News
November 1999
November 25, 1999
Happy turkey day
Gonna have an easy-going day today hopefully. I think I'm just gonna kick back and stuff myself, hehe. Hope you guys out there have a good one too. Before you get back to your turkey, let us all give thanks...Dear mighty Quake lord, we are thankful that you created Quake/2/3 and provided us with hours of fraggin madness, we are thankful for the little wussies that bitch everytime we kill them becasue it's always fun to listen to their next excuse for sucking so bad, we are thankful for the abundance of porn that is so easy to aquire on the internet, and finally we are thankful for the people who manufacture TV dinners who make lives easier for gamer....can i get an Amen here?
Alright guys, go get that turkey!
November 22, 1999
Q3: Areana has gone GOLD!
Yep, that's right, Q3 has gone gold and may be on store shelves within about a week or so. There isnt a set release date yet so i dont know when it'll be out for sure. Although I'm happy for Q3's release soon, i'm kinda skeptical about how it'll work becasue that last demo was packed with bugs. Maybe we should be counting down the days till the first patch to be released!
November 18, 1999
Got Q3 Arena test
I got the demo teh day before yesterday and did some testing...well, playing. I noticed a lot of great new changes in the user interface (menu, options...), the re-designed console, the maps, pretty much almost everything was modified in someway.
Bugs encountered
There were a number of bugs that i encountered....pretty obvious ones that i dont know why id didnt catch before the released of this test demo. Maybe it's just because of my system, i dont know yet. A few graphical bugs in the menus and options area, where some of the buttons were cut off or didnt show up properly. This isnt a real biggie, but it was kinda annoying to look at. Then there was the skin problem, i would pick a skin for my player (other than Sarge), and when i'm actually in the game, I end up using the Sarge skin for some reason. It took a couple of times restarting the game for me to finally get the skin i picked to show up. Same goes with the bots also.
The last big bug that i encountered was probably the most major ones that i found. Sometimes when i jump or shoot, my player continues to do so even after i stop pressing any keys. So like after i would jump or shoot, my player wouldnt stop jumping or shooting even though i'm not pressing anything. This pissed me off so much becasue i died so many time due to that. There is a way to get around that though, I found out that if you press Esc when that starts and then just get back in the game it would stop.
The Battlegrounds
The new map (q3dm1) that was included with this test demo was a small little DM map, not much to talk about. But there was one little architechual feature that was quite
interesting. If you ran though the IHV version of Q3 way back, you probably noticed this weird (but cool) looking thing that looks like an open mouth and you can walk in it. That was the only interesting thing i saw in this
map. But the good thing about this map is that it's quite small, very suitible for DM. There's a little courtyard that's perfect for strait up fraggin', sweet!
The old maps that we've know for the past 3 test demos were of course included with a few small changes of themselves. Nothing major worth mentioning (lights, jump pads), except in the Longest Yard
map (q3dm17), there were a few little this'n'that added.
What about the gameplay?
Well well...i can go on forever huh? As you already know, Q3's singleplayer is totally different from previous quake games. In the full Q3 game there will be 4 episodes, or Tiers. I think in each of those Tiers there will be 4 levels to shoot through, not sure about that. In this demo though, 1 Tier was included. There were 4 levels, the first level you had to battle 1 bot, the second - 4 bots, the third - 3 bots and the last level was with one bot. If you think playing with bots sucks, well you better stop playing whatever other games you're playing and check this out. These bots are what I'm talking about true AI, not to mention damn good snipers! They're hard.
But of course you have your choice of 5 difficulty levels. Here's the order from easy to hard : I Can Win, Bring It On, Hurt me Plenty, Hardcore, Nightmare. I havent tried the first 3 difficulty levels but i did play on the last two. Nightmare level, well...was a nightmare...like it was meant to be. I'm talking about me having -4 while the bot wins the match. And I'm a pretty decent player, not anywhere near like professional, but decent. Hardcore, was a little better. I at least was able to get some kills and stay alive for a little while. Play at your own risk.
There were also skirmish matches included. There was Free for All, Team DM and Tournament, Capture the Flag was there also but doesnt work. What i like about Team Dm was that you can actually communicate and interact with the bots. Yes, that mean talk to them and give them orders! This only works with Team Dm and Capture the Flag matches only, makes sense. What this means is that you can actually give you team member orders and they'll obey. Say for example Iwant to be the leader of my team, i would use the say_team command to talk to only my team mates and tell them, "I am the leader". From then on everyone would listen to my orders, like " 'name' follow me", and that member i just instructed would follow me. There's many many more commands and things you can say and do, but thats all i'll say for now.
Performance
Good or not? This is really hard to say, especially for me becasue i dont have a very powerful system. I barly made the requirments with my Pentium 233 MMX, 64 megs, Voodoo 1, and a shitty video card. So game performance for ME is ok, if i turn down some of the goodies like details and dynamic lighting (big performance hit!). I have read from a few sources that this demo doesnt have as good of a performance as the previous performance. Again, i really cant test performance extensively becasue of my situation, so i would be able to back that up. Online games, i havent tried yet. Due to my connection and system, my games wouldnt be playable anyway. So you'll have to try that on your own and see how that goes for you.
So what?
Overall, despite the number of bugs still lurking, Q3 is well on it's way to being a success. I dont think we're too far off from the game release becasue much of the game's important feature were in this demo already. This will be big, i can smell it. Not only because it a sequal of the previous Q1 and Q2 (which were acutally viewed as standards in all FPS games) or because of it's break-through technology (well, maybe) but because it's made by people who know FPS games. Experience rules, and no other company has as much experience as id.
November 15, 1999
Problem fix
Got word that some people are having some problems with the message : 'can not resolve authorize.idsoftware.com' in the demo. Here's what you do....so i was told...i dont have the demo yet so i wouldnt be able to verify it. But here's what you do to fix it.
-paste "192.246.40.56 authorize.idsoftware.com" into notepad
-save the file as "host" with no extension by putting " " around the file name when you save
-and put that file in your /windows/ directory
Hopefully that'll fix that problem for you guys. That's all i got on Q3 now, check back tomorrow or the next for nore shit.
Quake 3 Demo is out and HOT!
Omigod! Why does everything take me by surprise lately? Well, Q3demo's released recently, dont ask me when maybe earlier today. Even though i dont have it yet, i do know that the team play and bots in it kick ass. So see if you can get your hands on the 50 meg download, i probably wont be able till for another couple days, or till my friend can download it for me. But here's the scoop on the demo: 4 maps, 3 of which are old and one new (q3dm1) and 6 new characters (Sarge, Visor, Major, Grunt, Daemia, and Stripe). And best of all....BOTS!
Couple places you can try to get the demo from:
there's of course more but that's all i can find. God luck on finding one that's not busy or anything.
November 12, 1999
Q3 Beta testing at iD
The folks at Thresh's Firingsquad(well, just Kenn) was lucky enough to be able to go over to iD a littel while ago to beta test Q3. He mentioned some new stuff poping up including a new console interface and the improved lightining gun and all that good stuff. Check out the article yourself here.
November 8, 1999
What's up?
Boy, it's been a while since I've updated with anything on Q3 huh? Well, i'll start on that again soon, been too busy to get into that lately. I'll try to have my other sections updated though and get some misc. news for ya, sounds good? Life's been pretty busy with boring stuff lately...i'm too tired to do anything.
I can legally drive now!!!
I took my driving test on Saturday and past on the first try!! I got this fuckin fat Mexican guy for an examiner and he had a hella hard ass (hehe) time fitting in my car. I didnt get a chance to show off my doughnuts to him though due to the fact that the car weight was really unbalanced. I bet you i would've had a higher score if i did though, damn. So heres a tip: No matter how fat your examiner is, just show him your doughtnuts and you might get a higher score...he may even pass you.
OMI God
You wont believe what i saw on Friday. I had a concert on Friday and while waiting to play our next peice becasue the conductor was talking to the audience, i saw this lady...you wont believe this, but it's true. This lady was picking her nose like hell. I dont mean just picking...i mean she was just digging up there, you know. She didnt even care that there was people around or even the fact that all 120+ musicians could be looking at her...Well, that's not the half of it...i know you wont believe me but what i'm about to say is so damn true. After she was through "diggin" she stuck that same finger in her mouth and was like nibling on her nail...on that same finger!! Then she stuck in her nose again and did some more diggin and put it in her mouth again (!!!), nibling and sucking on that finger... Then she scratched her head with that hand and did that again. She stuck her finger up her nose like 3 times and then in her mouth after every time....i swear to God this is true!!!!