News Archives from June, 1998

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Tuesday, June 30th, 1998

Demos To Be Chopped
Now that the Llamanet server has been moved onto the Barrysworld backbone, there will be a few changes. One of the first things to be "altered" from the original llamanet agreement will be the amount of ftp space that I will have available to me. This means that "a lot" of the demos on my site will be removed. Therefore, if you want to get some of the demos that are on the Quake Demos page, you'd better download them before they're gone. Complete details regarding this are in my .plan file.

Shoot 'n Surf Allnighter
On Saturday, July 11th from 8pm to 10am Sunday, SnS is holding their "Shoot n Surf Allnighter 5: Quake and Bake". From what I'm told, it's a night of Quake, drinking, other games, more drinking and lots of stupidity. You can go to their Allnighter page for more info and e-mail them if you want to sign-up.

Daikatana MP3 Available
The first of 8 MP3 songs from the upcoming game Daikatana is available for download in .mp3 and real audio formats from the Daikatana home page. The song is called Plague Village and is from level E3M1.

Heretic II Real Video
The Heretic II AVI video has been released in Real Video format. You can watch them in high-bandwidth, and low-bandwidth formats. If you don't have Real Video, you can download the 41 MB .avi version here.

Site Stuff

Monday, June 29th, 1998

More Than 16 Million Served
I noticed on Bluesnews today that his hit counter has passed the 16 million mark. This is a great achievement for any site let alone a gaming site. Even more amazing is that he's had 8 million hits since January 1st of this year. That works out to approx. 1.3 million hits a month and almost 45,000 hits a day. Love him or hate him, 16 million visitors can't all be wrong. Very impressive Blue, keep up the great work.

mIRC Dude & Quake?
Is it me or does it seem the guy in the new mIRC about screen (author: Khaled Mardam-Bey) look like he's wearing a Quake baseball cap? Would be cool if he was.

Making Unreal Real
It took ages for Unreal to finally be released. GameSpot has posted the "Making of Unreal" story in 3 parts. It's interesting reading and not as long as the actual making of the game. :)

Official(?) Daikatana Site
A bunch of guys from Ion Storm have setup Daikatana.com which (as you might guess) will be the home site for any upcoming Daikatana information you might want.

Wanna Play Half-Life?
Sierra On-line's Beta Page has posted a request for beta testers for the new upcoming game from Valve Software called Half-Life. If you have the system requirements that Sierra is looking for, you might be just the right person they're looking for.

Some Funny Quake Stuff
I saw this on sCary's site and he described it as "weird". I agree with him but it's a great laugh. (real audio is required)

Tell you what, on a slow day check out Immortal's Real Audio show. It's some of the greatest listening you'll ever hear. (As long as you aren't Thresh. heh) Check out show12 and be enlightened.

Site Stuff

Sunday, June 28th, 1998

New mIRC Available
Every Quake players favorite chat program mIRC chat client v1.54 was released on the mIRC home page.

New WinAmp Available
New version of the cool .MP3 player Winamp v1.92 can be downloaded from the Winamp home page. Their server is very busy as it took me ages to get a decent connection.

Llamanet Still Having Concerns
The admin dudes at Llamanet are still trying to work out some buglets with the new server. The most prevelant problem right now is the mail server. Hopefully this will be cleared up soon and Dave can relax before he has a nervous breakdown. :)

Site Stuff

Friday, June 26th, 1998

Demos, Demos, Demos!
There's good news and bad news with the problems arising from the Llamanet server change-over. The great news is that I can now post demos on the site (w00p!). The bad news is that (as I write this) I can't get any e-mail from my llamanet address. You can send mail and the server will get it but I can't get it from the pop3 server. Also, my FP account isn't active yet. Llamanet dude, Dave says he'll get both of these running soon.

Raven To Release Game Code
Raven Software will be releasing the source code for Heretic and Hexen. This is pretty cool news. The bonus to this code release as opposed to id releasing the Doom code is that Raven used the Doom2 engine for Hexen. Raven will release it as soon as they can remove the sound code from the source.

Final Fantasy VII PC Demo
GamesCenter has released a new demo of the PC version of Final Fantasy VII (9MB). This is the PC version of the popular video game and not nearly as large as the 120 MB demo released a while back.

Aussie Quake Site
While surfing the net last week (something I rarely do), I came upon a nice Quake site in Australia called Challenge.AU. It had a nice simple design and seemed to promote Quake players from around the world (which is something I try to do). He also mentions my site on there a few times so it can't be that bad. :) Go take a visit if you have the time.

Computer Stress You Say?
Well, if you think that computers make your life stressful, take a look at this guy (425k). I think it's time this guy got into another line of work or at least cut down his caffeine intake by about 99%.  :)

Site Stuff

Thursday, June 25th, 1998 - Windows 98 Released

Llamanet Problems Being Worked On
Dave and the other llamanet dudes are hard at work getting all the bugs out of the new server. Hopefully everything will be working very soon. As for the mail problems, those are all fixed (knock on wood).

Microsoft Ships Complete Windows 98
At 12:01 a.m. June 25th, Microsoft Windows 98 (complete with IE 4.x) went on sale around the world. Early sales were very good as expected.

I attended the invite only Windows 98 roll-out seminar. For those of you that didn't attend, don't worry, you didn't miss anything. After a hard day at work, the last thing I needed to sit through was Bill Gates talking about the future. Anyway, I came home with Windows 98, a Microsoft CD holder and a bunch of Windows 98 pens so it wasn't a total loss. :)

Site Stuff

Wednesday, June 24th, 1998

Problems With E-Mail Address - Read This
As of this moment, there's a problem with my llamanet e-mail address. For the time being, if you want to send me mail, use methos1@geocities.com. I'll post a note when the llamanet e-mail is working properly.

South Park Q2 Models
Funny stuff. Visit This Site if you want to get some player models of the gang from South Park. Although the sound files aren't there yet, you can download all your favorite SP characters. When you use these in a game, you can say "You killed Kenny, you bastard!" and really mean it. The player models pack includes Cartman, Stan, Kenny, Kyle, Chef, Starvin' Marvin, and the cow. Now go download them or I'll kick you in the nuts!  :-)

More Silly Quake Stuff - Adults Only
Somebody (I won't mention who) sent me this link through ICQ last night and I'm wasn't sure if I should post it. Okay, here's the warning... Don't visit this link if you're a) under legal age b) offended by sexually related material or c) can't take things with a grain of salt (you'll really need "c" in this case). I don't know who wrote the "story" but it made for some laughs on irc last night.

MicroSoft / IE Gets Go-Ahead
With the release of Windows 98 tomorrow and the impending court date in September to debate whether or not MS should be allowed to include Internet Explorer with Win98. The U.S. Appeals court has overturned the injunction made by a lower court to remove automatic install of IE from the Win98 cd. Microsoft was told they can distribute IE with Win98 until the decision of the court case in September.

Let me get this straight. MS can sell Win98 with IE included until the decision of the September trial (possibly as late as January)? Umm, I must be missing something but, won't millions of people already have it by then? If so, then what's the point?

Site Stuff

Monday, June 22nd, 1998 - Quake Shareware's 2nd Anniversary

Unreal Timedemo
From the "it's about time department". Somebody has finally posted a utility on PlanetUnreal to allow you to get an on-screen average frame-rate in Unreal. Timedemo gives the overall FPS, as well as an average. Useful in helping with tweaking, system bragging and bitching about the hardware requirements. :)

Best of Show for E3 (courtesy of BluesNews)
The Best of E3 Show Awards are online. Here are some of the winners:

Hmm, I must be stuck in the Quake world because I haven't heard of half these games. Oh well, Quake is still the winner to me. :)

New ICQ Released
A new version of the Quake players friend (and enemy) ICQ is now available. It's now up to ICQ 98a v1.30.

Happy Birthday To Quake
I'm not sure of the release date for the full game but today is the 2nd anniversary of the release of Quake shareware from id Software. This site and about 1000 others plus about 10,000 gaming industry jobs wouldn't exist without this game. Then again, if the game was never released, some of us might actually still have lives. :)

Site Stuff

Sunday, June 21st, 1998 - Happy Father's Day

No Thresh and Blood for You!
I browsed through the latest issue (June 25th) of Rolling Stone magazine but, I couldn't find the Thresh article called "Thresh and Blood" that was suppose to be included. Did anybody else find it? As far as I could see, it wasn't there but, I might just be getting too old. :)

Still Waiting For The Llamas
As this time, I'm still waiting to hear from the llamanet admin as to when the new server will be fully operable. To repeat the history, I received e-mail on Wednesday night that the server was moving and would be down for approx. 36 hours. I then heard yesterday (after 90 hours) that it could be another 1 to 2.5 days. Well, it's now been approx. 3 1/2 days (106 hours) and still no word via e-mail, ICQ or irc as to when things will be finished. I understand that there were some problems with the domains being transferred over to the new sites but that's not an excuse for the lack of communication. :(

Unreal Patch Update
Yesterday, I mentioned that Epic was working on their next patch for Unreal. Today, Tim Sweeney mention that the patch will contain updates on Internet play, OpenGL support, Voodoo2 support. Plus info on the Unreal shareware version to be released "soon".

sCary Stuff At Operation: 3Dfx
Nice to hear that our buddy sCary has hooked himself up with a new job. Today was the official announcement that sCary will be webmaster at Operation: 3Dfx. Nicely done Steve.

Site Stuff

Saturday, June 20th, 1998

More Delays from Llamanet
Although I wasn't informed by anybody from Llamanet, I understand that there is a further delay in setting up the new llamanet server on the Barrysworld backbone. Hopefully this will be resolved soon.

BW 100 Player Quake II
BarrysWorld wants YOU! The guys at BW want to do some beta testing for their "MegaGame Platform" on Saturday June 27, at 20:00 BST. The project is described as a couple of hours of trying things out and then popping back to IRC, and so they look for "tolerant and patient volunteers."

New Unreal DM Maps
The folks at TerraFusion have 46 Unreal deathmatch levels archived available for download.

New Internet Code For Unreal?
Word has it that Epic is working feverishly to (vastly) improve the Unreal Internet code. I hope they can get it working properly. If they can't, the game will die out very fast.

New QW Proxy
Qizmo 2.0 has been released. This proxy will work with QuakeWorld v2.2x and has many features including voice transmission (great, people singing in your ear while trying to play :). The program is based on FAQ-proxy, but is 15 minute limited shareware. Still cool anyway. :)

Site Stuff

Thursday, June 18th, 1998

Doing The Server Shuffle - No Updates
I was informed via e-mail today from the LLamaNET admin dudes that the Llamanet servers will be moving over to the UK servers over the next couple of days. There is good news and bad news that goes along with this. The bad news is that I won't be able to update my site until sometime on Saturday morning (my time). The good news is that when the new servers are up, YOU will have a much faster connection, much quicker page loading and MUCH more stable downloads. The e-mail will continue as normal so you can send me as much mail as you want. :)

I certainly didn't want anything like this to happen but, sometimes you have to take a step back to take 2 steps forward. Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause. I'll talk to y'all on Saturday. :)

Site Stuff

Tuesday, June 16th, 1998

John Carmack Announces No More Quake 3
Huge news! Fresh off my .plan comments about Quake 2 dying. John Carmack of id Software announced today that Quake 3 is dead. In a surprising announcement, John Carmack mentioned in his .plan update that id is abandoning Quake 3, and also abandoning designing a single-player game altogether. id Software will be concentrating on making a new game called Quake Arena. Please read his .plan update. This could be the most important decision id has ever made.

Cool Daikatana Screenshot
While most screenshots of new games rarely impress me, this screenshot from Daikatana impresses me a lot. It's a screen shot of the new weapon called Shockwave. Hmm, I wonder when we're going to here that Daikatana will be switching to the Unreal engine? (rumor only :)

George Broussard Interview
In the wake of his stunning announcement regarding Duke Nukem Forever, George Broussard (President of 3D Realms) has done this very revealing interview. George talks about all the details involved in the decission to switch from the Quake 2 engine to the Unreal engine.

Site Stuff

Monday, June 15th, 1998

DNF Revs Up New Engine
George Broussard, President of 3D Realms, made a major announcement in his .plan today.   He announced that Duke Nukem Forever will not be using the Quake 2 engine after all. 3D Realms have decided to switch over to the Unreal engine for DNF. Although George doesn't mention why the decision was made other than the fact it was a "business decision".

When I did my interview with Scott Miller (done on May 20th,1998) of 3D Realms, he didn't answer many of the questions I originally posted to him. Some of these had to do with using the Quake 2 engine with DNF. Obviously, negotiations were already in the works at that time.

Quake 2 v3.17 Status
Word from Zoid is that Q2 v3.17 will be the next release due to version tracking at id Software. Zoid also says that they're working hard on making sure this release is as solid as can be. (this is good :)

Quake Demos Too Long?
Some people have commented about the delay at the start of some of the demos on the Quake Demos Page and the PGL Demos Page. While nothing can be done about the QW demos, you can always use fastforward with the regular Quake demos (*.dem). For those of you that still use the default .cfg files, you would hit your F8 key. For those that have hacked your .cfg files beyond recognition, you can add the following.

// Fast Forward for Regular Quake Demos
alias +fastforward "host_framerate 1.0; echo FastForwarding.."
alias -fastforward "host_framerate 0.0;"
bind key "+fastforward"

Hit the "key" you chose and presto, no more waiting for the player to clean his mouse or finish his smoke. :)

Descent Freespace Patch v1.02
The new Descent FreeSpace patch v1.02 which is suppose to improve Internet play has been released on Volition's site.

Site Stuff

Friday, June 12th, 1998

GameSpy v2.01 Released
It's now official (whatever that means), the geeks over at GameSpy have finally released the longest beta test program of all time, GameSpy v2.01. I had a hard time getting onto the GameSpy site so I have linked the file from BluesNews.

ADSL Info
Need some ADSL information? Try the latest "unofficial" ADSL FAQ. A lot of people seem to have many questions about this new tech. ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) should be available through most of N. America sometime in 1998.

Thresh Demos Anyone?
Exclusive to Methos Quake! One of the many visitors to Methos Quake has dropped a cool program in my lap. This utility allows PGL mod cam demos to be converted to 1st person POV Quake demos. This means that I can take any (all) of the demos from the PGL tourneys and make them into POV demos for people to watch. This way, we'll get demos of people like Thresh, Reptile, Unholy and many more (that's cool). The person who gave me the program asked not to be named (I'll call him X) and that I don't release the program to anybody.

The only drawbacks to this are that a) you can't see the weapons and b) it only works with the PGL type of cam.

I've setup a 2nd demos page called PGL Demos (link from the demos page) with these demos on it for people who wish to get them. I just watched Thresh beat Reptile on DM2 and it was great (damn, he's a smart player). Of course, many people are waiting to see the first person POV with Reptile beating Thresh on DM4. :)  Thanks X

Brian Hook's .plan
Go to the quakefinger pages and read Brian Hook's .plan file. It's a very insightful look into the Quake ego that surrounds us all.

Birthday Greetings
A big Happy Birthday goes out to Mark "DC-Carnage" Davies who turns 27 today. In the immortal words on Indiana Jones... Mark, it's not the years, it's the mileage. Happy birthday and many, many more.

Site Stuff

Wednesday, June 10th, 1998

Patches and More Patches
New patches were released yesterday for the following games..

Real 5 Nations Humor
As I was going through the TV channels yesterday I saw the start of a rugby game from the real 5 Nations tournament (not the 5 Nations Quake tourney). The British commentators, who are normally very stoic, said something I found vastly amusing. While talking about the teams involved in the tournament (England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland and France), he said the following:

"All the teams in this tournament have an excellent chance of winning, except for the team from Ireland who are doing their best not to get spanked."

It's not meant as a knock against Irish Quake players but I did find the comment surprisingly funny. :)

Site Stuff

Tuesday, June 9th, 1998 - Quake 2 Is Now 6 Months Old

Intel Get Sued
Only in the USA, I wonder why you never hear about this in other countries? Intel Corporation is being sued in the USA by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission). The FTC has decided that Intel has been naughty and is going to make them pay for it. You can read the whole story here. In the meantime, here's a small excerpt.

"In at least three separate cases against three major customers, Intel used its market to cut off these customers who had asserted their own patent rights with respect to microprocessors and related technologies that rivaled Intel's technology,"

The FTC determined that Intel's dominant market share constituted a monopoly, subjecting the company's conduct to heightened scrutiny under U.S. antitrust laws.

Intel Needs More Sales :)
Coincidentally, in the wake of the FTC lawsuit against Intel, the chip giant announced details on their Pentium and P2 chips. The price cuts range from 12 to 21%. Ziff-Davis has posted all the details on all the chips. It's amazing how much you save if you buy 1,000 of them. :)

Carmack Figures Out The Obvious
Now, please don't get me wrong. John Carmack is a god when it comes to making a great game engine and certainly an elite programmer. I think he just has a bit of trouble dealing with the criticism of his products. In his .plan yesterday, Carmack announced the following...

I have also concluded that the networking architecture for Quake 2 was just not the right thing. The interpolating 10 hz server made a lot of animation easier, which fit with the single player focus, but it just wasn't a good thing for internet play.

Umm, call me crazy but I thought people had been saying this for the last 6 months? Yep, that's right, Quake 2 is 6 months old today. It doesn't seem that long, mainly because there wasn't any teamplay, dm maps or decent network play until 3 months after the game was released. Yep, that infamous "point release" that was suppose to save the game. hmm

Unreal Lag Helper
Noticed this on www.unreal.org. There's a batch file out to help with the terrible lag when playing Unreal on-line. What it does is limit the fps in 640x480 and 800x600 full screen modes to 30 fps, thus eliminating the pixel redraw and fixing some of the slowdown. Trust me, you need this Unreal batch file (2 KB). Note: Just put the file in your \Unreal\System dir. If you don't use GameSpy to run Unreal, change the last line in the batch file to read: unreal.exe

Site Stuff

Sunday, June 7th, 1998

New Graphics Not Complete Yet
[TC]-Reaper sent along the latest graphics which I have posted on the site. Needless to say, they're not completed yet and will be undergoing minor changes and tweaks over the next week or so. I think that Reaper did a great job on them and he'll soon be back to his real job at Liquid Fusion. As talented a person as he is, this site is not a very good indication of his work. The concerns he had were many, mostly from the point that he was working with limited time, size constraints and working with my ideas and not his. Thanks again Chris, great job!

New DirectX Drivers
Microsoft has released the latest DirectX drivers (v5.2b) for download on their DirectX Media page.

Site Stuff

Friday, June 5th, 1998

New Graphics Have Arrived
[TC]-Reaper sent me the new graphics for the site. I think they look nice. A couple of things have to be done (if I can get a hold of him) but, I'll be working on putting them on the site this weekend. Now I can get rid of the cheesy titles for the pages. :)

Intel Prices to Drop
Intel Corporation announced yesterday that their CPU prices will drop by 15-20% on June 12th.

Thresh Rolls On
Well, I always wanted to interview Thresh but it's probably easier to get a hold of Bill Clinton (at least Bill answers his mail :). I noticed on BluesNews that Thresh will be featured in the June 25th edition of Rolling Stone magazine. The article will be called "Thresh and Blood".

Site Stuff

Wednesday, June 3rd, 1998

Methos Gets a New Address
Methos Quake has changed it's address by just a bit. The new address is http://methos.llamanet.net (No www required).

Daniel "DaNoLd" Pesic Interview Posted
The long awaited interview of DC_DaNoLd has been posted on Methos Interviews Page. Just as Dan is considered a very smart Quake player, he's also pretty insightful when it comes to answering my questions. Please take a look and see what DaNoLd has to say.

Duke Nukem Forever Movie
The Adrenaline Vault's E3 Page has posted an 3 1/2 MPG movie of Duke Nukem Forever. Be prepared for a long download, it's 32 Megs.

Site Stuff

Tuesday, June 2nd, 1998

System Shock Sequel Announced
Electronic Arts announced today that they will make System Shock 2. For those of you that remember the ground-breaking FPS System Shock, this is very good news. System Shock wasn't very well known because (like Unreal) it had such high system requirements at the time it was released. It was the first high-res FPS game around and it even had mlook.

E3 Photos
PlanetQuake has all the E3 photos you need in their Photo Archive's Page.

BluesNews Birthday
Congratulations to Blue on celebrating the 2nd anniversary of BluesNews somewhere around June 1st. (even he's not sure) BluesNews is the most popular game news related site and easily the most popular personal web site in the world. More than 14.6 million visitors can't be wrong. Congrats again Blue.

Site Stuff

Monday, June 1st, 1998

Methos Things To Do List

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