For the bandwidth impaired, like me when I'm at Uni, you may want to use this version of the site. Its nothing special but loads a fair bit quicker.

Lots of other news has happened since my last proper update. RedHat Linux 6.0 is released today. I'm thinking about ordering it. I have a love/hate relationship with Linux, whilst there are alot of things I like about it, theres an equal amount of things I hate about it. Maybe this version will remove some of those problems. I hear its got TNT support...

Speaking of Linux, the next version of the Q3ATest will be out for Linux soon. The Mac version came out at the weekend much to annoyance of thousands of PC owners. The reasoning for this release pattern is sound, at least when it does arrive we'll have a more stable version to play with.

Gandhi has moved over to PlanetQuake. Smooth looking site. Pingu has got some screenies of his latest masterpiece, Atlantis 2 up. Well worth a look. The good old Qboard has had a change in colours, looks more like the Terrafusion site. Which reminds me, thank you Mr Sarcasm (Renegade) for giving the site a mention in the news. Theres something extremely bizarre happening at Stecki's site. The entire site seems to have disappeared and replaced with some cryptic message. To see it you'll have to do a select all because its hidden.

The Shugashack has had a make over which looks cool, pity it now takes almost as long as PlanetQuake to load. The latest POTD on PlanetQuake is just amazing, you've just got to have this picture on your Windows desktop.

Got hold of the latest issue of Edge (Next Generation in the US). Theres an interesting article on the death of the Nintendo 64. I'm glad I bought one of them =). Also Next Gen Online has put up the interview they did with John Carmack, which was in last months issue. Very interesting read.

I bought Jimmy White Cueball 2 last Friday. Very impressive game. I'm not to hot on the snooker, but I've given the computer a good thrashing playing pool. There are loads of little secret areas. I spotted one which is a mouse hole behind a clock. Walking in there turned on a cheat for all players.

I also had a look at the website for Ridge Racer Type 4. They've gone a little OTT on the Shockwave me thinks. It well done though and it looks just like the interface in the game, with music and all.

I should be updating tomorrow with a fresh patch of Quake reviews and maybe some more Quake 2 reviews.

I thought I'd do all the review requests I had as to give me some spare time but just as I was writing this news update I got two more requests in, dammit! Speaking of creating reviews I'm just finishing off a newer version of the MPQ Input program. I've been using it to create all this weeks reviews and it certains speeds up the time it takes to do them.

Also we now have the Quake 2 reviewers sorted out. I'll introduce them later this week. They've got a backlog of maps to work through first so please DON'T send any requests it. I'll let you know as to when you can do.

Skorpion has started up new contest at his site. Its called the 'Omicron Duel Challenge'. The idea is pretty simple. You record a demo of yourself racking up kills on one Headshots maps, Bless To Kill. A chart is kept of the highest scores and whoever does get the highest score wins. The prize is a packet of dry roasted peanuts and a pint of John Smiths. Anyway, Skorpion has come up with a good set of rules for the event and I may even have a go.

Something I must mention is that Björn Aneer (a.k.a. cyBeAr) now has a website. Looks pretty good.

I just read about the now defunct GLDoom project. Sad news. I would really have liked to have seen it finished. Seems something weird happened for Bruce to lose all copies of it, including backups. Well I hope what he works on next will be just as good.

I noticed on Scary's a link for a review of the new Celeron 466 chip. They got that little monkey overclocked to 525! Anyway, I saw the 3D Mark 99 and CPU Mark 99 scores and thought I'd see what mine was as a way of comparison. I did my tests at 800x600 (and also note they used two 12Mb Voodoo2's in SLI mode, whilst I used a 16Mb Riva TNT) and heres the results :
 

Bench Mark Type	Celeron 466 at 525	Pentium III 450
3D Mark 99	3646	4155
CPU Mark 99	4675	6978
Game 1 - Race (FPS)	39.2	40.7
Game 2 - First Person (FPS)	34.1	42.5

I've probably dug myself into a hole with that, but I thought it was interesting to see the difference.

Slyde from the Mappers Monastery dropped me a line to say they've moved. Theres a good review of Gonzo's Warfare 2 - The Quick and the Dead. Whats funny though is the maps score, it gets 7 out of 10 and if you divide it by two (to bring it down to MPQ's scoring) it gets 3.5, which is exactly what Pingu gave it...

A new version of Rocket Arena has been released. Its now up to version 2.5 and includes 9 new maps with 57 arenas. For the full download its only 41Mb. I think I'll rush off and download it... actually no I won't.  I've never liked Rocket Arena. I don't like the idea of having to wait your turn to play (since I was crap at it and kept dieing) because whilst I'm doing nothing the phone bill is nicely mounting up. If I really wanted to waste my money I'd buy an iMac. =). Oh boy am I gonna get flamed for that..

Ridge Racer Type 4 was released last Friday and I went and bought a copy. First impressions were good, nice smooth interface, good graphics (for the Playstation) and the usual crap cheesy music. After a couple of days play my opinion is that its lacking something. The updated engine with light flares and reflective car bodies is cool, but I think its the tracks. Whilst in some regards they are better, they don't have the visual impact that Rage Racer's did. That say if you're after more of the same Ridge Racer action with better graphics, then I'd highly recommend it.

In my little break a fair bit seems to have happened. Ztn has moved from Terrafusion to PlanetQuake. Unsure as to why but he has. Ramshackle is now updated daily and if you visit there you'll probably find no need to read the rest of my update =). Headshot seems to have got out the hammer and nails and redone his site. Very smooth and all you Netscape users beware!

Yesterdays POTD on PQ is pretty funny. Must have been a bit of a ball ache creating the picture. A previous POTD was Gensurf which looks like a very interesting program. You can make curvy surfaces which look, to an extent, realistic. If only they'd make a version for Quake!

Also spotted a new map editor called Tread. Everything works well until I try to make something or import a map file. The program then falls over.

Theres an article on the old days of Quake which is well worth a read. Its a long article and I would have liked a zipped version of it but then thats just me.

A site that was mentioned on Terrafusion a while ago was the Mappers Monastery. Interesting site. There are reviews for what seems like the majority of Quake engined games out there. Looks like they've got their work cut out in keeping up with everything!

QuArK is now up to version 5.9. I had a little hand in that what with finding some bugs in the beta of it.

The Half-Life TeamFortress Classic patch was released not so long back. The amount of problems I had downloading it was unbelievable! I tried to download it on the day it was released and to no avail. I tried every link Planet Half-Life had and no luck. I finally got the patch 4 days later on the Sunday. Was it worth the 21Mb download? Well, yes it was... from what I've played it was a real blast. Also since they've released the SDK as well we'll hopefully start to see some bots.

Peej is on the fourth version of Strafin6 which I'm looking forward to. Also of note is that he's had a little Q&A with id software's Paul Jaquays. Peej asked some good questions and what I found funny was that it was on stuff that has not been asked before.

Gonzo has updated with some really cool pictures of a map hes working on. I hope he finishes it!

F^&£$!G network!!! I got hold of the lovely 3com OfficeConnect Network kit. Installing the cards in the 3 machines and connecting them to the hub was easy, but the real problem seems to be Windows 98 inability to recognise other machines. The cards are set up just fine and hub seems to know the cards are there. When Windows boots the little traffic lights on the hub flash but when Windows loads nothing happens. Dead. The Network Neighbour seems to knackered as well.  I'm really annoyed and would like suggestions on what to do. Destroying the equipment is not an option =).

Something I forgot to do yesterday was upload the news from last month which has now been archived in the Old News section.

About the Quake reviews, well I lied, I've just not had chance to get them done. I had more work than I expected to do. I should, all things being equal, have a few reviews up by Wednesday/Thursday of this week.

They'll be a slight change in the review layout when they do arrive. I've started to make changes to how its set out, not how its reviewed, but that all reviews will have their own page. I wrote a program which we just enter all the details of a review and it creates the HTML page for us. No messing about in Composer etc... From here all reviews will eventually be split up, not an easy task given the amount, but it will happen. This will mean I can create indexes which just let you select a review or archived review by map name, author etc.. It could be a month or so though before this system is in place. This will then help me when we go over to a another set up, which I explain next...

Monsto is in charge of something which is going to change how the reviews here will, eventually, be done. The idea he came up with is this. We put a web board on the site, we then create a thread and at the top of thread is a map review. You can then add your own comments and thoughts on the review or on what you think of the map. Now this is something which, to my knowledge, has not been done and I think it will be extremely interesting. Its not going to happen overnight, its going to take a while. Now I'd like to know what you think of this idea. So email me with comments.

Ramshackle has had a face lift. When I loaded up the site yesterday I thought I was at Peek's site before the graphics appeared! Anyway, it looks damn cool and you should pop by because you can download an updated version of one of ztn's Quake 2 maps, Painkiller II.

Speaking of Peek hes just released a beta of a DM maps he's working on.

You've probably read about the delays in the Quake 3 Arena test. Well that came as a surprise. Not that I WANT IT NOW or anything. Something else I was looking forward to was Team Fortress Classic for Half-Life. To be honest I was never a fan of it for Quake, I thought it was a mess, but the H-L version looks professionally done. Oh well, I'll just have to wait...

Other crappy news is that the glDoom project on indefinite hold. Dammit.

I missed out on doing my own April Fools gag, I woke up after dinner time so if I'd have pulled one of I'd have been the fool. I was disappointed to not see Redwood do any April Fools jokes, last year he did a shed load of them. Even sCary didn't bother. Blue did have some but the idea is not to tell you, you're meant to fall for them. I mean listing them under an April Fools section was a bit daft. The cruellest gag I though was ztn's saying he'd released ztndm7. Git! To console myself I think I'll go and buy a force feedback mousepad.

I got an email earlier this week from someone called "Doug Burmeister". You asked a load of questions, which I answered. Anyway point is I emailed you back and it bounced. I'd just like to know your proper email address, I tried [email protected].

In what spare time I had I re-installed Unreal to see how it would run on my new set up. On a fresh install the thing jerked a bit, but I updated to v220 and it runs just fine (with everything on highest settings). I'm actually enjoying playing DM against the bots. The maps are crap mind you, but it is fun.