Saturday, August 5, 2000

Carmack@QuakeCon -- 5:05 pm CST, Update by The Master

sCary went to the Carmack lecture held at QuakeCon, and here's what he got from it. Good stuff:

• Doom will be going back to DLLs, and will be using C++ (except for rendering code) instead of C. Ed: Will be interesting to see what happens of this. Carmack has never been a C++ fan since C always did the job. This is quite a change for id programming.
• Carmack feels the visual 'wow factor' of the new Doom will be a greater jump than it was from the recent jumps between Quake/Quake2/Quake3. (Lots of neeto new effects), but it will also focus on actual gameplay instead of just that 'wow factor'
• Single player is the absolute focus, and Carmack feels it will be their best single player experience to date.
• The game and editor/tools are now combined. You'll be able to simply type doom.exe -editor for example (Or maybe even an in-game toggle)
• Spending more time on the sound code / game code with the new programmers on the team. Ed: Good news here as well. The sound code used by all the Q(x) games was the original Q1 sound code (with tweaks, of course) and it's about time id got away from .wavs.
• There probably wont be much discussion on the gameplay specifics since what made Doom so big is always a subject of arguments. (No talking about the game itself)
• All of the Doom code is being written from scratch. Rendering etc.
• It comes out in 2 years. (Maybe 3, maybe 1.5) Ed: sCary wrote weeks, I KNOW that's wrong.

PlanetQuake has a much more detailed version of the above bullets here.

Thief license now belongs to Ion Austin -- 5:02 pm CST, Update by The Master

According to a Looking Glass forums post, the Thief license, source code, and art are now owned by Ion Storm Austin. This is very good news for Thief fans, since I personally think Mr. Spector is a fine game designer to have on your side, especially when not so long ago it looked like the end was guarenteed. Thanks JCal of Stomped.

Newer Beta UT D3D DLL -- 9:46 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Unreal Technology page has word of a new beta Direct3D .DLL for you folks who are having D3D problems with the 425 patch for Unreal Tournament. This patch must've really blown things up, judging from this comment:

We plan to quickly address any performance, networking, and editor issues people may have with version 425 in an upcoming patch.

Oops.

Friday, August 4, 2000

Carmack interview -- 11:00 pm CST, Update by The Master

Stomped has got a great interview with John Carmack online. Check it out, good stuff abounds.

Goodnight Diamond -- 10:54 pm CST, Update by The Master

According to this press release, S3 has closed their Diamond Multimedia division, to focus on the Rio product line.

So, okay, S3 has dumped their graphics business, pulled the plug on board design and manufacture, and is left with the Rio MP3 player, and nothing else. Wow, I'm impressed. S3 is dead. They have nothing left to offer, especially now that there's 4 million companies offering players cheaper with more RAM nowadays.

A.T. Hun comments: <SARCASM> I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Diamond for their excellent driver support throughout the years </SARCASM>

Some Shogo News -- 9:25 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I just made my every-so-often sweep through the Planet Shogo forums and saw some posts from Sspeare, the author of the Squishie (Man vs. Mecha) mod for Shogo. Squishie is my favorite mod for ANY game. He asked about what it would take to get people playing Shogo again, since he now works for LithTech. I posted and emailed him begging him to update Squishie to work with the Shogo 2.2 patch. I hope he takes me up on it. Of course, then I probably wouldn't have any time to post news! (not that I've done much of that today)

Rumours -- 3:43 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

In the wake of A.T. Hun's apparent abduction by aliens (good luck, A.T.), I've been searching the web for interesting news so that we publish something today. However, it's apparently a slow news day everywhere. So, it's time to start publishing rumors!
While skimming through comp.os.vms, I ran across a post which claimed that the longest uptime for a VMS system is the system which runs Ireland's railroad switching system. The system has reportedly been running since 1983 with no crashes or reboots. Yes, that's 17 years--longer than I've been using IBM-type PCs. Unbelievable? Well, maybe for an Intel/Micro$oft system (we have an NT server which is rebooted every morning to avoid a certain crash), but life is different in the VAX/VMS world. Now THAT'S stable! (And I'll be trying to verify this rumor--stay tuned. . .)

A.T. Hun comments: Nope, no aliens. I checked the news this morning and there was nothing worth reporting (still isn't) so my family and I went out of town for the day.

Past Two Days' News

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