Friday, March 31, 2000

Force Commander Demo -- 8:05 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Blue is reporting that Gamecenter has a demo of LucasArts' Force Commander available for download (77.3M). I may download it, if for no other reason to see if it really is as bad as all the reviews are saying it is.

John Cash .plan Update -- 1:53 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's John Cash updated his .plan with warning of a minor bug in Quake III Arena that could give mod makers a problem. It shouldn't effect end-users at all, though.

There is a bug that may be giving Q3A mod developers some headaches if they are trying to add new holdable items.

File cg_event.c, function CG_UseItem; the line:
itemNum = es->event - EV_USE_ITEM0;
should be:
itemNum = (es->event & ~EV_EVENT_BITS) - EV_USE_ITEM0;

This causes itemNum to be invalid about half the time, preventing any client side effect tied to the item from occurring.

There. Now I can sleep tonight :)

CliffyB Interview -- 1:44 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

sCary and the boyz at the Shugashack have slapped up an interview with Epic's Cliff Bleszinski on Unreal Tournament, what's up next for Epic, and other games based on the UT engine.

J Reviews the Meatpak -- 12:16 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Land o' Goshen! Yes, folks, there's some new, original content here on ye olde Haus. My fellow THoPper, J, has started doing reviews of the very best Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament maps, mods, and mutators.

In this first installment, J reviews the Quake III Arena map pack called Meatpak by Pete Parisi. Make sure to check it out! You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll learn a little bit more about yourself. Or something.

Updated DE Mutators -- 9:19 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Digital Extremes has posted an updated version of their Unreal Tournament mutators (Team Beacon, Volatile Ammunition, and Volatile Weapons) that were broken as a result of the 413 patch. Thanks Voodoo Extreme.

Pondering the Imponderable -- 9:12 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I slapped an old Voodoo2 into my system on Wednesday to try to get some more FPS out of Unreal Tournament. It is quite a bit faster in Glide on the Voodoo2 than D3D on the TNT. The only problem is that image quality suffers on the V2 quite a bit (yes, even with both cards at 16 bit). I played a bit online yesterday and discovered that the extra FPS really make a HUGE difference in playability. I still suck at UT, but that's another issue altogether. I guess I'll stick with this combo until I can scrape the cash together for a GeForce (or find a dirt-cheap TNT2 Ultra).

Thursday, March 30, 2000

Lord British Deposed -- 6:36 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I still wonder if this is a joke, but I've seen it from too many respectible places. Word on the streets is that Richard Garriot aka Lord British, the founder of the Ultima series of games either was fired or left Origin. Gamespy got confirmation from Origin:

Richard Garriott will be leaving OSI. Richard's contribution to OSI has been great and his legacy as the creator of Ultima is a tremendous responsibility for us to inherit. There are few promoters, if any, that parallel Richard's ability in that area. As Richard and I discussed his vision of what he wanted to do, create new large properties, OSI simply could not pursue those endeavors. Wishing Richard only the best and all life has to offer as he embarks on his new challenges.

Interesting strategy when the driving forces behind your two major franchises are now gone.

Update! The Official Ultima Online page has a news blurb confirming this story. Now I've heard it all. Thanks Evil Avatar.

More UT 413 Patch Woes -- 4:53 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Epic's Steve Polge updated the Unreal Technology Page with their plans on addressing problems in D3D and elsewhere caused by the 413 patch:

Several issues with the 413 patch have been pointed out. We will have an updated patch as soon as possible to address these issues. In the meantime, if you are having D3D video performance problems, see Erik's update below. If you are having problems installing UT, or getting an error after installation that "UnrealTournament.exe is not a valid Win32 application" or "UnrealTournament.exe is too big to fit into system memory", try installing into the default directory for UT (c:UnrealTournament). Our patch installer seems to be occasionally corrupting files when installing into different directory structures. We are still working on the problems of the 413 patch not working with minimum installs, and problems patching the Spanish/Italian version of UT.

Q3A Aimbot -- 10:37 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, server admins, if you don't have your Quake III Arena server sv_pure 1, you'd best do it soon. The folks at QuakeHelp got their hands on a bona fide Aimbot that does work online. The EZ-Net server has been set to pure since day one because of things just like this. Unfortunately, it seems that there will always be lamers . . .

More S3 Rumors -- 10:23 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

This Tech-Report article asks the same musical question I posed yesterday (story): Should NVIDIA buy S3's graphic chip division? To me, it sounds like a no-brainer. Tech-Report also points out that NVIDIA moved to sell $400 million in stock today. Coincidence? Stay tuned. Thanks Shugashack.

Past Two Days' News

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