When Dynamix released Starsiege: Tribes over a year ago they had no idea how successful the game would become. In North America it rapidly took over many of the online games servers and very quickly an RPG (Role Playing Game) element formed on the bulletin boards and in the community. Due to some arcane publishing constraints the game was not actually released (officially) in Europe for up to nine months later, although warez versions of the game had filtered through in large quantities well in advance of this. Pretty soon a vibrant Tribes community was growing up around this unique squad based multiplayer online game and then the scripts and mod explosion happened. The rest is online history and today we are months away from the sequel to this phenomenon.

We took this opportunity to carry out an in-depth and comprehensive interview with the main movers and shakers at Dynamix as they gear up for the release of Tribes 2. Far too often we have seen the same Q & A style sessions and responses in the past so we decided to take a more interesting avenue. With the full approval of the Dynamix development team we constructed a narrative approach to this interview to give you a unique perspective on the team, their objectives and working methodologies and the game under development. What you are about to read is an edited version of the questions that we posed and the answers that we received from the many contributors to this piece. Here is the first part in our series of four publications from this exclusive event.

Firearms is a realistic modification of Half-Life. It adds a wide range of new features and gameplay modes. As well as containing 27 new realistic weapons, it features a strong new code as well as some of the best graphics and animation yet to be seen.
Firearms features:

- new flexible class system
- new mapping entities
- new teamplay rules
- new textures
- new sounds
- parachuting
- new skins
- new models
- new graphics
- new weapons
- new animation's
- lots of new levels
- new player models
- new gameplay rules
- twenty seven new weapons

Firearms is featuring multiplayer only. In Firearms multiplayer you play in teams or rather armed forces. It is your job and duty to eliminate the opposing force and work like a real team. In Firearms you pick the weapons you wish. Before you enter combat, you will have the choice of choosing your own specific arsenal of items and weapons.

It is required by your leaders that you do wear kevlar armor in order to minimizes the loss of man power. So gear up soldier, get ready for a total new experience in combat simulation. Get ready for Firearms.

It is planned that we will continue to support the modification with new releases. We will optimize our models, maps, skins and animation, whatever may be needed. As it was planned, we originally wanted to have singleplay in Firearms. But due to lack of progress and interest, it has been put on hold.

Finally, the campaigns. These maps will be the best part of the game. They are made out of series of maps that can be played in about an hour. They put teams on opposite sides of a huge conflict. A prime example would be Omaha Beach scenario. A team invades a safety zone in enemy territory; the defenders (other team) must keep the enemy team at bay to gain points. The offensive must get men to a safety zone and destroy bunkers. In the map after that, the invaders must destroy bridges, railroads and power lines that the defenders must protect. In the final map, both sides have switched; the invaders have taken a village and are protecting a bridge. They are given around a minute to position themselves. There no chokepoints, the two sides will engage in a battle, and the inevitable showdown at the bridge that the defenders are trying to protect.

Spy: a fast class. They still have the ability to change disguises like in TFC, I am not sure however, but in TF2 it may require you (when a spy) to steal the uniforms from dead corpses instead of having all of them like TFC. This class requires a lot of patience and stealth. They are able to intercept voice messages when he close to enemy troops and tell his/her team about their messages if it could possible be a plan.

New TFC maps: Warpath, Epicenter, and Dustbowl

Numerous bug fixes

Team Fortress 2 netcode

New internet control system called VGUI

Worldcraft 3.3 (The popular map designer)

HL SDK 2.0 (Software Developers Kit)

"In it, one team must carry their flag into the other team's base within a certain time limit, while the other team defends. Somewhat similar to Hunted, the clock carries over to the next bout"

I will be taking next week off, but I will be bringing my work computer home and tinkering around with stuff.
I've added the "pure" server option to the menus, just need to tie it all together.
PocketSoft (the makers of RTPatch) have all of my assets and will hopefully be finding the patch bug that was crashing on Win98.
A CTF scoring issue has been addressed
I will have some one from Aureal look into the A3D issues. If people could email me with the specifics of their system / A3D sound cards where SoF doesn't detect it, that would help.

New TGA converter so model previews are extracted a bit faster

Fixed a few broken dialog boxes

Added keyboard reset function on the options dialog

Fixed bug with double bots on a listen server

Ok, to start off, Check-Out games has just kicked up an article, regarding the porting of id softwares Quake 3 Arena to the Dreamcast console. Check out this puppy right here. Clippage for your viewing pleasure:

Thankfully, fans of the PC version of Quake III Arena will find much of the same great graphics and gameplay with the Dreamcast version. Sega's new console shows some considerable power under the hood, and Q3A's engine should be able to move in fairly easily.

"The Sega Dreamcast is an incredibly powerful game system which makes it a perfect choice for the first console version of Quake III Arena," Todd Hollenshead, CEO, id Software, said in the official press release. "The impressive graphics of the Dreamcast, and especially its network capabilities, will really shine with Quake III Arena and help us extend the PC phenomenon to the Dreamcast market."

LAS VEGAS, April 28, 2000 - Wielding strange new technologies and hungering for revenge, the Soviet Empire invades America. New York City and Washington
are overwhelmed. Allied forces, unprepared for the surprise attack, are decimated. Will freedom be crushed under the heels of Communist aggression?

Gamers around the world will decide this fall with the release of Command & Conquer(tm) Red Alert(tm)2, the sequel to the three-million-selling, award-winning real-time strategy game Command & Conquer Red Alert.

Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:ERTS) and Westwood Studios announced Red Alert 2 yesterday at a press event in San Francisco. Red Alert 2 will be available for Windows® 95 and 98.

Command & Conquer Red Alert 2 brings players back to the alternate universe of Red Alert with an onslaught of new units, tactics and strategies. As in the original, gamers can choose to lead Soviet or Allied forces. Soviet commanders will invade North America and try to claim it for mother Russia. Allied commanders will fight to push back the invaders and save liberty.

Both sides are well-armed with conventional weapons and experimental technology. The Soviets can engage in psychic warfare, wield nuclear weapons and fry all they survey with Tesla technology. Allied forces can teleport with chrono technology, conduct covert operations with the help of gap generators, and rain down lightening bolts through weather control. Supporting these high-powered, advanced weapons are massive conventional forces, including armies, air power and navies.

The war rages across recognizable American cities, including Washington, D.C., Chicago, New York City, the Florida Keys, Pearl Harbor, even Texas. The war will then spread to Mexico, Germany, France and, of course, Siberia.

Have you ever wanted to leap behind the controls of the 'USS Defiant' or steer Captain Pikcard into a quantum flux singularity, even if just to put a stop to his annoying babbling and fancy for opera music? Well us too and lets face it, the only reason most people even watch the show is to see which poor alien species is going to get it this time. Not many of us really care if Worf ever becomes a warrior or Data decides to run amok and do the dirty thing with counselor Troy (ok we might watch the last one).

We need more bits per color component in our 3D accelerators.

I have been pushing for a couple more bits of range for several years now, but I now extend that to wanting full 16 bit floating point colors throughout the graphics pipeline. A sign bit, ten bits of mantissa, and five bits of exponent (possibly trading a bit or two between the mantissa and exponent). Even that isn't all you could want, but it is the rational step.

It is turning out that I need a destination alpha channel for a lot of the new rendering algorithms, so intermediate solutions like 10/12/10 RGB formats aren't a good idea. Higher internal precision with dithering to 32 bit pixels would have some benefit, but dithered intermediate results can easily start piling up the errors when passed over many times, as we have seen with 5/6/5 rendering.

Eight bits of precision isn't enough even for full range static image display. Images with a wide range usually come out fine, but restricted range images can easily show banding on a 24-bit display. Digital television specifies 10 bits of precision, and many printing operations are performed with 12 bits of precision.

What would new missions be without a few extra pieces of artillery? Boring, that’s what. But before I go into detail on the new units, let me first state that I simply refuse to get into a debate about the balancing of the units. I really could care less if the NOD has more defensive weapons, or vice versa. This is the stuff that never gets solved in online forums, where obsessive players that cannot spell go to scream the likes of, “Yeah, well yu just think the NOD sucks because you sck!” Blech…just enjoy the game. If a side has limitations you work around it. That said, the GDI has a new long-range mech called the Juggernaut, which packs a whole lot of whoop ass in its six artillery guns. Just be sure to protect it—it can’t stand too much heat. There is also a Drop Pod control plug for the GDI command center, which lets you shuttle troops directly to the battlefield. The NOD have a new cyber-spider type thing called the Reaper that packs anti-air missiles and a net gun that can stop infantry in its tracks. Its quite enjoyable to watch the captured troops squirming around. They can also make use of a new Mobile Stealth Generator, which allows them to cloak on the go. Both sides have the benefits of a mobile barracks and limpet drones, robots that attach to passing vehicles and allows you to spy on the opponent’s base, as well as a few upgrades to existing units that increase their power a bit.

Tom Hall: Anachronox is a 3D, third-person, sci-fi role-playing game. You start as Sly Boots, a down-on-his-luck space detective, and are joined by other characters as a small protection job turns into a huge mystery of who is trying to crush our universe, and why.

Gameplay would be similar to a 3D Final Fantasy VII or Chrono Trigger - more the latter, as the fights all happen in the context of the current situation (no "battle rooms"). Battles also let you manipulate the surroundings as well as your weapons. You can shoot a sign and have it fall on monsters. Or shoot a creature standing in water with an electrical attack to harm multiple creatures. Cinematics are all in-engine and really top-notch. The non-player characters in the game are all fun to talk to. So, you talk, you fight, you have fun in little minigames - from a weird checkers to flying a shuttle to strange puzzles.

I'm inspired by movies, novels, games. The more media you expose yourself to, the more metaphors you can apply to the gaming experience. In movies, some inspirational people are Spielberg, Hitchcock, George Roy Hill, Rob Reiner, and now Sam Mendes. Also a big fan of Chuck Jones, who directed Warner Brothers cartoons. Novels: Gateway, Ender's Game, Snow Crash, Hitchhiker's, so many more. Games: Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, LucasArts adventures (Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer rock), Ape Escape (buy it now), Mario, Ultima III, Wizardry I, oh, I'm sure I'm forgetting some!

Added support for: Seven Kingdoms 2, TZAR, Les Fourmis, Whiplash, Nox, RollcageStage2, Star Trek - Armada, Startup, WallStreet Trader 98, Rogue Spear: Urban Operations, ZDoom, Daikatana.

Added an "away" column to show if users are away in chat. You can also view a users /away message by selecting "Information" on that user.

Added a private message user list, so if you have /private messages disabled the users in your list can still /msg you.

Added Multi-Select support to the Chat Players List and the Internet Game Servers List.

Added a Color Variance slider to the Display Settings tab. The slider controls how close a chat color has to be to the background color before Kali will map it to a more visible color.

Added Bitflag support for Internet Game Server filters.

Fixed the launching of Dungeon Keeper II.

Fixed some problems with IPX game support under Win2k.

Fixed Ping times under Win2k and WinNT. Times are no longer fixed to 10ms granularity.

Fixed a large GDI resource leak. This was causing several display glitches like unable to see text in chat, disappearing password icons, and text disapearing from the input line during a word wrap.

Action Halflife style realism mode

Clan modes

Ghost codes

New Weapons

Improved more stable code

Quake style weapon switching (optional)

Bots ( Depending on the state of the AI )

IRVINE, Calif. - April 28, 2000 - Blizzard today announced plans for Diablo™ II's Battle.net® stress test -- the final phase of Diablo II beta testing and the company's largest public beta test to date. Starting Monday morning, hardcore gamers around the world will have the opportunity to register for their chance to be one of up to 100,000 players to be chosen to help stress test Battle.net servers prior to the launch of Diablo II. The beta signup is scheduled for a seven-day period exclusively on ZDNet's (NYSE:ZDZ) GameSpot (www.gamespot.com) beginning on Monday, May 1 at 10:00 a.m. PT and ending Sunday, May 7 at 9:00 p.m PT. Applications from around the world will be accepted. Following the registration period, Blizzard will randomly select up to 100,000 testers. Only one submission per person will be accepted, and selected testers will be notified via email within a few days of the sign-up period ending.

Selected testers will receive an access code and a ZDNet GameSpot download location via an additional email when testing begins. Users must have an access code to log onto Battle.net and play the beta. These emails will be sent over a period of days so as to ramp up the number of users participating in the test over Battle.net. The 100MB beta is being exclusively offered for download through ZDNet GameSpot in alliance with Mirror Image, a leading provider of online content distribution and streaming solutions.

The beta, which will only be playable over Battle.net, will include the Barbarian character class and portions of the game's first act. The purpose of the beta test is to ensure the stability of Battle.net servers worldwide. In preparation for this final phase of beta testing, Blizzard will end the current on-going closed beta test a few days prior to the start of the Battle.net stress test. Participants in the closed beta will automatically be included in the group that is selected to participate in the stress test.

Wielding strange new technologies and hungering for revenge, the Soviet Empire invades America. New York City and Washington are overwhelmed. Allied forces, unprepared for the surprise attack, are decimated. Will freedom be crushed under the heels of Communist aggression?

Gamers around the world will decide this fall with the release of Command & Conquer(tm) Red Alert(tm)2, the sequel to the three-million-selling, award-winning real-time strategy game Command & Conquer Red Alert.

Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:ERTS) and Westwood Studios announced Red Alert 2 yesterday at a press event in San Francisco. Red Alert 2 will be available for Windows® 95 and 98.

Command & Conquer Red Alert 2 brings players back to the alternate universe of Red Alert with an onslaught of new units, tactics and strategies. As in the original, gamers can choose to lead Soviet or Allied forces. Soviet commanders will invade North America and try to claim it for mother Russia. Allied commanders will fight to push back the invaders and save liberty.

Let me begin by saying the similarities between the first title and the sequel are astonishingly close. So much that my initial feelings and opinions were ones of disgust. The experience for me was much like watching the Anniversary editions of the three "Star Wars" films. Nostalgic and very satisfying in one sense, but underwhelming and disappointing in another. Diablo II's foundation is cemented in a number of basic truths consistent with the original product. First Diablo II, like its older sibling, relies heavily on the premise of action. Enemies are numerous and quite engaging, and Blizzard is a master of balancing the scales. The second truth is randomization. In the sequel, not only are the dungeons randomized, but so are the towns, camps, forests and outlining areas. The third truth, which was unfortunately ruined by cheaters in the original, is discovery. The hundreds and now thousands of items, armor, weapons, spells and artifacts that can be discovered is mind-boggling. The fourth and final truth that also remains consistent between the two titles is addiction. Like no other game I've ever played, Diablo possessed me like the demon namesake. I played through the product with all three adventurers, and before ending I was left with a 26th level warrior, a 32nd level rogue, and a 40th level sorcerer. Diablo II is without question rooted in those four basic principals of gameplay, and my experience tells me the final product will deliver ten-fold over the first, but for reasons you may not expect.

10) What's your favourite Unreal Tournament ever created? Do you have a favorite custom map or a favorite custom mapper?
It's hard to say I haven't played UT a lot because of my lame internet access in France. The maps I played the most is DM-StalwartXL and DM-Turbine. My favorite custom map so far is DM-Unreality][ from Jeremy 'Faceless' Graves. There are a lot of talented Level designers out there so it's hard to name only one. I didn't see a lot of custom maps because of my slow net connection.

The premise of the game has fantasy world meeting early industrialized society, roughly in the time of the late 1800s in Europe. In this case Arcanum is populated with all the fantasy races you have come to know and love, but with the chance to wield industrial might against magic power. In the words of PvP comic character Francis. "Dwarves with guns? Bitchin'!"

RP: What’s going to be interesting about heroes is the fact that they can go up in levels and they give beneficial effects to the units who follow them, or to translate that, who are in close proximity to them. So what I think will happen a lot is people will have to decide if they want to have a couple of heroes leading battle groups or do they want to have separate squads going around? I think it will hit at a really interesting dynamic.

And people have always wanted kind of veteran units -- that has always been a big desire of gamers. Personally, I’ve never been excited about veteran units, because I think it changes the way you play; it makes you want to play defensively and conserve your units all the time, which I don’t think is the fun of the latest RTS games. The RTS games have always been about encouraging you to play offensively. It’s very quick pace; offensive –- that sort of a game. So by adding in heroes, we give you that veteran aspect that I think people are looking for, but at the same time, keep you playing offensively because your hero, even if he dies, you can buy him back at your town at the same level he was at.

One of major gripes with the first game was that even though they were damn addictive, if you had a large mass of lemmings together you could never attach a skill to the lemming facing the right direction. Instead you would just click a few times on a spot hoping that you would catch a lemming that was going where you wanted, which would never happen. In this game they have added a great feature where the lemming you want to select highlights and if you press the left or right arrow keys you will get to highlight lemmings only going in that direction, cool!

“Real space, by it`s very nature, is rather barren and empty. After all that`s why it`s called space. I mean if it wasn`t barren and empty it would be "full" or "cramped" or something. In order to make the space in the game a little more interesting and force a little tactical play (there`s no hiding behind mountains and setting ambushes at the pass) it`s been populated with a variety of "landscapes" such as different types of Nebula, blackholes, wormholes and asteroids belts. All these things being the staple diet of Trek writers everywhere when looking for a convenient plot device.”

Gamers Central: What is the coolest item/weapon/enhancement in the game, the one thing you can't have enough of?

Harvey Smith: Well, that would be different for each player. For me, it's the subtle stuff. For instance, if you come to a laser trigger area--where the player must bypass a series of beams that, if broken, will sound an alarm--you can get through it multiple ways. You have technical tools and skills for this, but if you are thinking (and demanding more from the game's environment, like we want you to do), you can break the glass in the fire extinguisher case, remove the fire extinguisher, spray it into the beams, crouch and walk through while they are flickering. That's just one example...so for me it's not the guns and ammo (which are cool anyway), but the subtle environmental tools.

For a game that had been in development for an extremely long length of time, Shiny has sure managed to ship a game with a helluva lot of bugs. These range from little graphical glitches, to true show stoppers that cause the game to crash. At the moment the bug I'm contending with feels the need to reset my controls and graphics settings every time I go to play the game, and occasionally I will get a 'level not found' error when loading a saved game. I mean these kind of bugs just don't sneak through Q&A testing, they smack you square in the face with a big sign with - 'HEY! I'M A BUG!', written on it. It's very unprofessional, and has made me extremely wary of anything coming from the Shiny camp from now on.

Warcraft III will be a departure from previous -Craft strategy games by offering a new tier of recruitable units that are more powerful and that can advance in levels to acquire new powers. These hero units are a major reason why Warcraft III is being labeled a role-playing strategy game. The heroes are very much a focal point of Warcraft III: Although you can build structures, hire units, and command units without having a hero, Pardo makes it clear that you'll be at a distinct disadvantage without heroes. Combat will be swayed by the powers and abilities of heroes. Those without heroes will lose.

The inventory interface is based on the now-standard slot system that has become prevalent in games like Diablo II, Darkstone, Ultima Ascension, and System Shock 2, and it has 30 such slots for storing almost everything J.C. picks up, including tools, items, and of course, weapons. Without the weapons, Deus Ex could pass as an RPG with a robust 3D engine, but the fact remains that the game has an arsenal large enough to rival most traditional first-person shooters, including Half-Life.

Here's a rundown on the GeForce 2 GTS chip's resume:

First real-time per-pixel shading processor
8-texels-per-clock-cycle rendering engine
Hardware anti-aliasing
DDR memory support (SDRAM or SGRAM)
AGP4X with fast writes
32-bit color, Z/Stencil
Second-generation T&L engine, including cube environment mapping
DirectX texture compression with S3TC support
1.6-gigatexels-per-second fill rate
25 million triangles per second possible through T&L and setup
5.3 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth
2048x1536 at 75Hz maximum 3D/2D resolution
Integrated 720p, 1080i HDTV playback support
350MHz RAMDAC

This huge seven-minute video taken from the incite PC Gaming CD-ROM shows the most action and raw footage from Sacrifice, Shiny's epic new real-time strategy, seen so far. The movie is around 70MB is size, but for those with massive, throbbing bandwidth, it's well worth the downloading time and effort. View at your own discretion!

Mods carry a strong sense of community. The most popular mods have thousands of people following their development process. Which mods should you download? Is this new-fangled mod you've been hearing about worth the ten days it takes to download? Well, look no further - 3DActionPlanet is here to your rescue with this article, which will give you the lowdown on some of the coolest mods for Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Half-Life.

Submarine Titan’s twist is that it’s set underwater, and while that’s not exactly going to set the gaming world in fire, it does allow some interesting visuals and is being used to add some strategic depth. But on a feature-by-feature basis, it’s highly competitive with most other games on the market.

And more:

The game is set underwater because its fiction has a comet striking Earth in 2047, pretty much wiping the planet clean. A few survived and remained on surface while most took to the oceans. As is usually the case, the undersea survivors broke off into factions, and two rival civilizations took control. The military-loving White Sharks, anxious to regain a position of world dominance, duke it out with the ecologically friendly Black Octopi, who seek balance with the earth and are prepared to enforce it with all the weapons at their disposal.

On-line gaming is not only an inevitable future, it is very viable at present. Gearbox Software does, in fact, consider on-line gaming (cooperative and competitive) as a significant part of its development plans. However, a proliferation of on-line games does not exclude the existence of interactive entertainment designed to be enjoyed alone without a connection to other "players".

Interactive entertainment encompasses so many approaches that being on-line won't be the only option in the future. We are witnessing the maturation of our industry which is exposing two or three basic goals in a game's underlying structure. On one hand there is the classic concept of a game, which is about competition. On the other hand there is the classic concept of story telling, which is about expressing a narrative. A third classic concept is that of a puzzle, which often manifests itself in a challenge based on a set of rules. Cooperative gaming isn't really a fourth category, but it is a significant enough desire to note here. Cooperative gaming allows more than one player to participate together in solving puzzles, experiencing stories or competing against others.

MC: Many in our forums see this current console surge as signs that PC gaming is on the downfall. What do you think? Will Monolith start to move more towards the console arena and away from PC gaming?

JH: PC gaming as we know it is indeed somewhat on the downfall, or rather, a transition. The average price of a PC game on the shelf is falling, while the average cost of making a PC game is rising. Guess who gets caught in the middle of that? The developer.

Consoles are attractive because they have a more robust and proven business model. Contrary to some beliefs out there, development houses ARE businesses and they do need to survive somehow. I think that you are seeing a lot of PC developers looking at consoles because the lure of actually being able to make a reasonable amount of money is fairly attractive.

Without an understanding of the economics of the PC gaming industry, a casual observer might just say something like "Well, if they want to make money, then just make a good game!!!", but they just are overlooking the fact that most games don’t make the developer money despite the fact that they are good/great. Why this is the case is more than I have time to explain, but let’s just say in general, the PC development business model leaves a lot to be desired. Consoles on the other hand, are somewhat different …

MC: Having ties with Microsoft, have you any plans to develop games for the X-Box?

JH: Can’t comment on this yet, other than to say that LithTech will be on X-Box if our licensees feel that it would be desirable.

GA-Source has an interview with PR Manager Nikolay
Baryshnikov located here, and screenshots are also available here.

"The different thing about this game, and what makes it a solid winner, is the feeling or pacing throughout the different locations. The weapon and enemy placement is excellent. The levels are designed to mimic real world places with great accuracy yet still point you in the direction that the designer wanted you to go in. There were a few times when I felt like I was being pushed through the maze by way of an unrealistic obstacle or two, but overall an excellent effort."