i2e2 Sanctioning means that i2e2 has approved the tournament format and rules, and that players will earn i2e2 Rankings Points by participating. According to points totals calculated from the major StarCraft events in recent history, X'Ds~Grrrr... is in the lead, dominating the rest of the StarCraft field. He will be attending the France event, along with Thor and about 120 other contestants.

In addition to points earned for individual wins over both unranked and ranked players, points will be awarded according to the finishing place of each competitor. And to dispel any concerns about one player just attending every event and racking up points, only the top 6 events for any player will count towards their total points.

The significance of the rankings will be to determine the top players in the StarCraft community who will automatically qualify for special invitational tournaments hosted by i2e2 in mid-late 2000. Anyone interested in registering with i2e2, or interested in more information about either Event Sanctioning, registration for players, rankings, or general information about i2e2 may visit the i2e2 web site. Full rankings and guidelines will be posted in the very near future.

sc.org

Direct3D

One TNT2 user running the 2.08 detenator drivers sent a whole lot of screenshots with extreme mipmap corruption - textures were totally messed up in the distance but were perfect when you got up close to them. This went away when he upgraded to the newly released 3.53 drivers on [007]Nvidia's site.

AI

Although Steve added new unique configurations for individual bots, the user.ini file didn't ship with the new configurations in place (which explains why you probably won't notice any difference).

The many gang related fights that ravaged this particular area have already proven this section of the city slums to be an bloody battle ground. The Liandri organizers are expecting this to be the case once again, only this time, as a tournament domination arena.

This is definitely where SoF in limited. The CPU has to perform lots of calculations to work out where to place a vertex on the screen. This can either be done by the driver or by the game. We use the OpenGL transforming for ease, and although it maybe a little slower on a vanilla machine, it enables the driver writers to optimise for SSE or 3dNow! instructions transparently, and allows us to automagically take advantage of hardware T&L. The GeForce acts as the equivalent of a parallel Pentium processor running at about 2GHz (source : nVidia) which purely handles the transforming and lighting, thereby offloading a major chunk of work the CPU had to do to a custom much faster processor. In practice this means a much faster game.

The downside of this is you are limited by the transform speed of the card, so if you have a 3GHz processor in your machine, you may actually have a performance hit :) Then again, feeding the card enough verts to make this noticable would choke the AGP bus completely. I think I would be fairly confident in saying this will not be a problem for some time to come.

Direct3D

[addition to the first item on TNT1/2 etc with less than 128MB]: Update: I've just tried the newly released 3.53 Detenator drivers on my TNT2 machine, and played with all the D3D advanced options, and the drivers still appear to be page-locking around 16-20MB of physical RAM. If you find settings which improve the situation, please drop us an email at utbugs348@epicgames.com.

Networking

People are reporting netplay is laggier or they are experiencing more packet loss with this version. The netplay code has not been changed. This is because there are not that many servers running at the moment (200 vs over 400 before). Server operators *please* upgrade!

Audio

A3D weapon sounds are reported to be a lot more muffled sounding in A3D than in the previous release. We are looking into this.
The loud buzzing sound in the DM-MorpheusDemo map with 3D sound enabled is still there - sorry, we forgot to update this map for the demo release. The offending sound has been removed for the full version of the game.

Visuals

The "predator" style crosshair has a red box around it if you set your crosshair color to have any red in it. This corrupted texture has been fixed.

Source: Blues News

"The most popular exercise in the Ghost training regimen is scenario A11-X93, commonly referred to by trainees as "Nukes Away". In this scenario, Ghosts practice a variety of covert infiltration techniques while gaining the technical knowledge necessary for the proper guidance of field-standard tactical nuclear weapons. Since nuclear weaponry is too expensive to be used in live fire training, the exercise is performed using an extremely lifelike holoprojection simulation. The competition between the teams of Ghosts can be extremely intense, and all too commonly we see recruits spending what little leisure time they have inside the simulation, honing their skills."

-Commander Richard Walker

Age of Wonders takes place in a chaotic fantasy world teetering on the edge between darkness and light. At the start of the game, the Elven kingdom that had maintained a balance between good and evil has been shattered by the onslaught of a younger race called Man. The Elves survive and split into two factions, a mirror image of good and evil in conflict. In the campaign, the good Elves, called Keepers, seek to reestablish balance. The Cult of Storms seeks only Dark Elven supremacy. Meanwhile, ten other races strive to fill the power vacuum left by the sundered kingdom of Elves. Thus, this Age of Wonders is an age of war.

But games like Men in Black and Johnny Mnemonic stand as cautionary tales. This is not to say it can't be done. Aliens vs. Predator was a good example of a game that took movie monsters, combined them with game concepts, and succeeded in making an entertaining game that stands on its own merits. But why do so many good movies make bad games? Jan Lindner, vice president of research and development at Mindscape/Mattel, says, "Basically the two mediums are very different. Movies really tell one story one way to an audience. In games, it's told two ways, and translating between the two is where it fails."

Direct3D
* Some Rage FURY users are having problems with game in D3D. We are looking into this.

Input
* Some versions of the Intellimouse Explorer drivers don't allow you to bind the middle mouse button if DirectInput is enabled. We believe this is a driver issue - other games exhibit the same behavior. You can work around it by using the Intellimouse Explorer software to map a key (eg shift) to the middle mouse button and bind that key in UT.

UT Demo 348 Full Patch

UT Demo 348 Final Patch

The next release will be the full "demo" release for quake 3.
It will include bots and a new, simple level that is suitable for
complete beginners to play, as well as the existing q3test maps.

The timing just didn't work out right for another test before we
complete the game.

We plan on releasing the demo after code freeze, when the entire
game is in final testing, which will give us a few days time to
fix any last minute problems that show up before golden master.

No, I don't have an actual date when that will be.

From looking at various screenshots I first concluded that Revenant is little more than a graphics-rich Diablo spin-off. Then I had the chance to play it. Right from the start I was plunged into a detailed evolving storyline that had me, Locke D'Averam (the Revenant), being resurrected from the dead to rescue a powerful warlord's daughter. But Locke remembers nothing of his previous life, and must gather clues along the way. That's just the start. The inventive plot takes Locke through huge forests, haunted ruins, dark caves and much more.

The universe is home to some rather odd geological formations that create a rich tapestry for astrologers, whether professional or amateur. On 20th Century Earth, for example, people could swear that there was a face on the surface of Mars. The location of the rocks and the eerie placement of shadows made envisioned mouth and eyes seem all too real. A prominent mountain range on the planet of Uilel IV looks just like a snake winding its way across the surface of the planet. One of the strangest of these planetary anomalies is found on an island just off of the main continent on Mar Sara. Explorers who first saw the island mistook it for a gargantuan turtle -- initially a cause for great alarm. Closer inspection quickly revealed the true nature of the landmass, but to this day nearby residents still call the place "Turtle Island."

WON.net and Sierra Studios™ are holding the Half-Life®: Opposing Force® Live the Dream Tournament, hosted by Clan World Network,, beginning October 22, 1999. The tournament will be using the Bootcamp map from Valve's Half-Life®. The top four players from the tournament will spar for the championship title on November 10, 1999 at a live event in San Francisco, California. Championship players will compete using Half-Life: Opposing Force developed by Gearbox Software. This is the first time ever that consumers will have gotten a chance to see this new game in action.

Signups are already taking place http://www.clannetwork.com/.

Source: VE

The Last Command is a fully functional Nuclear Processing Station owned by the Liandri Corporation. This facility's system originated layout makes an ideal proving grounds for Capture the Flag Tournament matches. High tech voluminous industrial architecture paired with curving maintenance corridors means fighting here will require quick reaction times if your team plans on surviving.

The game puts the player in a classic 1930's pulp action adventure and creates a world of shadows, suspense and terror in which the paranormal and supernatural threaten mankind. To counteract these menaces, President Theodore Roosevelt created the Spookhouse, a special investigation bureau to which the player's character belongs. There are four global missions to tackle, a cemetery in France; a ruined castle in Germany; a small, Texas town; and the back-alleys of Chicago.

He will also be doing artwork, which is also very high quality. I see him as the next conceprt art guy for a large company, youll see his stuff tommorow.

* handle window close events properly
* enable r_displayRefresh selection and feedback on mac
* avoid AGEN_IDENTITY when CGEN_DIFFUSE_LIGHTING
* colorized railgun muzzle flash, impact flash, and mark
* exactly synced animating textures with waveforms and collapsed all explosion sequences into single shaders
* removed unneeded black pass on hell skies
* fixed grenades sticking to steep slopes
* scan for next highest fullscreen resolution when exact mode fails (fixes SGI flat panel failing to init)
* all cgame cvars now have a cg_ prefix (crosshair, fov, etc)
* clear clientinfo before parsing configstring
* make all feedback voiceovers share the same channel
* fixed nodraw curves
* fixed obits from shooter entities
* fixed chat char issue
* separate gentity_t fields into sharedEntity_t
* reintegrated q_mathsys with q_math
* cg_forcemodel also forces player sounds
* unknown cmd commands don't chat
* fixed strip order on text quads

At first glance, Age of Empires II still appears to operate very much like its predecessor. Each round revolves around collecting as many of the four basic resources (wood, food, gold and stone) as you can and using them to build an army to destroy your enemy. The units that you build this army out of are, with one new exception, still split into four basic types – cavalry, archers, infantry and siege engines. As you advance through the various ages, you'll have the power to improve each one of these four unit types with new technologies and training styles, but for the most part, they still serve the same purpose on the battleground as they did in the first game. And, as in the last title, these technologies are simply purchased with resources gathered from the surroundings rather than requiring any sort of scientist units or buildings.

* Multiplayer support over the Internet, LAN or modem
* Single-player gameplay, too!
* Play one of 3 'Mechs (Mad Cat, Bushwhacker or the Orion)
* 2 new multiplayer maps (The Gorge and Train Depot)
* Instant Action mode of "Battle Progression"
* Control up to 3 Lancemates in Instant Action
* Jump jets for your 'Mech
* Support for force feedback joystick
* Direct3D support

Overview War in Europe is a Multiplayer World War II based mod. In the game you have the ability to choose from either the Axis or Allied. You also have a menu in which you have the ability to choose a primary weapon which you will have until you decide to change. In order to obtain perticular weapons players must achieve a certain frag limit in which then the weapons will become available. Other features include a ranking system which can either promote players or demote players once again based on your "frag vs. death" status. So for example if your frag limit exceeds your death limit by 3 then you are promoted to Seargant.
Maps War in Europe features maps with various architexture ranging from the destroyed villages of Normandy to the bloody beaches of Omaha. Other maps include Nazi "Work Camps", V2 Rocket sites, ect ect. All will include true to life scenery that would have been common during the WW2 period.

Weapons Each team has a certain ammount of weapons that they have at their disposal, so Allied and Axis weapons are not usable by both sides. All weapons are modeled after historical World War 2 makes of small arms. Some of these include the American Standard M1 Garand and the German Mauser.

Future What lies ahead for this mod? You can expect to see more and better weapons as well as levels and other cool features.

The Meltdown begins with two days of single elimination rounds on October 23 and 24. The remaining teams will do battle on October 30 to determine the two co-champions - the Masters of the Clan Squad and the Masters of the InnerSphere. These four finalists will compete in the live finals on November 13 at GameWorks in Seattle, WA and ride away on 1999 Harley Davidson "Fatboy" motorcycles, valued at $18,000 each.

The busy bees at the CPL have announced that Illinois-based Impact Gaming Center has signed on to become yet another CPL Official Qualifying Center. Launched in Sept. 1995, Impact is the first computer gaming arena near St Louis, Missouri. The center has over a dozen computer stations, equipped with the latest Pentium III and Voodoo 3 technologies, as well as a high-speed T1 line. It is located at:

Impact Gaming Center
5801 Old Collinsville Road
Fairview Heights, IL 62208
618-624-0624

Flight Simulator 2000 has gone gold and is scheduled to start showing up on store shelves in the U.S. in mid-October and mid-November in Europe. For the first time, Microsoft is offering two versions of the product: a professional edition designed to meet the needs of flight simulation enthusiasts and pilots, and a regular version for new or more casual users.

Features include several new aircraft, such as the Concorde, the Boeing 777-300, the Mooney Bravo and the Raytheon-Beech King Air 350. The product also contains more than 21,000 airports worldwide, including cities such as London, Paris, Manhattan, Chicago and more. GPS provides point-to-point navigation, and the title utilizes the Jeppesen database of real navigation and airport information, used by pilots around the world. Users can also download current worldwide weather reports and have the simulator automatically duplicate those conditions in the simulation.

Ahh, nifty :p

* r_primitives 3 path for non-vertex array testing
* specify sex in model animation.cfg file
* proper dropping of failed bot inits
* removed identical pain sounds
* serverTime strictly increasing across levels
* added GL_DECAL multitexture collapse
* windowed mouse on mac
* fixed byte order issue with curve clipping on mac
* made com_defaultextension buffer safe
* fixed levelshot and added antialiasing to image
* don't clear bot names before kick message
* made servercommand sequences strictly increasing across
level changes
* unpause on vid_restart

Asheron's Call is a 3D online-only RPG built around the persistent world of Dereth. There's big trouble brewing in Dereth, as a magician named Asheron inadvertently opened a portal to another world. A vicious race known as the Olthoi rushed through, forcing Asheron's people - the Empyrean - to seek shelter in a hidden dimension. After helping the Empyrean escape, Asheron put out a call across time and space, looking for adventurers to come to Dereth and fight the Olthoi. There is more to the game's back story -much more, in fact - but from this basic setup you can see the premise: You enter the world as an adventurer answering Asheron's call.

Advanced Micro Devices plans to unveil today a new microprocessor that will compete with a new chip Intel named Monday, Reuters is reporting. The 64-bit SledgeHammer, designed to compete with Intel's new Itanium, represents a change in strategy for the company. Rather than copying Intel, AMD is introducing a chip that is not compatible with software written for chips made by its larger rival. Intel's Itanium is expected to debut in the second half of 2000, while AMD will not launch its chip until 2001.

FRAG 3 Registration Closes

How many deathmatchers can you fit into a phone booth? Gamesurge has learned that registration for FRAG 3's "Bring Your Own Computer" free-for-all has closed. People can still register online for the exhibitions, seminars, door prizes and other events. The dates for FRAG 3 are Friday, Oct. 29 through Sunday, Oct. 31.

A limited amount of non-registered attendees will be allowed on Sunday after 10:30 a.m. to view the tournament finals and participate in the now-famous giveaway. The cost of a Sunday only pass will be $12.00. FRAG 3 will not accept third-party free passes, discount passes or any others special passes that may have been issued at any previous CPL event. Children under the age of 12 can attend at no cost.

Well that is all for right now.I was lazy so I just cut and pasted it for ya viewing pleasure.

We know we have a very talented readership out there that is just teaming with inspiration of how to re-design this site! We are looking for any Graphics/Web-Design gurus out there that would like to give 24 Hour Gamer a whole new look. In exchange for the winning design, we will give the winner(s) their very own subdomain here at 24 Hour Gamer to host their site (yoursub.24hrgamer.com) and their very own stylish looking “@24hrgamer.com” e-mail address. So, if you think you might be interested, email us.

Both the Starcraft and Brood War Fall Season run through Dec 31, 1999. Get out there and make your mark in the Starcraft pantheon of great players!