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Blue's News report:

"ATI Cards and Battlefield 2 Demo -- In testing the demo, EA has encountered some visual issues on certain ATI cards with the previous Catalyst drivers (5.5) and are working with yesterday's 5.6 release to discover if the issue is resolved. If in playing the Battlefield 2 demo you encounter texture corruption of any kind, we recommend rolling back to the Catalyst 5.1 drivers. ATI is aware of this issue and is working to resolve it."

Sorry about that link not working. It seems to work coming from Blue's News but otherwise you hit a stupid "register" page. The only part of the page that's relevant to my post is the part that I quoted, though.

Why not there screenshots, taken from an E3 preview in 1998? The article has a Duke Nukem Forever screenshot too!

Parent fails to include release dates of the game. This relevant because I was reading Blue's News and Aspyr announced TODAY that Doom 3 had been released.

It was out on pc when? Last august? Same for the other games, they are older and were released on mac a few months (at the very least) after the pc version. Take a look at the top 10 upcoming games for pc at gamespot , and tell how many of those will be available for macs. 2 out of 10? 3 out of 10? Even 5 out of 10 wouldn't be enough.

Not good enough for even a mild cored gamer. And for the record, I wish 10/10 of these games were playable on linux, so I wouldn't have to send one cent to either MS or apple to play the games I want.

Well I don't know about a HL2 server, but for example here are the requirements for a Quake 2 server. Bare with me now...

"roughly a 486" and "about 1 meg of ram per player, i.e... 16 Megs for 16 players" so if you have 1,000 players on one server, that's about a Gig of RAM. And if a little 486 (we'll say about 100Mhz) can handle 16 players, then 1,000 players would take roughly 6.25Ghz[intel style] to handle.

Now, I know you're gonna say that's an unfair comparison, but I don't really think so. You have to take into account that a FPS is a much faster paced game and has to refresh everything probably about 10 times as quickly as an RPG would require.That was also assuming that the server is only keeping track of character coordinates, items and stats. Someone pointed out the fact that most current MMORPG's do alot more than just that to keep down cheating. This was not part of my original estimate, and I think there could be better ways to take care of such a problem.

Now, I don't know how many characters (player and non-player) are on a WoW server at once....it could possibly be up to 10,000 even...which would require 10 times the processing power of course. So, I don't think a machine with 4 opterons (roughly 16Ghz[intel] of power together) should have much trouble with this. Then again, most games have a seperate server for each "zone" and of course a seperate dedicated server for the database too.

But, then again...I did say at the end of my post that "I may be off", and then I even caluculated for if it took 3 times as much money to run. It was an approximation, an estimate, a guess.

Do they look like rock stars? No. More like 1980s rap stars. Who looks like rock stars then? Kernel hackers. OS hackers look like church music stars and hacker anthropologists look like movie stars. As you see, all of the hackers look like stars, but only kernel hackers look like rock stars, except those who look like sport stars. If you have any other "Ask Slashdot" questions, you know where to find me.

First the WoW non-story, then the Grrl Gamer non-story, now this complete and utter non-story. Seriously, Slashdot may be the news for Nerds... but it's certainly no Blue's News. Can't we just leave the gaming news stories to someone who can actually cover it?

You don't even need a subscription to tell what's coming up on Slashdot. Just check out the Evening Tech Bits section of news updates on Blue's News. Half of the items end up on Slashdot in one or two days.

In all fairness, Blue takes many articles from Slashdot as well.

This CNN story says video games calm kids before surgery, more effectively than tranquilizers or parental presence. Doctors found that allowing children a few minutes to play the games reduced their anxiety until the anesthesia took effect. Dr. Anu Patel conducted the study after noticing a friend's 7-year-old son was so absorbed with his Game Boy at a restaurant that he ignored the adults and the food at his table.

Seen on Blue's News and copied from my Web site.

...that doesn't care what this guy's system specs are or what resolution he watched it at?

Didn't we just have a nice article about game reviews? Where is the "meat" of this story?

Wouldn't it be much better to read something like this, instead:

Ant writes "Blue's News mentions a Far Cry Tech Demo/ATI & Crytek Tech Demo the showcases the capabilities of the amazing Crytek engine used to power the award-winning game, Far Cry. The tech demo is presented as a movie, called "The Project". The story is reminiscent of the 1930's adventure-serial "Cliffhangar" movie, but set in the present. I recommend everyone check it out.

There is also a video file format available for those who don't have a powerful system and/or video card."

Then again... this is Slashdot. *grin*

Half Life uses the Quake engine (albeit heavily modified):

1,2.

Do a google and you'll find others who have emailed this guy. Here's an example:

example Look for post #16

I'm figuring the exchange is real.

WOW!

Blue's News has links for the awesome introduction cutscene (DivX from World of Warcraft game. Also, FileShack (registration required; free or subscription required) has it. It is about 46.5 MB; AVI; 2 minutes and 49 seconds long).

Apple has this introduction cutscene in QuickTime format (non-saveable) as well.

The introduction was almost like watching The Lords of the Rings movies. Amazing! I can't wait for the free open beta! :)

Aspyr Media, Inc. announced today that it is bringing id Software's critically acclaimed blockbuster hit, DOOM 3, to Macintosh. The game is under development for Macintosh by id Software, and will be published by Aspyr Media, Inc.

The ruins of an ancient Martian civilization have unlocked the secrets to teleportation and the Union Aerospace Corporation will stop at nothing to harness this world-altering technology. As part of a Marine detachment sent to protect the facility, your duty seemed simple enough until the invasion. Now, in an epic clash against pure evil you must fight to understand who is with you, who is against you, and what must be done to stop this nightmare from reaching earth.

"DOOM 3 has instantly become a must have title for any game fan, and were thrilled to be working with Aspyr in bringing this landmark game to the Macintosh," said Todd Hollenshead, CEO, id Software. "Now, Macintosh owners can experience for themselves the unparalleled combination of bleeding-edge technology and edge-of-your-seat gameplay that critics and fans are raving about."

DOOM 3's dramatic storyline, pulse-pounding action, and incredible graphics, combine to produce the most frightening and gripping gaming experience ever created. DOOM 3 utilizes id Software's revolutionary new 3D graphics engine to create disturbingly realistic graphics, with never before seen detail and real-time lighting. Players can fight the forces of evil as a lone marine or battle other marines in team or deathmatch-based multiplayer modes.

The game is rated "M" for "Mature" by the ESRB and is available for preorder at www.aspyr.com for $49.99. For more information, fans can visit www.doom3.com or http://www.aspyr.com/games.php/mac/d3/.

See Blue's News (direct link to Blizzard's forum thread). Don't trust anyone's words on release dates except Blizzard's.

So I'll do a quick recap:

Needless to say, many more sources are reporting this already.

But to strip it down to the basics, just in case all these sites get slashdotted - it's officially gone gold (Vivendi Press Release), and it's coming out on the 16th November. Book the day off work Now!

The ECE torrent is available, alongside direct downloads provided by BeyondUnreal.

Not clear enough? How about this from Blue's News?

The pack is an 84 MB download, available on 3D Gamers, FileFront, and GameSpot DLX (registration required), Gameguru Mania, Gamer's Hell, Game's Fusion, Tiscali Games, and Worthplaying.

As seen on Blues News a new demo for UT2k4 has also been released, basically the same as the old one with some engine updates and a few extra maps.

FYI 3d Gamers always has a torrent up of the files it mirrors.

it's a court battle that won't even start before HL2 is released (if it's released soon...)...

Also, they've already said they are releasing it on Steam regardless of this case.

read here for more:
article on bluesnews.com

I knew this was a dupe, just not from /. This was first posted on June 24, 2003 on Blue's News. The original eBay posting has now expired, but I remember that it was the same auction. Either it didn't sell last time, or the owner has tried this phishing expedition before. ;-) I'll reserve judgement.

This is the first time I have ever heard of a small site that was able to sucessfully defend itself from a slashdotting, due to an early warning.

I'm sure the guy had fair warning. It was on Blue's News earlier today, and I'm sure all of the other gaming sites picked up on it well before Slashdot.

A guy over a Bluesnews came up with the perfect way to make your own Doom 3! And save the money!:

For all of you that have yet to buy the game, you can easily recreate it: Go in your living room around midnight, pull all the blinds down. Buy a two dollar flashlight and stand in the center of your living room. Have your friends quietly walk around you, every once in a while yelling in your ear and punching you in the face. You can punch back, but you have to shut the light off first. There yah go, all kinds of money saved.

And of course, another nice quote from the story posted on Blues News:

As for the link between Manhunt and the crime, the police are clear. Pooni said: "We haven't connected the game with the murder and we've already made that statement, but some sections of the media chose to ignore it...the motive was robbery."

Here is a very extensive list of mirrors courtesy of Blue's News.

3D Gamers, ActionTrip, Computer Games Online, Doom3.de, Doom3Maps.de, FilePlanet (registration required), FileShack (registration required), Fragland.net, Gamer's Depot, Gamer's Hell, GameSpot (streaming for free), GameSpot DLX (registration required), Gamehelper, Gaming Horizon, GenGamers, OzForces,, Yahoo! Games Domain

Couldn't post as a list because "Your comment has too few characters per line"

"The NV30 runs the ARB2 path MUCH slower than the NV30 path. Half the speed at the moment. This is unfortunate, because when you do an exact, apples-to-apples comparison using exactly the same API, the R300 looks twice as fast, but when you use the vendor-specific paths, the NV30 wins."

"The reason for this is that ATI does everything at high precision all the time, while Nvidia internally supports three different precisions with different performances"

So basically, Nvidia's cards can cut a few corners, with minimum, if any, visual impact, while ATi's cards can't, even with optimised code path.
Basically, Nvidia screws up when it comes down to standard ARB2 code path, but it does so well with their own path that developers have to code it, and Nvidia gives them a lot of support. It looks like a fair deal to me.

According to Todd Hollenshead's plan file : Mac and Linux: Unfortunately I don't have dates for either of these. However, Linux binaries will be available very soon after the PC game hits store shelves. There are no plans for boxed Linux games. More remains to be done for the OSX version of DOOM 3 and that will take some time. We won't release the OSX version until it's just as polished as the PC version. The date for OSX DOOM 3 remains "when it's done", but I can confirm that it's definitely coming. Here's a link to the plan at Blues http://www.bluesnews.com/plans/6/

Here, go pound this web server: Todd Hollenshead's .plan on Blue's News.

See here.

Blue's News always has more gaming news than you can read in a day (but you should still try!), including slashdot-friendly summarizations of the proceedings. E3 Insider is the "official virtual gateway" to E3 that started I believe last year. I don't know to what extent the coverage will be, but its got more of a marketing feel to it so take that for what its worth.

Doom 3 will use the latest and greatest pixel shading technology to the fullest extent. You might consult John Carmack's somewhat old .plan file where he suggests the ATi ~9800 line of cards fall short of being able to run the number of long and complex shader programs he wants to use. ID is partnered with Nvidia on Doom 3, which suggests they aren't going to pull punches on shader length for ATi compatability. Not saying it won't run on ATi, just saying it might not run all the shaders or might use an alternate yet inferior set of shaders. As for the capabilities of the X800 it seems most sources suspect it's the same core as the ~9800's so the shader capabilities (Pixel Shader 2.0 instead of the newer 3.0 support) should be the same although I can't verify that.

That said, Nvidia has been taking some shit for inferior image quality and speed. That said, Doom3 will run fastest and maybe prettiest on the X800, it just might not run will all the effects enabled that the Geforce FX+ cards will.

I am a hardcore PC gamer and live in L.A. area. Sheesh, I submit a lot of stories to Blue's News, slashdot, etc. and I still haven't been to ONE. I know people who aren't hardcore gamers were still able to go.

Ugh! I must be a bad luck. :(

Didn't he shun ATI for having crappy OpenGL? Futhermore, how do you explain this

Doesn iD use OpenGL, not the Direct3D crap anyway?

2 - Halo is fill rate limited because Bungie did an outstanding job of using the specialized pixel shader hardware on the Xbox.

For a decent example, see BluesNews.com (Under the "customize" header, left-hand side).

This way you can default to the fancy bells-and-whistles layout, but offer an alternate, plain-jane for those who prefer it (or really, as many different styles as you feel like maintaining).

BTW, have you heard about the sequel to KOTOR? According to the Blue's News editorial it will be based in the Episode II timeframe. There is a chance we will see Natalie Portman (petrified, if you have an old video card), covered in hot graphical grits!!!!

My favorite gaming news site, Blue's News, has advertisements from UGO that has advertisements with women as well. Same with IGN. It is not just the hardcopy magazines.

Why doesn't someone just register a generic Slashdot account? Like username: slashdot and password: slashdot. Over at bluesnews someone registered a generic bluesnews account in that kind of way so that everyone could just log in using that to read the articles.

Here is what I wrote on Blue's News (post #30):

This game is very cool. I wasn't expecting much, but wow. Did anyone figure out what the card thing do? I totally loved that Guardian level. I love how the whole map changes and being thrown in the air is fun! Weee!!! The demo is also long. I think I played it for two hours straight! Small demo size and a very long fun demo. Very impressive.

I don't think I will get the full version since it is a mindless shooting game and I have OTHER games to play, but it is fun like Serious Sam and DOOM games.

Will there be a multiplayer demo with co-op. soon?

Post #31 in Link: "Icculus (Ryan Gordon, the guy doing the ports) said Linux and OSX demos should become available within a few hours of the Win32 release."

Version 1.01 was available through phone and mail orders, and then on a shareware CD-Rom. Players needed to purchase the CD-Rom and then call id to receive an alphanumeric code that would "unlock" the shareware CD-Rom and install the full version of Quake. Purchasers could also then order a full version of the Quake on an "unlocked" CD-Rom for an additional amount.

1.) Rerelease the game, either solo or as part of a collection. Not exactly gamer-friendly, but at least the company is showing that they do have a legitimate use for their older titles.

2.) Authorize free download of it. This is the course that Rockstar and several other companies have taken, and it's worked wonders. Having a chance to play games like Grand Theft Auto and Hidden and Dangerous again for free is a great thing for us gamers.

This is the best way to combat abandonware - take it into your own hands. Makes gamers happy, great positive publicity, another use for those older titles...what more could a game publisher ask for?

The quote about Fallout 3 is actually from Blue's News.

Blue's News

Exactly. Here are the information filters I use :

Movies: Word of mouth.

Books: Word of mouth.

News: Call me old fashioned, but I subscribe to quality newspapers and magazines. For net news, I use their websites, Google News and for "niche" news, /., Blue's News and The Onion.

Music: Word of mouth.

I'm not one of those "All RIAA music sucks now!" cookies, there is still some major label music which is good, and I mostly hear about it through word of mouth!

Ads (aka: mental engineering): Mozilla Firebird blocks popups and I really don't mind spam. Also, I don't trust filters, I don't want to miss anything important. And guess what, some ads on the web are actually worth clicking.

Cheap Products: Word of mouth!

Oh, and both Mulholland Drive and The Matrix Revolutions are great movies. But it isn't any reviewer's opinion that made me think that, or go see them in the first place.

Well, just from reading the 80+ comments on Blue's News, I'd say the initial feedback is overwhelmingly negative. Some of the issues people have with it can apparently be fixed by tweaking the .ini files (One entry contained a comment saying the current value was for the X-box, not the PC, and offered an alternate value. Why this wasn't set as the default, I have no idea.). Some changes apparently aren't sticking though as the .ini files are installed as read-only (which can of course be changed). It will be interesting to see what Ion Storm has to say about this.

iD released a win32/OpenGL version of quake as unsupported, though free, software a couple of years after the original, called GLQuake.

Ehh... Carmack isn't developing Doom3 on MacOS. He has been pretty vocal about his love for Visual Studio 6.

I'm considering getting a G5 for game development. I'm currently running a small dev team that is gearing up for work on a DooM 3 total conversion. My question is, Mac gamers, how hard is it going to be to compile DooM 3 on OS X 10.3 Panther, compared to PC? What are the roadblocks for PC-centric guys like myself? Are there any good tutorial sites for gamers like myself who want to switch ?

I figure, if John Carmack is coding DooM 3 on a Mac, then it must be all that, right?

Here's the official announcement mirrored at Blue's News.

One line that intrigued me:
A radically revised rendering engine that gives "Freedom Force" a look torn right out of the comic book pages.
Are they moving to cel-shaded rendering? At least it's more than just a novelty in this case. Although I think it would be kind of cool if they'd tried to do a kind of 50s TV look as well - just to distinguish it from the multitude of cel-shaded games already).

I think this is great news! When I saw this over at Blues News I was very excited. Freedom Force was a great game on so many levels. It was a hell of a lot of fun, the script was hilarious right from the opening sequence, and it was just such an original take on the strategy genre.

The "Dirty Commi Bastard" humour was very amusing (even to an Aussie), so I can see the Third Reich angle being an easy target for them. I hope they bring back the same characters.

Also, it wasn't just an article, it was a series of articles. I'm at work (posting on /. rather than writing code ... bad coder, no donut), so I don't have my DDJ collection here (and their site seems not be be responding for the moment), but I think these are the same basic content. This is another page with links to his stuff, but it is a bit out of date. For instance, I believe he's moved on from MicroSoft (though I can't be botherd to check on that ... what d'ya want for nuthin?).