I've whipped up a Q2 mod page for my simple mods and would like to know if you'd put a link on your page to it, or at least mention it?

the url is
http://home.on.rogers.wave.ca/rhaskett

I've got a grapple hook, personal teleporter and of course, deathmatch messages...i see that Orange guy beat me to the punch with his configurable messages. That was my next enhancement for that mod, to add INI support...i am still going to do that, but i am also going to write a little windows program that will allow you to easily set up your custom messages with a pretty interface, instead of having users hack at an ini file (which they could potentially screw up).

Thanks for anything you can do for me.
Rob ( FLAvour )

Okay everbody, stop freaking out over the gl_swapinterval bug, it is not a big issue as far as I know. There is a misconception that this bug will cause people to lose framerate, and that is NOT true under most circumstances. As far as I know, the FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL environment variable that 3Dfx users are setting OVERRIDES their implementation of the OpenGL wglSwapIntervalEXT extension. This means that if you are setting FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL at all that this bug should not affect you. The default for this value is "1", which is also the default for the cvar in Quake2. The only way you could "lose" performance is if you inadvertently set the Quake2 cvar to something high, like "5", and forgot about it while playing. Even then I believe that the cvar is not archived, but I don't remember exactly (I'll check when I get back into the office).

So there's no reason to panic. The bug is very simple: if you set the cvar within Quake2, then change video modes (or switch refs, i.e. anything that causes a reload of the OpenGL DLLs), whatever value you set for gl_swapinterval will be ignored.

And, as I said earlier, if you set FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL, that should override the Quake2 cvar altogether.

Quake II Rocks On

"Sequels aren't supposed to be different-just better. This week, id software's follow-up to its wildly successful Quake hits the shelves, and it does not disappoint. While battling your way through 39 levels of Quake II (1-800-idgames), pay attention to sounds of running water, footsteps, grunts and distant firefights. Even without a 3D accelerator card, the murky underwater views are realistic and the effect of shooting throught translucent glass is beautiful. But don't worry, there's still plenty of violence (the game has been banned in Germany). Your arsenal of weapons includes a chain-gun with spinning Gatling barrels, and a railgun, which fires a projectile that tears through alien Stroggs until it hits a wall. Slay bells ring..."

Bug workaround: Zombies not clearing after a client disconnects (Network play) Add "+set zombietime -1000" to the command line of a dedicated server. This will clear out zombies after a client disconnects. This will be fixed properly in the point release. Thanks to John Cash for letting me know about this workaround.

Simply Computers

Watford Electronics

How to make skins using Photoshop 4.0:

You will need q2.act

If you open up a Quake2 skin in Photoshop you will notice that it loads up as a grayscale mess. To make it look like the skin should, follow these steps.

1. Load up the .pcx file
you will notice that the image loads up in grayscale mode.

2. Change the mode to Indexed Color(Image|Mode|Indexed Color)

3. Now to load the proper palette go to Color Table(Image|Mode|Color Table)
Now a large set of boxes will pop up. Click on the Load button and select the q2.act file then click OK.

4. Now the skin should look as intended. To get the full editing capabilities of Photoshop, Change the image to RGB Color Mode(Image|Mode|RGB Color)
Now you can edit the skin freely

-----

To convert the skin back to a usable Quake2 Skin: (Assuming your image is in RGB Mode)

1. First you must switch your image to the q2.act palette by changing to Indexed Color Mode(Image|Mode|Indexed Color). A small dialog will come up. In the Palette combobox chose Custom, and set Dither to None, then click OK. An other dialog will come up, click Load, select the q2.act file, and click OK. (Now the image is in the 256 color limited pallet that quake uses. You may notice that your image's colors have change some what. This is because the Quake2 skins can only use a certain set of colors.)

2. Now you have to get the skin back to the grayscale jumble. Go to Color Table(Image|Mode|Color Table) a palette will pop up. In the Table combobox chose Grayscale and click OK.

3. Now that you have your proper jumble, put the image into Grayscale Mode(Image|Mode|Grayscale) It will ask you if you want to discard color information, chose yes.

4. Save your file in the .pcx format in c:\quake2\baseq2\players\male\ or c:\quake2\baseq2\players\female\(depending on the gender of your Skin and where you installed Quake2).

If you play Multiplayer everyone you are playing with must have your skin.

Adam Padron(DataHead on EFnet)

Delete config.cfg in your X:/quake2/baseq2 (X=the drive where Quake2 is at). Copy the config.cfg here to that directory, and start up Quake2 in your new audio.

The project is a very ambitious partial conversion, about which no details can yet be revealed, but suffice it to say that it will be on the scale of "Zerstoerer: Testament of the Destroyer" by nihilism Unlimited or Steve Fukuda's "Apocalypse" project.

Full details about this project, which will be terraFORMA's crowning achievement to date, are available on the website at: http://terraforma.stomped.com

-Ryan "BabelFish" Freebern, coordinator

I uploaded some files to help you all get started with creating player models. You can view them in TexPaint (which John released the source for yesterday), and if you have a 24bit GL card, you can even use TexPaint to paint on the models.

They are located at;

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/pmodels_12_12.zip

I've included the base.tri from each the male and player model along with one LBM to get you started with, as well as one of their crouching and standing frames.

I was also going to upload the conversion utility I hacked together that we used to convert maps from Quake I to Quake II format, but after giving it futher thought, it was really a moot point. QE4 can read in Quake I maps, and you are going to need to retexutre all your maps anyway (My program didn't handle that as all our QI format maps already contained Q2 texture names). The program didn't handle converting entities from one type to another because we didn't need that functionality (again, everything in the QI format maps were already using the new Q2 entities.)

December 13, 1997

To All you who have played Quake 2. Visit the Mirror, and submit your editorial. We will post everything related to Quake 2. Good or Bad, Negative or Positive. Don't Just read the News, Reflect the News.