News and Waffle

200,000 Visitor ^

by Paul - Monday 29 March 1999 @ 07:53

No new stuff yet, I just want to know who is the 200,000 visitor to the site. Email me with proof and you'll get your name in lights on the site (for what its worth!).

I'll be posting a few reviews up sometime this week. I've got a fair bit of programming work to do first.

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New Reviews are up ^

by Paul - Thursday 25 March 1999 @ 07:53

Ok, heres 7 new 5 by Aardappel and 2 by myself. Some interesting maps.

Now on to a different subject. We need some more Quake 2 reviewers! 2 infact. The requirements are simple.

• You know something about Quake 2 mapping.
• You play the game. (Trust me, I had people who applied before who said they don't really play Quake 2 but would love to review. Weird!)
• You have the facilities available to properly review the maps.
• You can cope with a having to regularly produce reviews. Don't just apply if you think its something fun to do. It just require a bit of effort on your part.

So if thats not scared you off and you *SERIOUSLY* want to review Quake 2 maps. Give details on what Quake 2 stuff you've done as well. Then email me.

Thanks to Gestalt at PlanetQuake and Renegade at Terrafusion for giving the above bit of news a mention! Should hopefully generate more requests. Also thanks to all the people that applied so far, I'll get back to you all this weekend.

Headshot has released a new map. It's called Bless To Kill (175kb). I have mixed feelings on it. I'm not keen on the texturing, its like q1edge. There is some really nice curved architecture though.

Peej has moved to PQ. His site now has a new look which I think is pretty cool. I especially like the logo.

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Spank you all ^

by Paul - Monday 22 March 1999 @ 07:51

Thank you to everyone that emailed me about the UKPAK review. Glad you like it! I went and proof read it, after I'd posted it, since I was in a rush to get it up. One or two mistakes in there! Oops. I've corrected them and uploaded it again. DOH!

You know something, I'd save myself alot of time and money if I proof read my stuff. Dammit!

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Eventually... ^

by Paul - Sunday 21 March 1999 @ 07:51

3 computers later and with a little delay here is the UKPAK review! But I'm sure you don't mind the wait. You still here? Go read it...

Skorpion has moved his Omibot route making page to the ever-enlarging PlanetQuake.

I've just been reading about the new mod interface for Half-Life. I could ramble on about how damn good an idea it is, but I'll save some time and point you to this article about it.

Just to continue rambling on about Half-Life. I've now reinstalled it and thought I'd have ago at properly playing it in deathmatch. I downloaded a load of maps. One in particular was Double Cross by one of the guys at Valve. Radium gave it its highest ever score. I loaded it up and was completely unimpressed. The architecture inside the buildings is just so bland and boring. Most of outside sections were cool, but I was just astounded at why this map got such a high rating. Maybe I'm missing something?

That little rogue Xori has started to do indepth reviews on his website. The first is on Junior's latest map, jrdm2 (376kb), which I mentioned on Thursday. Anyway, I found the review to be very interesting. Anyone would think he'd done that type of thing before =P. I look forward to seeing more!

The Fat Controller has added a new section to his site. The seal of approval. Don't quiet understand the relevance of the seal bit, but basically what it is, is a little history of an authors maps or pak of maps. Worth a look.

Also Mr Fribbles has begun updating his regularly again, after having a break.

Apparently there was a bug somewhere in Q1Edge (524kb), so its now been fixed and re-released. Tim Willits updated his .plan file to describe the changes.

I was also just taking a look at the new screenies of Team Fortress Classic. It looks very impressive and I can't wait to get my hands on it.

Also can you believe its 10 days until the Quake 3 Arena test is released. I'm getting excited already. Speaking of demos, the demo for King Pin is going to released this weekend. I also want to play that, the problem is that its going to weigh in at about 100mb(!?!) so I don't think I'll be downloading it =).

I installed Internet Explorer 5 yesterday. Not much is changed. The interface in Outlook Express is a little tidier and the folder filenames now match the name you give them in the program. Other than that though I'm trying to figure out what exactly I downloaded in that 18Mb.

Also got a CD-Writer yesterday. I'm going to put it to good use =).

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Oi you! ^

by Paul - Thursday 18 March 1999 @ 07:50

So wheres the UKPAK review you're all asking? Well it currently lies nearly-finished on my HDD. The reason its not finished is simple. I got my new PC last Friday and lets just say the transistion from my old machine to the new one was not a smooth one. Now though I have everything working prefectly. The thing is I now have four exams to do at Uni so my time is mostly devoted to that.

Anyway, Pingu has very kindly bailed me out again and done up reviews.

Some maps which are worth downloading are Junior's latest piece which is jrdm2: Foot Massage (376kb) and Bal's newest map in the baldm series. Baldm4 - Eternal Life (217kb). Also for those who want to complete their collection of Killjoy's maps then you'll be glad to know he has re-released, the first map in kjdm series, Baths of Blood (197 kb).

Also Tim Willits at id software, has released his conversion of the Q2DM1 map for Quake2. Its called Q1Edge (524kb). If you want to read his little .plan update on it, click here. Its an interesting map. I didn't really like it in Quake 2 and in Quake it seems out of place. The texturing is pretty bad, not in use, but in keeping a constant theme.

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Reviews I tell you! ^

by Paul - Sunday 07 March 1999 @ 07:50

Heres reviews for your reading pleasure.

The UKPAK mega review will be up next weekend. Its coming along nicely.

I'm seem to be getting more and more crap email addresses and bad links. I would name and shame you people but if you can't be arsed to do things right then why should I?

Details of the new Playstation 2 have been announced. The machine looks absolutely amazing! Its apparently 50 times more powerful than Sega's Dreamcast and 4 to 5 times more powerful than a Pentium 3. I've read a load of articles on this but by far the best place is Ars Technica (look at the news for March 5th). They have technical spec documents with graphs and loads of fancy jargon I don't understand but if you're interested I recommend going there. What I like about the new machine though is that its backwards compatible and will run existing PSX games! Whats even funnier though is that Sega has just suddenly announced a Saturn emulator for the Dreamcast.

Anyway, some Quake related news. id seems to have been in a bit of twist this week what with the leaked Q3A IHV demo and interview transcripts appearing without id's consent. I'm sure they'll cope though.

The Quake 3 Arena site has some new screenies up. Some really smart level pics in there. Also Scary has more Q3A shots. Some new, some old. Cool stuff. The player models are a little too wierd though. The laser sights shown in one of the pictures looks cool.

Renegade has joined the news team at Terrafusion. Now we get regular updates =P.

Last months news has been archived. So if you missed anything go have look there. Speaking of archives, the program I'm writing for the review archives has had hit a problem. Nothing major, just annoying.

My new machine arrives soon and I can't wait.

Finished Metal Gear Solid for the second time yesterday. I can believe I bought it last Friday then finished it on Sunday. Just like Resident Evil 2 though. I picked it up and just kept playing until I'd finished it.

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Distractions ^

by Paul - Sunday 28 February 1999 @ 07:48

Okay Dokay, I should have had this up yesterday but some stuff happened which distracted me. Anyway, heres 2 more reviews. Yes. 2. There would be more but people keep giving wackass links and return email address which are just crap. That kinda thing really annoys, using the wrong return email address. I mean how the hell am I meant to contact you? Huh... geesh. Erm... I sound like Scary. Oh boy!

Anyway, the UKPak is now out. Theres an interview with UKPak head bloke, Aardappel, at the site which is well worth a look. Also heres the two download links for the pak at moment. Here and here(3.6Mb). Its been put up on cdrom.com so I'll sort out that link when it appears. I will, of course (smug mode on), will be doing a review of the pak. Initial plans go something like this: intro page, page per map and a conclusion. So you can expect a little 10 page review of it. I also want to include comments from people who play teamplay Quake to give their opinions on the maps. I was thinking of adding these comments into the reviews.

I got an email from João Teixeira, author of Brown Stuff (217Kb). (I mentioned this map on Thursday). Apparently he's lost the source for the map! DOH! There was some tweaks that João wanted to make. Unfortunately we won't see them =(.

Nothing else interesting has happened since Thursday. I have noticed that Terrafusion is a little quiet. Actually its too quiet. The grand plans of making it the custom map mecca seem to have gone of the boil. The majority of news updates seem to be done by Peej and actually I have had more news here, which is saying something. I hope things get back on track soon.

Haha. The return of the dark writing!

I bought Metal Gear Solid yesterday. 35 quid. Cheaper than I thought it would be. Interesting game. I love running up behind guards and breaking their necks before they have time to react. I read the review on The Adrenaline Vault and it got panned. I think the reviewer had a couple of valid points but for the most part he was talking complete toss.

Before I forget, the latest issue of Edge has some really cool news on the Playstation 2. Besides it dropping large lumps of brown stuff all over the Dreamcast and co, it'll be backwards compatitable with the Playstation. They say it will probably use software emulation to run old PSX games. Cool stuff!

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More news ^

by Paul - Thursday 25 February 1999 @ 07:47

I've just been informed that the final finished version of the UKPak will be released sometime this evening! So keep your eyes peeled. I know I will.

Another little scoop is that the same team behind the UKPAK maps may work on a pak of FFA maps. Note that the maps in the current pak are aimed at teamplay.

I found an excellent map yesterday. Its Brown Stuff (217Kb) by João Teixeira. To save me having to describe how good it is, heres some screenies (I found the map on the Fat Controllers site).

I've been pondering about the future of the site. As to what the content should be. When Taskmaster opened the site his original aim was to review maps from everyone. To let anyone have their maps showcased. I have no intention of changing that. We will continue to review any maps we recieve. Questions have also been asked as to whether we'll do Quake 3 Arena. Well the answer to that is yes. I'd be stupid to say no.

I've tried to take the angle of interviewing top authors but some don't regard the site very highly and refused to take part. Some did and I'm grateful to them! I wanted to do more but I needed a lot of different peoples co-operation to do what I wanted. It wasn't there, but it seems though that Peek's site has successfully managed what I could not do. Anyway...

What I was thinking of was to cover everything about Multiplayer Quake. One of the most common questions I get asked is "How do I play multiplayer?" So I'd like to do FAQ's to help people in this situation. The thing is I can't do this alone. I don't mean I want more people to work here, what I want is people is to help contribute to create these FAQ's. At the moment though the ideas that I've have aren't fully formed and I want peoples suggestions. So please help me to create an even better site!

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Doh! ^

by Paul - Thursday 25 February 1999 @ 07:45

I've just fixed the link for one of the e1m5 duel by odd. You can now download it!

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Big ass bunch of reviews. ^

by Paul - Wednesday 24 February 1999 @ 07:44

Heres a mid-week surprise. Some reviews! 10 infact. 6 by me and 4 by Pingu. A big thank you to Pingu for helping me out. This clears nearly all the maps I have to review.

The Fat Controller has released his latest map in the RC series. Its called Grader Spader (500Kb). If you want to take a peek at some screenies of it while you download it go here. As is consistent with the series its done up a different style from his previous maps (yeah ok, RCDM4 and 5 use the same textures, so sue me!). As the Fat Controller puts it, its a E1M5-textured keep of four chambers. Pretty big map. Also why isn't his site hosted somewhere? Like Terrafusion. I mean, he has done loads of maps, more than some people who've recently joined there. Anyway, just a thought.

I've made further adjustments to the Netscape frontend to the site. The top bar wouldn't mess up on resizing the window. I've changed the index so it works with exact pixel sizes and not %. That was causing part of the problem. As far as the problems with the curved corners on the left and right (I just spotted them) hand side, I don't know what causes that little gap to be there. Suggestions on how to fix it would be very welcome.

Work on the archive changes continues. Heres my plans on what I'm going to do. I'm going to write a little program which will read in a file of reviews. Split them up, give each map review a seperate file, then go and create an index of all the files in the archive. Which should then create various HTML pages which have a listing of all reviews by author, map title etc.

I've also made what I hope to be the final adjustments to the page. I've worded it in such a way that its easily understandable... I hope =P. I've also added a link the links page.

The Q3A movie I mentioned yesterday is pretty cool, theres some really impressive stuff in there. Players doing backflips, things like that. This footage was released especially for the release of the Pnetium 3 chip. Now quite how a Pentium 3 will make much difference is beyond me. From what I've heard the only change the P3 has is these 70 new game enhancing instructions (like AMD's 3D-Now!) and it runs at a lower voltage. Anyway back to movie, the voice over is a bit annoying. Actually, its very annoying. Not because its a twangly American voice but because they mispronounce id software. The bloke says id as one word instead of like two letters, i.d. Geeesh.

Scary has got some new shots of Quake 3 Arena. Cool stuff. Not really had time to look at them properly. Some bad news as well, Webdog has ceased active development. Kind of unfortunate but there you go.

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