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August 17, 1999

GameWinners.com has posted the cheat codes for Looking Glass Studios' recently released RPG, System Shock 2.

BioWare, makers of games such as Shattered Steel and Baldur's Gate, will be doing a demo of their upcoming games MDK2 and Neverwinter Nights at Fragapalooza 99. The demo is tentatively scheduled for Saturday night on August 21st.

Fragapalooza 99 is Canada's largest and longest running LAN party. FP99 is four days of gaming, fun, and prizes, running from Thursday, August 19th through Sunday, August 22nd. With over 300 participants registered, FP99 is looking to be the biggest and best ever.

Thanks to Voodoo for letting me know that The Matrox User's Resource Group has posted a new utility for the Matrox G400 (MAX and vanilla), G400Tweak, that allows you to alter various registry settings that should boost the performance of the G400. Apparently they have also posted behnchmarks on MGA Optimization Tools from beta testers of MGATweak (which they say should be available in an open beta soon).

New bleem! v1.4a
Thanks to Ethan Warlick for letting us know that a new version (v1.4a) of the Playstation emulator for the PC, bleem! has been released. Here's the sauce on this latest version:
bleem! 1.4a has been released! It is important to remember that this version of bleem is a "Maintenance Update". Here are a list of improvements since v1.4.
1 Added Work-Around for CD-ROM/DVDROM Access -- People with DVDs or CD-Roms that were having problems reading the CD-KEY should try this version.
2 AutoConfig KeyBoard Controller 1 on First Boot
3 Eject Menu Option Disables Sound Immediately
4 Sound AutoConfig at 44K, 16Bit, Stereo on First Boot
5 Exit FullScreen Mode by Pressing Left Mouse Button
6 Improved D3D Screen Transition Logic (Menus <-> Game) -- This will cause less "weirdness" when games switch from different modes/sections of the game.
7 Updated Internal Compatibility Listings DataBase -- Less games will show up as "untested"

Wewp! Entertainment has posted an edited chat log, from a recent IRC shindig with Wolfpack Studios, regarding their upcoming online ("Persistent, Immersive") RPG, Shadowbane (which will require a 3D card, according to the FAQ). They edited this chat to make it look like a normal interview (not like an IRC chat) -- pretty good stuff.

A new version of Marc "that's not my gerbil and duct tape" McCall's OpenGL game, glUFO has been released (along, as always, with the source code -- great for people learning OpenGL). Here's what he's added in this latest version:
--smoke swirlies & diffusion
-new ufo model
-new terrain
-first & third person viewpoint selection
-faster, yeah baby yeah!
-new screenshots for the openGL challenged
-new particle system
-1024 x1024 terrain texture
-new cooler sun
-more animated stuff on the ufo: blinky light, engine glow, rim glow (yeah baby!)
-cleaned up the source & added lots of comments - all those budding game programmers who can't spit their way past a non realtime app can see how it's done!
And here's a bit more on this little game:
glUFO is my first crack at openGL and Glut. It is still in its early stages of development, but improving rapidly!

The demo lets you fly the UFO about, orbit and zoom the camera around the UFO. I have started a worklog so any new features or improvements will be detailed there.

The girls over at GAS :) have posted a review of Dungeon Keeper 2. Another very positive review of Bullfrog's latest, with an overall score of 96%.

Our British ho-cake Sharky has also kicked up a review of DK2.
I finally had a chance to play this little gem, and it does kick some serious ass. I was a big fan of the first (even with its problems), but really dig on this one. It's like the first, but the way it should have been when it shipped.

SWAT 3 Interview
Gaming Age has smacked up an interview with Rod Fung, producer on SWAT 3. Here's a snip:
GA: It's evident that the SWAT series has gone through a series of changes that have not only changed the way we look at the series, but also how we play it. What were the deciding factors in how this SWAT title would be presented?
Rod: SWAT 3, Close Quarters Battle is quite a different game from SWAT 1 and SWAT 2. This game is really what I would like to call a "first-person tactical simulation". What we are doing in SWAT3 is to create a realistic close-quarters battle experience for the player. The first person perspective just happens to be the best way to represent this. We would have originally used this type of first-person game engine in the first SWAT game years ago, but we didn't have the technology at the time. Now we have this amazing engine that has allowed us to create the game that we originally envisioned.

CGO has popped up the second installment to their preview of Sierra's SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle.

Some WoT goodness
Just getting my daily Unreal/UT/WoT fix over at Unreal Universe and noticed that the guys over there spotted a few posts on the Wheel of Time Forum (on various issues, some good stuff here, especially the first bit). Check it:
Legend's Sam Brown on shadow support:
Unfortunately, WoT won't support shadows and there's no intention of including future support (that I'm aware of). From what I understand, it's a speed issue. The Unreal engine wasn't designed with shadows in mind and getting them to work easily isn't...well, easy. As shadows are basically an asthetic enhancement they aren't a focus of current development.

As for the TNT card's stencil buffer, as I understood it, this addition to Unreal was both extremely slow and pretty bad looking. For those reasons it was never integrated into the Unreal codebase. And as others have already said, it was only usable on the Creative cards using their drivers. That's a VERY small audience to cater to.

Sam Brown on framerates:
Basically, your framerate can never exceed the speed with which your screen is updated. For example, if your monitor is refreshing the screen at 60Hz then the image on the screen isn't going to run at anything faster than 60fps. Of course, you could turn VSynch off, which will allow your card to try and update faster than the screen refresh, but that can cause some strange visual side effects (people usually describe it as tearing).

Glen Dahlgren says no more WoT screenshots soon...
We just released over 30 shots in the last couple of weeks and you want to vote for more? Do you understand how long it takes to actually create good screenshots?
I'm afraid that it's going to be a while until you see more shots, and a vote won't make this any sooner. Sorry.

AvP Strategies
I noticed over on Aliens vs. Predator Network that AvP World has posted three new strategies for the Marine character in Fox Interactive's AvP. They are "Fighting Smart Guns", "Keep Strafing", and "Check Your Six".

A new version of WCPUID has been released (version 2.6c-Beta1), now with Athlon support (test version). The guys behind WCPUID are the same folks behind SoftFSB, the dandy little program that allows you to change the speed of your front side bus on the fly (no rebooting).

While at the Doom Legacy site, I spotted this little blurb of news on their main page:
DooM Legacy v1.29 soon?
At least, Boris is working hard on it :) Someone tells me this version will add a better network support. Yes! That means DooM would be quite playable over the Internet. And of course you can expect a lot of bugs will be fixed as well as a better OpenGL support... Only good things in perspective!
They go on to mention the new version of OpenGL Doom Legacy (which I just posted mention of above).

Unreal Tech Update
Tim "sweet ass" Sweeney made an update to the Unreal Tech Page with some juice on DirectX7 (in regards to UT). Dig it:
Some people have been asking about our plans for supporting the upcoming DirectX7. Unreal Tournament will ship with DirectX6 support, and will be compatible with (but not optimized for) DirectX7. As soon as Microsoft has released DirectX7 and we've had a chance to optimize the code for DX7 and test it across a wide range of cards, we'll release an Unreal Tournament patch with complete DirectX7 optimizations. This has been the plan all along.

DirectX7 has lots of cool new features. The ones which Unreal Tournament will exploit are:
1 Improved texture management.
2 Hooks to enable 3D card drivers to perform their own texture management to improve performance.
3 Optimized polygon path for significantly faster polygon rates.
4 Windows 2000 support.

-Tim
A big wet one goes out to Blue for spotting that one before me :) (bitch ;) ).

3dfx interview
Speaking of people with chronic masturbation problems, Vince over at Extreme Hardware sends word of an interview that they have kicked up with 3dfx's Brian Burke, regarding their T-Buffer technology. Here's a snip:
EH: Have you done any performance testing with T-Buffer in 16-bit colour? 32-bit rendering? If so, is there any way you could let us have some specs?

Brian: We have been working on this technology for sometime and have done extensive testing. Since this was a technology announcement and not a product announcement, we can not release any specs, yet. I will say that 3dfx is pushing to have 32-bit rendering with full scene AA for benchmarking the next generation of 3d accelerators. We also maintain that anything under 60 frames a second is unacceptable for gaming.
Oh, something else kinda spicy (although known, but just in case you missed it):
EH: When do you expect to have T-Buffer hardware available to gamers?

Brian:They will be on the shelf this fall for the Christmas buying season and will be priced in line with mainstream consumer 3D accelerators.