Slashdot Mirror

Games matter. Instead of wasting time, I suggest you go to www.gamespot.com and take a good long look at the list(s) of games of each console, read the unbiased reviews, stare at pictures and movies, and then decide which console is coolest.

You're right, games domatter. However, I disagree with your suggestion for Gamespot as a useful source of information. They are very much biased towards the Playstation 2, to the detriment of both the Gamecube and the XBox. Yes, I know that pretty much any site is going to be biased, but Gamespot takes it to an extreme, to the point where their XBox reviews consistently rate 1.5-3 points lower than reviews on other web sites. Maybe they're just "telling it how it is", but when the reader reviews on Gamespot actually line up well with the editorial reviews of other web sites, you get a little suspicious ...

Sadly, I can't really recommend any better place, as most of the major gaming networks have gone the way of the dodo, or at least made most of their content subscription-only. What I do is keep my eye on Blue's News, which is mainly PC gaming but covers console gaming as well. Typically, you'll find links to better reviews than Gamespot reviews at Blue's. Otherwise, go to your local Blockbuster, rent a console and a couple games. Give it a spin for a week for $20 (console and a couple games), see if it's worth spending $300+.

it does have a hidden team deathmatch feature. You can read the details on Blue's News. :)

I wished the company released a team play option because Return to Castle Wolfenstein (RTCW) looked like a winner with its team based option. I wasn't expecting it to be that good. I couldn't conclude if RTCW is a winner since I haven't tried MoH:AA's single player and teamplay multiplayer yet.

It basically contains a Makefile which uses Wine to run the Win32 versions of the tools. The README has more information on my experiences with it (some of the web links are down now, though). This was before the 1.17 point release for Linux but it should still be able to run the latest Win32 tools.

BTW, I think versions of GtkRadiant have the Linux Q3A SDK 1.1 in the package. E.g., see this link: (search for SDK at planetquake.com and linuxgames.com): FilePlanet mirror.

One thing to note is that the 1.2x SDK release broke mod compatibility, so running the old native Linux SDK tools will produce code that runs only in pre-1.17 Q3A. It may be better off to use Wine to run the latest Win32 tools so that your mods can run on the latest Q3A. And bug Timothee of GtkRadiant to release the updated SDK for Linux.

Hope this helps,

Y.

If these don't help you, drop me a line at terabaap@yumpee.org and I'll see if I can dig out the files ...

Y.

Welcome to weblogs.

I too am interested in a Single Player Linux binary. Multiplayer on a dialup isn't much fun. I asked this same question on Blue's, and one of the commenters said they were planning one, but I don't know how much he knows:

Blue's Comment Section

A list of one-time and recurring LAN parties is available Blue's News. Notice something weird about it?

Yup. There's no regular LAN party in the San Francisco Bay Area. (BANGG (Bay Area Network Gaming Group) appears to have gone quiescent.) Anyone out there know of recurring LAN parties on or near the SF peninsula?

Schwab

A list of one-time and recurring LAN parties is available Blue's News. Notice something weird about it?

Yup. There's no regular LAN party in the San Francisco Bay Area. (BANGG (Bay Area Network Gaming Group) appears to have gone quiescent.) Anyone out there know of recurring LAN parties on or near the SF peninsula?

Schwab

Okay, I know it's socially popular now to bash /. for, well, slashdotting sites, but really, is it seriously /.'s job to check that any site it dares link to has lots of bandwidth?

Shouldn't a company as big and popular as iD have bigger servers anyway? Isn't it their responsibility to ensure they've got the capacity to dispense their product to everyone who wants it? Shouldn't they be in charge of distributing it to mirrors first if they don't think they can hack it?

What about other news sites? Should Blue's News not post links to this file? It's a Quake news site, so it seems appropriate.

Quitcher whining, get a decent proggie (like wget) that can try a site every few minutes and auto-resume downloads, and wait in line like everyone else.

http://www.bluesnews.com/files/idstuff/wolf/linux/ wolfmptest-nomedia-0.7.16-1.shtml
http://www.bluesnews.com/files/idstuff/wolf/linux/ wolfmptest-0.7.16-1.shtml

http://www.bluesnews.com/files/idstuff/wolf/linux/ wolfmptest-nomedia-0.7.16-1.shtml
http://www.bluesnews.com/files/idstuff/wolf/linux/ wolfmptest-0.7.16-1.shtml

Gamespot have the WRONG version of the Wolfenstein test. Their version is an older version so you should download it from either Fileplanet, Bluesnews or 3D Gamers.

Pick up any tech publication these days, and you'll see this kind of thing. If you really want to see it, though, you should check out the gaming rags.

GamePro is a good one to check if you want to see the antithesis of reporting. They put out a magazine full of screenshots and one or two paragraph previews and reviews. EGM at least tries for some content. (Even if it is very industry-praising.)

In the PC market, if you want to see some really kiss-ass writing, grab any recent copy of PC Gamer. First, check the advertiser's index, and count the number of reviews for each company. Then check the review scores for said companies. See a correlation?

These online "breaking news" sites aren't much better. Blue's News , for instance, is a good place to go if you want to check out the current state of the gaming industry's PR department. I mean really, how many screenshots and developer's journals do they have to pump out before we finally get the point that oh, hey, they might actually be working on that game.. Anyone remember those Tribes 2 screenshots?

Speaking of screenshots, if I see one more "exclusive," I think I'm gonna puke.

VoodooExtreme 's not much better, but at least they don't have ads all over the place.. and they filter out most of the "we just fixed another bug" crap.

Ah well.. c'est la vie..

The future is now.

You should take a look at Red Faction. The game is already out for Playstation2, but a demo is out for PC aswell. It allows true random carnage to the worlds geometry, and it is something to behold. The most impressive part is how rocks collapse when the last support is blasted away.
The game itself looks and feels a bit like Half-Life, except it takes place on Mars, with the movie Total Recall as an obvious inspiration.

TechTVs History of the First-Person Shooter
Blue's News FPS Guide and History
First Person Shooters
MediaPipes History of the First Person Shooter
3D Action Planets History of the FPS Shooter.

Also, here's a link to Spasism that claims to be the first First-Person Shooter 3D multiplayer networked game, circa 1974!.

If anything, you could say Doom was the first game to show that the PC could now be considered a serious games playing machine.

liB

It appears that Pearl Harbor has been badly received by critics. "Not since Battlefield Earth have critics gotten so creative when bashing a movie." ObCredit: BluesNews.

Alex Bischoff

Metabyte tried this exact same thing back in the days of the Voodoo2. The community blew a collective nut, Metabyte pulled the drivers and they never left the underground. I imagine the same thing will happen again.

Metabyte tried this exact same thing back in the days of the Voodoo2. The community blew a collective nut, Metabyte pulled the drivers and they never left the underground. I imagine the same thing will happen again.

Metabyte tried this exact same thing back in the days of the Voodoo2. The community blew a collective nut, Metabyte pulled the drivers and they never left the underground. I imagine the same thing will happen again.

• Gamers.com - Not too much info nowadays (they got bit too)
  
• The GIA - Fairly good coverage of major events. Very review and gameplay heavy, rather than industry news.
  
• Gamasutra - Industry news in a simple format, though more finance and 3rd party tools related
  
• FGN Online - Pretty good coverage. It's now an IGN affiliate.
  
• SegaDojo - Fairly good SEGA related coverage
  
• MS Xbox - For the people who can get past the fact that Microsoft might just have a kick ass gaming machine
  
• Final Fantasy Online - For any Final Fantasy freak. The site's down at the moment, though
  
• IGN Games - Coverage of anything and everything in gaming
  
• GameSpot - Okay, so it's GameSpot. At least they publish all their media in downloadable MPEGs
  
• Core Magazine - All the random things that other people don't cover, including interviews and stuff straight from Japan.
  
• US Famitsu - Currently down, with no plans of coming back up, but it's the US branch of the standard gaming press in Japan - Famitsu
  
• Stomped - Lots of coverage of gaming in general, with some focus on FPS.
  
• Blue's News - Blue keeps going, and it's always focused on FPS for the most part.
  
• OMM - And of course, Old Man Murray.
  

sCary's renamed Shugashack (now ShackNews) is still around.

As is Blue's News

The 3D maze was in Excel 95. The flight sim is in Excel 97.

They can be found in the archived /. at http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/01/1424204.shtm l

and in the Easter Egg Archive.

Heheh. Everyone time Easter Eggs comes up, I remember the ones back in Need For Speed (PSX).

Mine was this one: Players can only enter names with that a maximum 8 chars. I was a little annoyed that my name wouldn't fit, so I had the name entry screen automatically append the "I" when you entered in my last name.

And I remember the day Dave (fiziks guy) put in the machine gun cheat. Lost productivity that day :)

Now only if we could find that nude cheat in Dungeon Keeper. :) (Hey, Peter Molyneux said no one found it, at last years GDC talk or at Blue's new's link)

http://www.bluesnews.com/abrash/

http://www.bluesnews.com/plans/1/

Carmack has quite a bit to say on the subject as this .plan update is rather long (a little too long for a /. comment I think).

From Blue's News

There's a video of the event showing some of Doom 3 (as well as other info about the new card) on Cnet. I followed the link from bluesnews.com. I'd paste it here but the URL is quite large. Anyway, very impressive.

Crack Falls Down [2:03 AM EDT] The official announcement that Dave Taylor mentioned in an earlier .plan update of what's up with Crack and the Golgotha source has worked its way through the net. On the subject of the source, a later .plan update points out, "To those of you grabbing the source, you only need golgotha_src.zip to get started. Also, we goofed on the music name, it's "Helsinki, Finland", not "Helsinki, Sweden". *blush*" Here's the whole sad tale, told in good spirits:

WHAT: Crack dot Com is closing its doors.

WHY: Ran out of cash.

REALLY WHY: Lot of reasons, but then again, there are a lot of reasons that we got as far as we did. I think the killer reason, though, was that Golgotha was compared by publishers primarily to Battlezone and Uprising, and those titles sold really poorly.

WHAT NOW?: Now we file articles of dissolution w/ the secretary of state, and we file bankruptcy.

IS THAT IT?!: No.

WHAT ELSE?: We're releasing the Golgotha source code, and data to the public domain.

HELL YES! WHERE'S THE SOURCE CODE?: I want to personally thank everyone who supported & rooted for us. That was really nice of you.

YEAH YEAH, BLAH BLAH, WHERE'S THE SOURCE?: I want to apologize to the fans and business partners we've let down.

BOO HOO! WE CARE. OUT WITH IT!: Thanks for your patience. The source & data can be found at http://www.crack.com/golgotha_release. And of course, the ex-Crack developers are up to new & interesting things which you can follow at the web site.

WAIT A MINUTE. IS THIS STUFF FREE BECAUSE IT SUCKS?: No. Even if you thought the code sucked, there are 15 gorgeous pieces of music, 100 cool sound effects, and over 2000 hi-resolution textures. But trust me, even the code is cool. It's an ultra-modular outdoor 3D engine, and it does WAY more than Battlezone or Uprising even came close to. Check out the features page. You should definitely check it out if you've ever wanted a public domain, competetive, outdoor 3D engine.

THANKS!: Welcome. Have a happy.

Check this out:

Infantry Q&A

Infantry Q&A [loonyboi-12:42 AM EDT] - Post a Comment
GameAddicts has conducted an interview with Jeff Peterson, the lead programmer and co-owner of Harmless Games, the developers of Subspace and the upcoming game Infantry. The game was originally supposed to be funded and published by Brainscan, which is part of the Maximum Holdings, which was purchased by GameFan, which was purchased by Express.com (phew). With the recent turmoil at GameFan, Jeff says the publishing rights have been sold to another company, who will be making an announcement in the near future.
--

Yes, you are right. I got passes mixed up. Yet I am sure that by the time Xbox hits the streets there will be a NVidia chipset for PCs that does eight textures per pass. Or sixteen, whatever. It seems hardcore gamers will pay anything, so the race isn't gonna slow down any soon.

30 texture passes would give renderman-like quality? hmm... Time to go hit Google.

Mark Peercy of SGI has shown, quite surprisingly, that all Renderman surface
shaders can be decomposed into multi-pass graphics operations if two
extensions are provided over basic OpenGL [...] It may take hundreds or thousands of passes, but it clearly defines an approach with no fundamental limits.

I would appreciate it if you could provide the URL where Carmack says 30 will do. That is only 1.5 generatios away from 4! (well, 3 really ;).

(Personally I think this needs far more coverage than just a slashback, guys)

Apache has started that Voodoo Extreme (the link probably won't work :P) would return in full force in the coming days. They had already started to move before the plug was pulled. The VE staff are taking a few days vacation before they go back with their new host, who though unmentioned is receiving high praises.

By all accounts it sounds like GameFan was collapsing rapidly and it's amazing they lasted as long as they did. Something shady was going on with advertising revenue. Many people have stated that since moving to new hosts they've gotten almost 50% more click-through/hit revenue than what Gamefan was showing them.

What concerns me is that this is not going to be the last network to fall by any means. UGO and IGN BOTH sound like they're in for a very tough year, and to me this is going really raise questions about the profitability of internet-only content. Wired, CNN, WSJ, NYT, and hell even /., are all able to stay very much alive because of real world counterparts in other media (or just plain ol' big bucks hoping to diversify). Do the online portions, despite the large readership, actually provide profit at all? Would you pay for Blue's? sCary's?

Someone is going to have to come up with a better answer for online-only content distribution, and this year is going to prove it.

- Spiff

Michael's been pimping the X-Box for a while now, as described in this slashdot article from July.

Of course, Michael's a pretty famous programmer, who wrote Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book and Zen of Code Optimization, as well as A great series of articles for Dr. Dobb's. But I hope that slashdot doesn't just post EVERY little thing he says something about the Xbox, since that's apparently his job now.

This is something that I'd expect over at BluesNews, not /.

I'm not sure what the rush to get this out the door for the Win clients was. Most people weren't expecting mush from id until closer to the Team Arena laung, right?>

I think a better idea would have been to hold off on any release until the source & multi-platform builds were ALL ready. That way you don't have the Linux/Mac crowd upset for not releasing anything; the Win crowd upset for releasing an upgrade that screws with the mods in ways that the mod builders can't do anything about. Talk about not being able to see the forest from the trees!

Graeme Devine (Designer / Project Manager) says he "thought we'd never get this out the door!" (.plan). Maybe waiting would have been prudent. Also, "Because we've added so much I think we're going to call this a "Public Beta".": do you think or do you know? Which is it?

Well, I hadn't run thru single-player in a while. Guess this was the chance I was looking for?

Can be found on Blues News here.

<AOL> Me Too! </AOL>

I listen to NPR on the way to work and home, because the short little "this program brought to you by FooCompany, makers of business to business software" is WAY, WAY less irritating than the advertising on other channels. And they have interesting stuff - I've bought CD's from musicians I've heard on NPR, and found out interesting stuff about the recent party conventions.

And the rest of my news I get from the net - Slashdot, Blues News, Wired News, CBC (Canadian non-corporate news) and CNN.com.

The critical thing about on-line news is I can quickly scan the headlines, ignore the ads, and only read the stuff I care about.

When you get used to that, watching news on TV is just intolerable, both for the astoundingly stupid and annoying ads that make you wait until they end, and even more importantly, the lack of a fast forward button to skip the retarded "human interest" stories that are irrelevent filler.

Watching TV news is like watching a stupid person web surfing. It's painful.


Torrey Hoffman (Azog)

What you say in your post about the development of Unreal is certainly true. It took way too long and was riddled with bugs upon release. You stop short however of explaining what happened after Unreal's release--something that is likely to happen to Mozilla.

I was one of those people who watched Unreal's release carefully. What happened when Epic shipped a program that was unplayable over the internet and ridden with various bugs in single player was that it killed the Unreal community. For all of the copies sold that first couple weeks, all of the mods announced for the game, how many saw the light of day and were played consistently? Not many, and certainly not anywhere near the number of the game series Unreal was supposed to replace, Quake. I remember watching as Bluesnews exploded with announcements, and then became a wasteland of Unreal information.

What remained, from what I saw, was alot of bitterness and unhappy people when it came to their thoughts about Epic. I for one uninstalled my copy of Unreal and placed it on the shelf. It was only recently that I reinstalled the game, added the needed patches, and then began to play it. I was glad I did, but the game I played should have been available from Day 1. It wasn't however. It has only been recently that Epic has managed to return to favor with the game-buying public because of Unreal Tournament, although they still have yet to receive any of my money. In contrast, I had Q3A on pre-order.

Let's look at another game that fits this ananlogy: Daikatana. It too spent several years in development and upon released was also riddled with bugs. This includes at least one bug that makes it impossible to finish the game. What has this done to the public's opinion about Ion Storm? Killed it. The Daikatana community is, like Unreal's, non-existant. In my estimation it has also cost other games that have been released under the Ion Storm mantle sales. Deus Ex, a very good game, hasn't broken into the Top 20 in sales.

So what does history tell us? That perhaps these two pojects should have been aborted. During their development maybe someone should have done what suck.com is doing here for Mozilla: calling for a mercy killing. There is a certain point when continued development does more harm than good. If Mozilla uses the development of Unreal and Daikatana as a guide, that's certainly true.

Vortex of Sound has obtained a letter from Oakland's Bankruptcy Court that seems to suggest that Guillemot wishes to purchase what's left of Aureal, the beleaguered audio hardware company. If it goes through, this wouldn't be the first time Guillemot bailed out a company in danger of going under - they previously purchased Hercules and Thrustmaster.

-------

http://www.vortexofsound.com/news.htm

is the URL.. but I got a DNS lookup fail :-\

RB

Maybe this will help clear it up for you on how hard it is to add MP support for Mac... This is from Graeme Devine's plan file from July 24:
"I'll be adding the SMP support into Q3A and shipping a build off to Apple today"
Hmm, adding it in and shipping it the same day... doesn't sound too hard if you ask me. if you wanna check out the whole .plan, click here

Here is one of the .plan anouncements that first pointed to it, and
here are a few pictures of the actual machine.

Being born outside of America and only having been here for a few years, the amount of violence in American entertainment from music and movies to video games and television has left me stunned.

In a country were the average youth (especially minorities) is disenfranchised, ignored by their parents and has easy access to mind altering substances it is in my opinion a deadly combination to combine that with the current cocktail mix of easy access to firearms and constant daily diet of violence in all forms that children get.

That Americans are desensitized to violence is no longer news, but it amazes me when someone claims that a diet of gratuitious violence and entertainment that consists of 1, 2 ,3 , 4 , 5 , 6 and 7 is their constitiutional right. Now I do not claim that violence would not exist without violent games nor that video games cause violence but even a blind person can tell that we (in America) are extremely disensitized to violence. Nowhere else in the world is so much violence consumed by the public nor is it as easily accessible to minors as in America.

In my opinion until there is a movement to curtail the excessive amount of firepower in the community then moves like this are a stop gap measure on the journey to ridding our communities of violence. Yes, I know violence goes beyond violent video games and is more likely due to other factors (abuse at home, poverty, feelings of persecution, resentment) but the fact is that violent video games are not blameless. But two wrongs do not make a right (allow violent video games to minors since they have access to other violence), after all, the Columbine kids didn't play long games of Pokemon before going on their killing spree.

PS; If you've ever lived in a neighborhood were you go to sleep hearing gunshots and wakeup to sirens you'll know where I'm coming from. Lakewood, Atlanta, GA.

This may be rhetorical; I'm sure the Bungie boys are being leaned on heavily by the MS brass to keep their mouths shut. However, in this interview on Blue's News, Doug Zartman says this about PC and Mac versions of HALO:

The decision about what platforms Halo and future Bungie games will be developed for remains in the hands of Bungie Studios, in the hands of the teams developing them. In Halo's case the decision has not been made yet.

Why, then, does the HALO page at http://halo.bungie.com still say "Coming soon for Windows and Mac OS"?

Doesn't Zartman really mean "We were planning to do Mac and Windows versions of HALO, but that decision is now being revisited"?

This may be rhetorical; I'm sure the Bungie boys are being leaned on heavily by the MS brass to keep their mouths shut. However, in this interview on Blue's News, Doug Zartman says this about PC and Mac versions of HALO:

The decision about what platforms Halo and future Bungie games will be developed for remains in the hands of Bungie Studios, in the hands of the teams developing them. In Halo's case the decision has not been made yet.

Why, then, does the HALO page at http://halo.bungie.com still say "Coming soon for Windows and Mac OS"?

Doesn't Zartman really mean "We were planning to do Mac and Windows versions of HALO, but that decision is now being revisited"?

Because of the limited number of skins at the time, most of us had the choice of the Tim, Xian, and Sarge skin, because that is about the only skins they had. What was scary is that the Tim skin looked nearly EXACTLY like him. And, in my opinion, was the best player amongst the gathered group. Hence, you learned to run away if you saw Tim running towards you. It was very strange to be running around, and run right into someone you recognize from the real world.

However, for a team play game that involved pushing a button to get points, we ended up playing almost all the same skins, so the effect was much stranger to see 3 Xian's running around. `8r)

Anyway, it has been maintained from the begining that id software is able to create photorealistic skins, and that they will provide instruction on how to create your own. There is a PC gamer issue out there discussing that as well.

--
Gonzo Granzeau

right here

This is Apogee President Scott Miller's responce to the license, first posted on Blue's News:

A standard response to the madness! :-)

I must say this is just entirely too funny. And a sad commentary on how little most people understand law.

I will say that anyone who thinks we are trying to control reviews and such are jumping on a bandwagon without really giving it proper consideration. Legally, that's entirely impossible -- but then, most people know less about law than they do making ice. ;-)

This policy/agreement simply allows fan sites to use our trademarks and copyright character art, etc. Most developers/publishers do not allow this at all. End of story. We are providing a way for them to do so, though. Lay people, of course, read this policy and become panic mongers. This policy is only for owners of web sites who wish to use our trademarks and copyrights, like www.3dportal.com. Somehow, someone found a link to it and of course jumps to the wrong conclusion, because...hey...it then can become a hot topic. Yippee. Don't we live in a fun society?

We might need to make it more clear that reviews are--of course!--not what concern us (nor could we legally prevent negative reviews--that's patently absurd). It's a web site using our logos next to overly foul, abusive, racist, etc. language or art. For example, we would not allow our logos to be used on a porn site.

Back to important work...

There really was a lot going on at E3. Free software is a pretty small part of it in some ways, but an important one not covered much elsewhere. Sort of like that bumpersticker that says "it'd be nice if one day the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy weapons and the local elementary school gets all the books it needs" (heavily paraphrased of course) ... Free Oses make what I hope will eventually become the platform of choice for games. The best example of what I'd like to see is the elusive but rad-looking FlightGear ... I want that, but for submarines:)

timothy

saw this on Blue's News:
"one of the reasons for this is the fact that they have direct input to Microsoft as to the development of the API"

You can see the "ultrasound" of Romero's baby at thes e mirrors.

Warning: I think I'm safe in saying that it's looking like a mighty ugly baby. :)

Hopefully when we see the full deal, it'll look a lot better.

--

No, the first programmer Carmack hired was Michael Abrash. In fact, Abrash recently released the chapters pertaining to Quake from Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book on Blues News at this address.

--

No, the first programmer Carmack hired was Michael Abrash. In fact, Abrash recently released the chapters pertaining to Quake from Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book on Blues News at this address.

--