Saturday, December 9, 2000

NFL Week #15 -- 11:22 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Here's my picks for this week in the NFL: Lions, Bears, Ravens, Bucs, Panthers, Steelers, Jaguars, Titans, Eagles, Broncos, Redskins, Vikings, Saints, Raiders, Colts.

The Master comments: Eeyore's picks are: Patriots, Eagles, Lions, Titans, Chiefs, Dolphins, Giants, Jaguars, Ravens, Broncos, Redskins, Vikings, Saints, Raiders, Bills

Pondering the Imponderable -- 11:00 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, folks, I don't know how much I'll be around today. Ye olde wireless is freaking out so I'm getting the necessities done via my modem. Not too painful--as long as I don't have to download anything :) Hopefully it will be cleared up by tonight so I can smack The Master around in Q3:TA.

UPDATE! OK, that's weird. Now everything's all better. They must've gotten whatever was broken fixed. Oh well. I'll take it :) Now I can commence the planning for The Master's smack-down.

Friday, December 8, 2000

New Mech4 Demo -- 9:47 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Daily Radar got their hands on a new demo of MechWarrior 4 (68.7). It includes four mechs and allows you to play in instant action mode, but no multiplayer. It requires a PII-400, 64M RAM, and a 3D card. Of course, if I know the MechWarrior series, you'll need a lot more than that to get it to play decently. Thanks Blue.

New Threewave Site -- 9:30 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The new Threewave site is officially open for business. Threewave (headed by Zoid) came up with the first Capture-the-Flag mod for any game with its QuakeWorld version. Plans include coming out with a new Threewave Quake III CTF map pack (yes!) as well as creating standard map packs with the very best Q3A CTF maps on the Net. All of the maps will be Team Arena-ready and support the new power-ups and gametypes. This, ladies and germs, is beyond cool.

Carmack on Linux -- 4:09 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's John Carmack made a post on Slashdot giving The Official Position on why they chose not to have the Linux binary on the Quake III: Team Arena CD.:

We are going to continue to support linux in future products, but unfortunately it doesn't look like a strong business case can be made for it. The mac version outsold the linux version by quite a bit, and even that didn't hit 5% of the windows sales. Mac versions are still valid business cases, because the support is way easier than on either windows or linux platforms, and the sales numbers amount to something noticeable.

There is no way that a linux box will hit the shelf at the same time and have the same price as a windows box, assuming the publisher is making a maximum effort for the windows box. If this is truly a gating factor, linux boxed games just won't succeed.

Loki wants to get away from making games "convertable" between platforms, to force linux players to buy the linux boxes. I have issues with this. Not making executable binaries available online sucks. I hate binary patches, and requiring either patches from different versions, or the installation of all previous patches. Just releasing a new executable is so much easier.

Our options from here are to move towards a hybrid CD and pay Loki for official support (which makes linux support look like an expense, rather than a benefit), make a hybrid CD but leave the linux version in an "unsupported" directory, or just make unsupported linux executables available online like we used to.

It is going to be quite some time before DOOM ships, so we can't say anything definitive at this point.

Thanks Blue's News.

Case in point: when The Master and I bought an extra copy of Q3A to run a dedicated server with bots, we had two options. We could try to find an online dealer that had it and pay $49 for it or we could go to Best Buy or some such place and pay $25 (on sale) for the Win32 version and download the binary. Since we are on a tight budget, it was a no-brainer. As much as I want to support shrink-wrapped versions of Linux games, my pocketbook can't justify the cost difference.

NOLF Patch Released -- 1:49 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

As promised, Monolith has released a patch for No One Lives Forever. The patch is 6.44M and fixes a whole slew of bugs. You can find a list of said fixes in the NOLF Team .plan. Thanks Blue.

TradeWars Brought to the Web -- 12:03 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Back in the day, J.t.Qbe and I played a healthy (or maybe unhealthy?) amount of the BBS door game "TradeWars". Apparently someone got all nostalgic and decided to make a web-based, open-source version of the game called BlackNova Traders. I want to check it out further, but it is being thoroughly Slashdotted at the moment. Now that I think about it, I may even have a registered version of the original on a floppy somewhere. Finding it would be another issue :)

J.t.Qbe comments: How 'bout it, A.T.? Tradewars at The Haus?

A.T. Hun comments: I'd be up for it. We'll have to revisit it once the software is more stable. Brings back memories, doesn't it?

The Master comments: If there's a way to control the server, and it's configurable, I'll be happy to run it for ya :-)

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