Damn you! McDonald’s, damn you! I’ll never eat your food again! Or at least not until I get off work.

You know that 5 billion dollar lawsuit that the parents of the Columbine victims have filed against 25 video game companies? It looks like Eidos has been dropped from the lawsuit. Apparently – get this – the way they decided who to sue was that they went through the belongings of the killers and anything attached to anything they owned got sued. Eidos got sued because they found the box for the PC port of Final Fantasy and so Eidos makes the list. Of course, Eidos didn’t make the game – they just ported and published it – Square (of Japan) developed the game. However they decided that since Final Fantasy didn’t have any guns in it they’re cool. Guess it’s lucky that there weren’t any Tomb Raider games in their room. How about this – be glad your kids weren’t software pirates. Oooh – there’s a good question: if they only found pirated games would they even be able to sue? “Your game set my kid off – I’m suing you!” “Your kid stole our game – we’re suing you!” Even if those two hadn’t killed themselves the game companies would still get sued – those kids don’t have that kind of money.

Today is the first day of Freshman Orientation Week in the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M. FOW is where all the cadets who are incoming as freshmen get to come to campus a week early so that they can get fitted for uniforms, so that they can get haircuts (the guys, anyway), and so that they can get yelled at a lot. The idea is to get the “WTF?” mostly out of the way before class starts. In addition, without fail a certian number of incoming freshmen will suddenly have the epiphany that they don’t want to be in this Corps thing at all and they can politely and quietly leave before all the real fun starts (and hopefully before the haircut). Ironically, six years ago today was the Sunday before FOW for me, so six years ago today I was sick out of my mind and hated my life. I love FOW these days – gives me a laugh to remind myself of what I looked and acted like, and how badly I just wanted to go home.

This means then that Friday is the six year anniversary of the release of Windows 95. Not that that means anything.

So my adventures in DirectX have been foiled/delayed by the fact that the Direct3D samples won’t run – they either tell me they can’t create a Direct3D device or I don’t have enough video RAM. Now, this is kinda rediculous – every Direct3D anything runs on my system, and the people in this thread I started tell me all should be obee kaybee, but still no go. I figured it was a “rollback from WinXP” issue, since I’ve had some other problems, but a reformat/reinstall didn’t do the trick. Oh well, at least the other things I noticed seem to be okay now.

The part of the reformat/reinstall I hate is not the reformat/reinstall, nor is it the fear that you didn’t back up something important on the drive you have to reformat – it’s the reinstalling of everything. This wouldn’t be such a big deal, if I didn’t have so much shit. Office 2000,Visual Studio, FrontPage 2000, Corel Draw 7 (don’t laugh! it still works!), Adobe Acrobat 4.0 (not the reader), Nero, The stuff that came with my DVD drive, the drivers for my mouse, the drivers for the Zip Drive, the million or so little utilites, it’s annoying. I miss the old DOS days where you could just copy the contents of a directory – no registry, no shared DLL’s, no system directories. It was nice. And what I really hate is those games that don’t need to be reinstalled, but they think they do. Quake 3 runs more or less like the old Quake and DOOM did – you install it and it places an entry in your control panel to be uninstalled. Now if you reformat your hard drive you can still run Quake 3, but if you need to install a patch or the Team Arena mission pack it says you don’t have Quake 3 installed. The fuck you don’t! But since it’s not “installed”, it’s just “there” you have to reinstall it over your old installation. Then you can patch it. Annoying.

With any luck I can finally tinker with V12 and DirectX tommorow night.

Oh shit – you mean Outlook 2000 has a bug in it? Quick! Alert the media. Wait, too late.

Yeah, so I got one of those Zip drives yesterday. Well, that’s not entirely accurate, ViaTexas got a Zip drive yesterday. I got the USB Powered Zip 250 model – the one that doesn’t even need to plug into the wall. It r0x0rs. Yeah, I know everyone got one of these things seven years ago when they were all the rage, but I’m slow. So I fire up this little baby and I’m fairly surprised by it’s performance – the instruction manual said that if possible you should not use other USB devices simultaneously. Well, my mouse is USB, so no go there – maybe if I don’t touch it. Well I fire up the Iomega Backup program, which I figured was just a frontend for copying stuff. I select a few directories, being sure to keep it under 250MB when I notice the preferences. I check them out and they tell me that it can compress the files. Well great but most of what I have is ZIP files, which are probably as compressed as they’re going to get, so I’m not too hopeful. I tell it to start and then I head to bed. As soon as I lay down I realize I need to do something so I go do that and then I check on the Zip drive – it’s transferring 36MB a minute – it’s going to be finished in no time. So I head to bed – and an hour later I get a phone call, a job in the nightly accounting feed blew up and I have to unfuck it. Only it’s so bad it extends beyond what I know to do, and beyond what my team mate knows how to do, so we call up the head guy and he says it’s so bad that he has to restore the nightly backup and we’ll have to attack it in the morning. Wow – lucky for me it wasn’t something I screwed up. Some kid had too many transactions for the program – it tops out at 650 and he had 666. Scary. So while I’m waiting on the head dude to get back to me on what this is going to entail I check the Zip disk. It’s only half full – it literally got the 2.1:1 compression it was stating. Also, it compresses the whole thing to a file, so not the blind copy I was expecting. On the one hand, this isn’t what I’m looking for – the idea behind this is the fact that I need something to update a database to a big removable disk. However, this backup dealie is nice, so I fire up a new backup of 357MB worth of stuff. This morning I check on it and it got down to like 140someoddMB. Cool. Me likey the Zip disk. Plus Iomega for some reason has started making its 250MB Zip disks in a “U” shape – presumably because it helps to avoid confusion with the 100MB disks.

Tonight I’m going to embark on some adventures with the DirectX SDK.

Hey real quick, if you happened to read yesterday’s post yesterday, check it again – somehow it got truncated in Blogger. The fixed post is below.

Okay, so time for my QuakeCon wrapup. Like the last time I went (1999) it was pretty dang cool – but it was also not nearly as cool as if I had brought my own system.

This year I went with my wife Wendy and some of her gamer cousins, the aforementioned Moe and Robert. However, the first day (Friday) it was just me and my wife. So we get there and we get our little name tags, placing our names on them. Then we step into the BYOC room. It’s much bigger than last time – the size of a couple of gymnasiums. She immediately kept apologizing to me that we hadn’t planned well enough to bring our PC’s (or perhaps just mine) but I assured her it was alright. Next we stepped into the room with the exhibits and displays. Immediately I was drawn to the table under the large banner reading “DOOM – Game Boy Advance” where they had four GBA’s networked together running the GBA port of DOOM. While the screenies I’ve seen of this port looked crappy to alright, I can tell you this much – this port kicks ass in the flesh. While it can’t really hold a candle to some of the recent Win32 ports with higher resolutions, it works really well. One thing though – neither myself nor anyone who was around when I was fiddling with it (some of which were wearing Activision T-shirts – the DOOM GBA publisher) could get Multiplayer working. Oh well – I’m sure they’ll either iron it out or it will become obvious with the inclusion of a manual. I’ll tell you this much – money permitting the day they come out with that port I’m picking up four GBA’s, four copies of DOOM GBA (this game’s too big to do the “one cart” thing), and a link cable. Yes, you’re invited.

Next up was Return to Castle Wolfenstein. My lone disappointment with this game is that it’s swastika free (as far as I can tell). I guess it’s because in a multiplayer game having someone with a Swastika be the winner is a dangerous precedent (the original Wolfenstein had no multiplayer). Not that I like swastikas, mind you – but killing Nazi’s without them just isn’t as much fun. I bet they still can’t sell the game in Germany as it is. They had four PC’s running the single player version, and twelve or so networked ones running a multiplayer “Axis Vs. Allies” game (think Counter-Strike in WWII). Very cool – and very well done. Also, Raven had two PC’s running Soldier of Fortune II. Lots of good old carnage.

Then for some reason my wife and I took a Discreet seminar. Discreet is the company who spun off of Autodesk and now handles the 3D Studio MAX product. They were giving seminars on how to use GMAX, a product which is a subset of 3DSMAX. The idea (I think) is that a game developer pays however much Discreet’s cost is and buys GMAX to be used on their game. They then can write level and model exporters for GMAX and distribute it (with those exporters only) free to their end users. So we went to the “Character Modeling” seminar and my wife gave up at some point. I was barely able to keep up, and even then I had the horns on the wrong side of the thingy’s head. Oh well.

After lunch we waited for the id press conference and the Carmack talk. My wife is bored out of her mind at this point. Couple that with the fact the press conference was late, the people around us were “unusual”, and the fact that the smelly guy next to her couldn’t stop staring with his creepy beady little eyes at whatever breasts were around (read: not that many at QuakeCon) and she was slowy becoming miserable. I pointed out John Carmack with his wife Anna Kang (not sure if that’s still her last name) as they walked by to which my wife was shocked that they looked so normal. So finally they let us in and we all get to sit down. Todd Hollenshead (CEO) gives a little schpeil and then shows some video footage of Quake, Quake II and Quake III, the last of which was the Team Arena teaser again. He retorts, “I guess you’ve all seen that before,” which gets laughter from everyone but my wife, who hadn’t. Then they announce Quake IV, outsourced to Raven. Looks like that rumor was right.

Then they announce that their unannounced game is untitled and is a “multiplayer experience not based on an existing property” but not a MMORPG. Ok, cool. Next.

Next is the DOOM III demo. It looks badass. It has all the stuff from MacWorld and more. No gameplay or sound yet. Also no title. Damn. But it looks cool. Then comes a scene with a dead guy on the floor with his guts being feast upon by a demon, complete with blood curdling down the drain. Great id, just fucking great. I have to justify that the game industry is not full of evil violent school-shooting shit every day to some people and you go and pull something like that. Suffice it to say Wendy was not amused. To their credit it looked more like they were going for that Resident Evil, Silent Hill horror movie feel (as opposed to the more ominous Hitman feel) and they stated that this probably wasn’t going into the final game, but it was still a gruesome sight.

Carmack followed that with a talk. Surprisingly, I could keep my head above water, which is more than I can say for the crowd which ranged from enthralled to filtering out to sleeping. Carmack of course is going on about everything he feels like talking about, no structure, no goal, he just goes on and on. It’s like listening to a genius on the Hawking level – if you’re looking for someone to sell you something, move along, but if you want to listen to one of the few geniuses in the game industry just go on about whatever, Carmack’s the guy. His lone fallacy is his shrill, nasal voice and a habit of being just a little too phoentic at places. I didn’t notice it too much (I heard him speak two years ago), but my wife couldn’t stand it. Then there was the usual Q&A session.

The next day the cousins joined us, and Wendy brought a book. We had noticed that almost everyone had their handles on their tags instead of their names, so I wrote “Schnapple” on mine and Wendy wrote “Mrs. Schnapple”. We attended Paul Jaquays’ “Trash my Map” session where the id mapper critiqued people’s Quake III levels – not so much on style or content, buyt mainly for technical aspects and their use (or overuse) of polygons – interesting insight into what level designers have to do to get levels everyone can run. Then we toured the joint, playing games and such. We wrapped up the day by watching the showing of Jedi Knight II. Folks, Raven is the shit. This is going to be an awesome game, handlily surpassing the first game. You know you get to see the good shit when they won’t allow video or photos of the game to be taken (they did this at the DOOM III demo as well).

So that was QuakeCon – it sucks that I didn’t get to bring my PC (especially when I discovered that when I arrived not all the BYOC slots were full), so the thing got dull quicker, but I got to see the id press conference at least (which was my main goal) and I got a T-shirt or two out of the affair. I got to show my wife that this was in fact a real industry with a huge following and I got to hang out with some family members I don’t see that often.

So, what else? Well looks like the aforementioned (yes, I like that word) Moe redid her page, and apparently has been redesigned using Pepto Bismol. I was going to make a pee-on joke at her expense, but looks like she ditched that page. Drat.

Oh, and I rolled back to Windows 98. Guess that precipice had a bungee cord after all. Ironically I ditched XP not because of the OS – the OS is fine, in fact I miss it already. I ditched it because of no Voodoo3 drivers. Anything and everything I found just didn’t work too well. I guess I could do the “install/roll back” dealie every time I wanted to play a game, but I didn’t want to mess with that. If I owned a GeForce 3, I wouldn’t have a problem – pretty much every video card whose maker is still alive has at least some beta drivers that work. In theQuake games there’s some minor OpenGL glitches, but Black & White is unplayable, due to garbled text. I read I could turn off AGP text caching but it turns out I don’t even have that. So even Direct3D games are spotty. Here’s the thing, though – whose fault is it? Is it 3dfx’s fault? Well it is in the respect that they’re not here to make new drivers, but does this mean that every piece of technology dies along with its maker? To Microsoft’s credit, they at least have a pretty good attempt at a Voodoo3 driver, but perhaps it’s their fault old Win2K drivers don’t work. Maybe it’s Nvidia’s fault – they “own” what’s left of 3dfx and appear to be burying it in New Mexico along with those E.T. carts. Word is they refuse to let Microsoft have the source for the 3dfx drivers, and since Nvidia’s not working on new drivers (they want you to buy Nvidia video cards, after all) then the drivers die. Perhaps it’s EA/Lionhead’s fault – they’re the developers of Black & White and they don’t have a product that supports XP yet – it supports ME and 2000, so XP should be a given, yet it isn’t. Sure, come October they’ll probably have a a patch out, or at least a workaround, but I don’t need a workaround, I need a game.

So I’m not good enough to hang with the Beta OS boys after all. Ironically this wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t run games – meaning that XP has at the very least made its claim as a professional OS. More ironically, short of the fact that the XP compatible drivers they made were imperfect, this isn’t even a Microsoft problem. 98 is like The Phantom Menace, it ain’t perfect and in some cases isn’t even pretty, but it works for what it does. Consequently, there’s no way I’m buying XP unless they can come up with a version that runs my 3dfx card flawlessly, so basically I’m going to have to hold off until I can get a new video card – like a GeForce 3. My wife couldn’t do the XP thang since it doesn’t like her hard drive controller (?). Same old stuff – new hardware for new OS.

Where do unfinished games go when their developer dies? Daikatana is no real consequence – it was running about as well as it was going to when Ion Storm Dallas folded. Anachronox is another matter – it still needs a good patch or two, but the aforemention Ion Storm is closed. True, some of the developers are using the last “moving out and cleaning up” days of Ion Storm to put the wraps on a new (final?) patch, but what if there’s still a lingering bug or two? (And judging by the “patch from yesterday’s patch” pattern Quake 3 fell into, there’s always a lingering bug or two.) I guess the developers could always go ahead and take the source and stuff with them – or can they? I mean, the “developer” owns the rights to the source, but what happens when the “developer” goes away? Does Eidos (the publisher) own it? If so, what are they going to do with it? Anachronox‘s source is a different animal – its original engine was licensed from the Quake (1) source code, but since id has released that code under the GPL and they had no problem with Raven releasing the Hexen II source code (also derived from Quake), they probably wouldn’t have a problem with it (unless Anachronox also incorporates Quake II source, which id hasn’t released). It would probably be in Eidos’ best interests to have someone working on the Anachronox source should another bug or two come up – if horrible bugs plagued Anachronox (and with a patch already put there’s no real evidence that there are still lingering bugs) then Eidos wouldn’t be able to sell any more copies of the game they just placed in a box on store shelves and then they would lose even more money. They could have the developer fix the bugs – but they just fired them all. What to do, what to do…

Even more perilous is the just-announced news (rumor, anyway) that Dynamix, the developers of the successful game Tribes 2 have been all let go – roughly 300 or more of them. This isn’t a bad thing per se (other than lots of people losing their jobs), except that Tribes 2 isn’t just not finished, it’s really not finished. The patches have been so haphazard some of them undo previous patches. The prevailing logic was that eventually the game would get stablized – but now that seems uncertain. This is different than the Eidos/Ion Storm situation – Sierra has enough internal developers that they can hand off the finishing job to someone else. However, will they bother? Perhaps at some point they’ll just say “good enough” and leave it be. Perhaps the game was re;eased when it was in the state it was in (after being delayed multiple times) because Dynamix knew they were on the chopping block. But why were they on the chopping block? Tribes sold a berzillion copies and Tribes 2 sold plenty (last I heard was 200K units), but still they get the boot. Sierra probably isn’t going anywhere themselves – each time they unveil a new Half-Life expansion/sequel/prequel/stand-alone-mission-pack/pack-of-the-previous-games-named-after-a-precious-metal, they more or less print money. I still like Sierra, mainly because I grew up playing the King’s Quest line of games, but ever since Roberta Williams and her husband sold the company in 1996 (and vanished after the dreadful King’s Quest 8) the company has become a corporate giant and, as a result, has come to represent everything people hate about companies in America – away with the love of the art, make way for the bean-counters. No, we won’t be making another Space Quest game – they don’t sell. Now hunting games – that’s the money! You don’t want to make another Tomb Raider game for us this next year? You want to “tweak the engine” and come out with a different game? No, sorry – please give us Tomb Raider II No? Well then you’re fired – Shelly, please get me another development team to whip out some levels, and pronto!

Granted, I know nothing about the business world – and I sure as hell don’t have a clue what it takes to sustain ones self in business. It always seems like when art and commerce mix, however, commerce wins and then commerce dies because it killed the art – witness TSR, makers of the Dungeons and Dragons products in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s – as soon as the bean-counters took over the company died. Ironically the company was bought by Wizards of the Coast, who have since resurrected the D&D line, but while people have praised them for sticking to their values, they look to also be succombing to the bean-counter mentality.

I’m headed to Dallas in a few hours to go to QuakeCon. While I love id and all their games – they’re going to announce some new ones. I’ll tell you what they are – Doom III and Quake IV, which they’ve farmed out to Raven. Any takers? Notice how id hasn’t come up with an original game premise since 1996? Doom and Quake sequels, a Wolfenstein sequel (farmed out to Gray Matter) and even a Commander Keen sequel on Game Boy Color. Not to say they’re not any good – especially the footage I’ve seen so far of Doom III – but I wish they could come out with something different and new. Who knows perhaps they’ll surprise us all at QuakeCon.

Well anywho, couple these revelations with the fact that Gathering of Developers, the independent publisher out of Dallas has been sold to Take Two, a corporate giant, with 99% of the staff breaking off to form a DVD-Video based magazine (?) and the other 1% moving to NYC, and this is shaping to be one fucked up day in gaming.

Oh well, at least the V12 engine was released. Too bad I can’t buy it just yet.

The luster is starting to fade from Windows XP. Previously, I thought that Quake 3 was fine and Elite Force was the screwed up one. However, I have since discovered that Quake 3 looks weird as well. Not unplayble, just kinda annoying. A set of drivers I can get at http://go.to/3dfxp makes OpenGL work, but breaks Direct3D support, meaning I would have to roll back and forth between drivers for different games. This isn’t so bad, per se, but now I don’t even really have proof that Direct3D even works. Just on a whim I started up Black & White this morning and while it ran fine – 3D world looked perfect and everything – but the text looked all screwed up. I had to keep guessing as to whether or not I was quitting the game or deleting my hard drive.

OK, so at least I can burn a CD, right? Wrong. Despite the fact that Nero has worked just fine up until this point in XP this morning it was no go. No ASPI layer. Well fookin a – it was there before. I’m sure I can get it to work – I’ve found info on some people with the same problems – but it’s a pain. Still, I know it’s my own fault for getting into this. The hell of it is that thanks to my taking off tonight to go to Dallas for QuakeCon this weekend I won’t even be able to muck with it. If I can get things working – one way or another – I’ll keep XP, otherwise it gets the heave-ho.

I revamped the linky linky at the top of the page. My sister, Amy Kidd, now has her own .com, interestingly enough. Click and try her Christian Singing Dealie. Oh, and the Duck link yesterday was to my (possibly aforementioned) cousin-in-law Moe’s page What She Said. Since she’s been so nice as to give me a permanent link, I figured it was appropriate to affiliate her site as well.

So, off to QuakeCon. Bummer that I can’t bring my PC. However, so long as I get to see Carmack’s press conference tommorow all will be good. Now I need to find directions to the darn thing. Who knows, perhaps my father-in-law will let me blog from his system.

Garagegames.com Post
I’m running the V12 demo on a development computer provided by Intel that has both XP and WIN2000. It works on both.

Jeff Tunnel, GG employee.

Sweet.