Saturday, February 22, 2003

Titanium Mod Resurrected -- 8:43 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Phillip Marcus aka ]R[ Gauss emailed to tell us that they have restarted work on their Titanium mod for Quake III. Here's what he had to say:

www.reactivesoftware.com is live, and titanium.reactivesoftware.com site will be up soon. We've just finished updating the source code to Q3 1.32, and a full team of 15 is working on it again now, including the original three programmers, and me, the designer.

In case you don't know what this mod is all about, check out Wraith's review of an earlier version. You'll definitely want to keep your eyes on this one.

Rhode Island Club Fire -- 7:58 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I was just reading Melodic Rock about the fire yesterday at a Rhode Island club where Great White was performing. They have a link with RealPlayer footage from someone who was at the concert with a video camera. Some of the reports are beyond disturbing. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the literally hundreds of families who lost a loved one or had one seriously injured in the blaze.

I know that this isn't typical Haus material, but I like to follow the bands I listened to in my younger days. This absolutely defies description.

UT2K3 Bonus Pack News -- 1:13 pm CST, Update by The Master

There's a blurb from Steve Polge in this Infogames forum thread discussing the delay on the Unreal Tournament 2003 bonus pack release. Here ya go:

A lot of unexpected issues have come up that have delayed the release of the bonus pack. We had to release patch 2186 before the bonuspack, because the bonuspack relies on some functionality added in 2186. Testing and releasing that patch took a little longer than expected. Then, we had to make a new version for Germany to satisfy the German requirements to avoid having the game "indexed". After that, we had to make another patch (2199) to address the server exploits that were published.

We've been working on the bonus pack at the same time as these other things, but they have certainly been a distraction, and we are a small company. These other items in particular took testing resources away from the bonuspack.

We never promised a release date for the bonus pack- just estimates, and certainly its taken longer than we expected. We are still testing and fixing bugs for the bonus pack. Providing estimates for a release date is dangerous, because I'll be accused of lying if we don't make that date (I'm not sure what our motivation for taking longer than needed would be, though).

A.T. Hun comments: In a related story, J and I played some bombing run in UT2K3 last night. I hosted and he joined. A good time was had by all. We experimented quite a bit with the link gun and found its linking feature to be tremendously entertaining.

Friday, February 21, 2003

Freelancer Demo Released . . . Sort Of -- 3:29 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Microsoft and Digital Anvil have released a demo of their much-anticipated space sim Freelancer. Unfortunately, you need to be a FilePlanet subscriber (not just registered) to download it. The Lancers Reactor is reporting that the demo will be available for us plebians on Monday. From the comments I've read so far, this move is earning intense hatred for FilePlanet.

M$ SQL Customers Face License Fees? -- 9:29 am CST, Update by The Master

There's a story up over on The Register discussing the possibility of royalty payments from Microsoft customers using Microsoft SQL Server to a company that Microsoft licensed patents from. Here's an ugly case of patent law rearing it's ugly head.

So, when are all of these stupid software patent laws going to finally get shot down?

J.t.Qbe comments: About the same time all the stupid tort laws get shot down. It's getting ridiculous. In my book, SCO's tinking with the idea of trying to enforce patents on Unix is about a ridiculous as it gets. So far. Do patent claims finally have to kill the computer industry completely before something is changed?

The Master comments: Most of the stuff surrounding the SCO issue has to do with people putting OpenServer libraries on Linux so they can run OpenServer software. I can see the complaint in that. But I have heard they're talking about other parts of their patent portfolio, which makes for a completely different story. On patents (quoting Michael Abrash): "The idea of software patents is precisely that eventually eveyone will own parts of our communal knowledge base, and that programming will become in large part a process of properly identifying and compensating each and every owner of the techniques you use. All I can say is that if we do go down that path, I guarentee that it will be a poorer profession for all of us--except the patent attorneys, I guess."

A.T. Hun comments: Actually, M$ knew what they were getting into. Either a) somebody screwed up royally, or b) they lied through their teeth. I suppose people could always move to MySQL :). At any rate, this case will be moot. Microsoft will either tie this up in court forever or use some of their vast supplies of cash to buy the company outright.

No Old News

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