other networking software unusable and even cause Windows to stop working altogether, requiring a complete reinstall. I'm waiting for Microsoft to issue an angry response saying its Internet Explorer has been rendering systems unusable for years now. Thanks Slashdot.

CrossHairHealth in Q3A? -- 10:48 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

For some reason, id decided to remove the cg_crossHairHealth function from the full version of Quake III Arena. However, the folks at this site have discovered that it still works if you set cg_drawCrossHair 10. With r_picmip 1, the crosshair can sometimes disappear in the background. It looks a lot better with r_picmip 0, but my poor TNT can't handle it. Check out their site for screenshots and the whole nine yards. Thanks Voodoo Extreme.

Just the FAQs -- 10:29 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

For your frequently asking pleasure, SilverStream's Quake III Arena FAQ has been brought up to date with information from the first point release, and the unofficial Unreal Tournament FAQ has had some minor updates too. Thanks Blue.

Friday, January 21, 2000

Carmack Re:ArenaSpy -- 9:36 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Firing Squad has put up a brief Q&A with id's John Carmack regarding the use of ArenaSpy on a pure server.

FS: GameSpy's "ArenaSpy" mod is a modified dll, but it's allowed on a pure >server. Is this because it's only a UI/menu change and not an in-engine game modification?

John Carmack: You can start with a dll ui, because pure doesn't get set until you connect to a server. Any loads after that will be pure.

This does make me wonder how easy it is to hack the client so it will "pretend" to be playing by the server's rules while actually it isn't. Thanks Voodoo Extreme.

Gone Gold Facelift -- 9:01 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Gone Gold, the site for the latest news on the latest releases, has gotten an HTML makeover. It looks very sharp if I do say so myself. It's a slow news day, so go check it out!

Clan Page Update -- 6:38 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I had to make a few changes to our clan page today. We were going by [THP] until I saw that a bunch of clans were already using it. I went back to an older acronym we were using, [THoP], which is not being used by anyone. I also finally noticed that I hadn't changed the TITLE and META tags from a different page that I used as a base for it. Doh!

Unreal Tech Page Update -- 11:49 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Epic's Steve Polge updated the Unreal Technology Page with more helpful Unreal Tournament-related docs.

I've added or updated several resource documents for Unreal Tournament. The performance tweaks and known bugs (for version 405) are new. I also updated Jack's document on running UT servers.

At least now there is some more information on setting up UT dedicated servers. If anyone knows of good sources of information on setting up dedicated servers under Linux, please email me!

Q3A Requiem released -- 11:17 am CST, Update by The Master

Wow-this was quick. There's a first release of Requiem for Q3A on Reqoning. The release is for both Windows and Linux.

A.T. Hun comments: Don't get too excited. At this point, it only adds the offhand grapple (which I couldn't get to work), a powerup that increases firing rate (I think), and increased armor levels that don't back down to 100.

Domain Winner Loses Big -- 11:12 am CST, Update by The Master

According to this Wired article, hey, Network Solutions isn't liable for anything if they screw up. Some poor college student paid a domain holder for his races.com domain, and NSI screwed up the transfer so now a domain squatter wants half a mil for it. Unbelievable.

A.T. Hun comments: The name Network Solutions is almost becoming synonymous with incompetence. Heaven help you if you have some issue you need to resolve because a) you'll never reach anyone at their phone number and b) it'll take a week for them to return your email and the person replying will not take the time to read your request. Maybe now that there is some competition NSI will either have to shape up or go down in flames.

The Master replies: Nope, they won't. They don't have to. When you have legal protection from your own stupidity, you never have to shape up. Plus, they still own a great deal of the process. Kinda like M$ being able to use it's customer base for beta testing.

Past Two Days' News

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