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Fingers [John Carmack] [American McGee] [John Cash] [Christian Antkow] [Brian Hook] [Paul Steed] [Paul Jaquays] [Todd Hollenshead] [Barrett Alexander]

Hello to all you news people out there. I, Drywall, am mailing you on behalf of my fellow webmasters Mr? and ShadowStalker, to announce the opening of our new website, Inside 3D. Formerly known as Inside.QC, we have expanded, and now we'll be covering Quake, Hexen 2, Half-Life, Quake 2, Unreal, Duke4Ever. For the most part, the staff will remain the same, however by mid september, we expect to merge with Fatty McGee and his site WM_Quake2, so he will cover Quake2 editing for us. We currently have an interview with Howard Roy of the KQP up, and many more are to follow. We will continue to maintain and add to our vast list of tutorials, and expand them for all the other new games. Ok, I guess that's enough :) Hope everyone likes it...the url is http://www.planetquake.com/iqc/index.html. You HAVE to put the index.html for now, tho I'm not sure why.

After long discussions with Chris Hecker I've decided to try and use more industry standard extensions instead of trying to do stuff specific for Quake2. Right now we're interested in the following types of extensions:

- multitexture
- paletted texture
- particle systems

For the multitexture stuff the SGI stuff looks like it may not suck, but until I mess with it some I may not know for sure.

I'd like to use the glColorTableEXT that is part of the OpenGL for Win32. I'm going to talk to 3DLabs and 3Dfx as to why they each did not support this extension to make sure there aren't some technical foibles behind it.

I think that we may be able to use the SGI glPointParameterfSGI extension for particle systems. It's not _ideal_ for what we'd like to do, but I think it's good enough. It allows us to specify a min and max size for scaled particles, and it allows us to change the size of particles via the standard glPointSize API. It also scales over distance, etc.

Next week I'll mess with this stuff some more, since the software renderer is pretty much up to speed. I'll also be spending the end of next week getting SciTech Software's MGL code reintegrated into Quake2.

If you haven't read it yet, be sure to check out;

The Computer Gaming World Quake II Preview which appears in their September issue.

They rated Quake II the "Best of Show" at E3.

I already use the Win95 Plus pack Dial up Networking server to play quake as it is much faster than playing through the quake dialup setup :)
This is mainly due to windows 95 having specific drivers for your modem which quake does not. I played against a friend at 33.6 with compression enabled the other night with 3 reaper bots each and it was smooth (Ping = 80 - 100). You can also use it to send and receive files, but as usual Microsoft does not include much help for that (Or any of it, I spent hours on Microsoft's site but found JACK SHIT!)..

To set it up, first it needs to be installed from the plus pack obviusly. In Control panel/network/identification set up your name and a workgroup name (use a easy name). This allows both players to use WinPopup.exe that comes with Windows 95 to talk to each other before they start quake etc to decide what patches they want to play etc... winpopup.exe must be loaded to receive messages. The person acting as the server needs to go to open up the Dial Up Networking folder, then Click Connections/Dial-Up server on the menu. Then click Allow Caller Access. Add a comment if nessicary. Then set the server type as "PPP : Windows 95, Windows NT 3.5, Internet" this will connect as Windows 95 protocol (IPX).
The other person then dials in, logs on as a name (It does not matter). You then run quake or whatever (QUAKE/QUAKE 2) one person starts a IPX server and the other person joins.

Welp, you put up the stuff from American, so I figured I'd send along something I asked Cash about a while ago regarding rotation in Q2:

I asked:

For brushes that rotate, is there a specific class just for rotating things like func_rotate or something or is rotation just another way that brushes that can move (like func_doors and func_trains) can move? I can understand it'd be easier to make a seperate class like func_rotate for brushes that only rotate and nothing else, but it would be cool to have anything that moves be able to rotate... particularly I'm thinking about making func_trains that first move from one point to another, then rotate, then move etc. Just curious about how rotating is implemented. Thanks.

He replied:

Right now it's seperate classes, but I'm looking to see if we should change it to be part of the more general classes.

Moebius of Dark Requiem

> Will the GL complement of Quake 2 be using 8-bit textures like Jack
> Matthews is implementing in glQuake and glQuakeworld ? He claims
> the texture thrashing is much less now that he's using 8-bit.

Yes, as an option. It also supports true 16 bit images, which would make art creation for a GL-only TC much easier.

John Carmack

Friday: Got five monsters into the game this week, and hope to have another one programmed in later on tonight. They are really looking great.

We'll be doing a code merge tommorow night, so hopefully, we'll be able to start placing this batch of monsters into the game then. Really looking forward to seeing what kind of evil AI John Cash has cooked up in the past few days.

Things are moving right along and everyone's really busting their asses.

With respect to the batch of screenshots that I released today, I just wanted to answer some questions I saw people had on 3DNet #quake.

frame1: The monster you see is monster_infantry (aka: Paul Steed). The weapon is the rocket launcher. This is one of Tim Willit's base levels which appear near the start of the game.

frame3: The monster is monster_soldier (There are three different variations of this monster, with varying degrees of toughness and each of them has a different attack. The weapon that the player is holding is the grenade launcher. This is one of American's levels, The Factory, where the aliens chop up captured humans and turn them into cyborgs =)

frame5: a monster_soldier with his back turned to you. This is one of Tim Willit's base levels which appear near the start of the game. Notice the gorgeous sky with the mountain range in the background.

Hope this answers your questions. Back to work for me...

> Hello! You mention incredible player limits in your .plan file but
> these figures are for Ethernet. How many Players On A 28.8 Could
> Log into the Server? This is very important becouse of the
> modification I and a group of other people am considering which is
> . Also, will Quake 2 Feature Server Hopping?

The scalability is not limited by total numbers. If they don't all come into the same room, you are fine.

John Carmack

I mailed JC... 200 is Just A Sample #. As long as you dont have more than 16 players affecting you(on the screen, making noises within audible range, hurting you) then you wont be notified of the existance of the other players unless you ask so theoretically...With A Big Map You can have 2000 players on a modem game....(Yes thats right if there not in the same places)...we did some premlim calcs. 200 Players Requires A Server Capable of 10 MPS.