Old News

(Even older news is elsewhere.)
06-03-97
Not much going on. Thought I'd revisit the Quake Things We Are Waiting For:
  • Quake Rally: They say they're in the stage of working on "finishing touches" and it's to be released "soon now"... hmmm, say another month then? :-)
  • The Apocalypse: QuakeLab has successfully moved to PlanetQuake, so that distraction is out of the way. No other news.
  • RGB3: Looks like they've finished "shooting" and chosen voice actors. Note: the "Lemur" doing one of the voices is not related to lemurboy, except in that they are obviously both cute furry rocket-launcher-toting prosimians.
  • PainKeep: It's out, and much fun! Worth the download unless you are really in the dark ages of modem technology. Wish more servers were running it. We'd run a PainKeep server but we're eating up gobs of bandwidth as it is... don't want to bring down the wrath of the Stanford Network Traffic Police on the head of our network admin, since he's been very cool about letting us run Quake servers.
  • FnT finals: Coming down to the wire! The Open division winners bracket champs Legends are waiting on Craft and Flag! to determine the challenger for the Open title, and POTS winners bracket champs Legends (!) are waiting on EarthQuake and the to slug it out.


05-29-97
lemurboy played his Phase III rounds today: game 1 was a close second-place finish behind rix9, and game 2 was a third-place (eliminated) finish behind [LGD] B2 and Yo_Momma-RB. Game 1 was a nice piece of work; unfortunately the registry hacks to allow MPlayer demo recording don't seem to work for tournament games, so the game 1 demo didn't come out. Boo hiss. Game 2 was pretty much a case of not sticking to the game plan; early on lemurboy did too much tangling with B2 and not enough camping. While he was dying, Yo_Momma was locking down the rocket launcher area (in the Grisly Grotto). Oh well. If not in game 2, the end would have come in game 3 for sure.

MPlayer Red Annihilation impressions: a mess. It could have been worse, but it could have been a lot, lot better. The first games on any given day of competition didn't start for a long time, sometimes an hour or two. And after that they only ran about 2 games concurrently (with lots of pauses), when there were 15 total games to play each day. There was no posted competitor list and starting time for upcoming games, which would have alleviated a lot of the "sitting around doing nothing all day" that we were treated to. Then there was the silly visible-GameGod issue, the lack of telefrag protection, the outright crashes of the entire MPlayer system, and the mostly terrible (for deathmatch) Episode 1 maps. The MPlayer personnel -- GameGods, Wizards, random answerers of email -- have been very cool, but it looks like MPlayer just wasn't ready for this.

As for the actual effectiveness of the tournament itself, well, my totally unsubstantiated opinion is that it might well find the best Quake player in America. So the Ferrari will probably be in pretty good hands. But the 16 finalists in Atlanta (who all get prizes) will not be the 16 best Quake players in America. Among those who didn't compete because they didn't like the way the tournament was set up, or out of apathy (this means you, xris), or those who couldn't fight past connection problems (especially east coast players)... there's bound to be some people who are at least as entitled to a spot in the final 16 as those that actually go to Atlanta. But to repeat myself: oh well.

In other news: PainKeep is out!

05-27-97
News from the front: eeevil and ahnuld played their Phase III rounds yesterday (lemurboy doesn't play until Thursday). ahnuld got caught in one of those sickening dry spells in the first half of his match, and his comeback in the latter half fell 2 frags short of second place (the lowest qualifying position). The qualifiers from his match were QM revetahW and Strahd GUN. eeevil got second place on his first match, behind Azrael13 (who is apparently some Big Name Quaker going incognito), and second place again on his next match behind [LGD] WhiteWolf. His third match was unfortunately a three-person match (instead of the usual four, because of problems at MPlayer) against Azrael13 again and [LGD] Thresh, in perhaps the worst map in the tournament, E1M6 The Door to Chthon. Azrael13 set up shop in the RL / yellow armor room, leaving eeevil to wander the rest of the map getting killed by Thresh. It was kind of ugly. Azrael13 got the handful of frags he needed for second place, and eeevil was eliminated.

05-25-97
Yes, I'm up at 6:00 AM... actually still up, trying to rotate my weird sleeping pattern back around to something normal. As long as I'm here, why not update the news page with random stuff? OK then! Here is lemurboy's list of Quake Things We Are Waiting For (in approximate order of impatience):
Of course not every C9er is looking ahead to all of these, or to the same degree. For instance, eeevil couldn't care less about single player stuff like The Apocalypse, but he's so antsy for Quake Rally that he's taken to playing Big Red Racing on MPlayer to tide him over. Sad.

Oh, speaking of the M-word, the three of us who entered (lemurboy, eeevil playing under a different name, and ahnuld) have all made it to Phase III of MPlayer. Of course. You pretty much just needed basic hand-eye coordination to get this far. lemurboy and eeevil are in the second tier, probably about where they belong, but ahnuld is for some reason in the first tier. (??) We're not sure what he was smoking, but we wish he had shared some with us. As some sort of karmic retribution, however, ahnuld has ended up in the same bracket as [LGD] Thresh. Hee hee. Seriously, none of us are likely to advance (since that wuss xris didn't sign up), but at least in Phase III we should have the opportunity to play a fun game or two against some of the best players in Quake.

In other news: we're thinking of putting some other maps from Episode 1 back into the server rotation. Candidates are E1M3 The Necropolis, E1M4 The Grisly Grotto, E1M5 Gloom Keep, and E1M8 Ziggurat Vertigo. All except for the Keep have never been on our rotation because we were kind of tired of them even before we started the Mothership servers (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth), but now they might be a breath of fresh air. The most likely candidates are E1M5 and E1M8.

05-21-97
A big "thank you" to the QuakeWorld team for ignoring our skin submission in their latest pack release. I guess it must have been "lewd or inappropriate" -- maybe we should instead go for full frontal nudity like the RevCo skin -- or more likely it simply showed up how much 90% of the other skins suck. (Actually, of course, there was probably just some mixup somewhere, but I'm annoyed.) Oh well, one more reason for us not to play QuakeWorld. Unrelated: CTF players should check out the "Cheater" map (no, I dunno why it's called that) available in the Supply Depot of the Flag Academy, among other places. Note that it is currently on version C, with version D expected soon. It's a neat-looking map, and it will have a tournament based around it (see the TFC page). I'll be making it available on our ClanRing CTF server (port 26004) soon as a custom map.

05-16-97
Bah. Velocity challenged us to a clan match, and we showed up all ready to get our butts kicked -- for nothing. Velocity was a no-show. Well, one of their guys did show up, but after some consideration we decided not to go 1 on 4. And people ask us why we don't play more clan matches. In other news, the CTF server on port 26004 is now using the latest ClanRing CTF mod, since lemurboy has started doing a little work on that.

05-12-97
News, shmews. Well, I suppose numerous little things have been going on. lemurboy has become part of the "Quake Weenie Advisory Board" at one of our favorite sites, Quake Weenie Deathmatch Tactics. As the Exalted Weenie described the job, it involves "answering questions if you have time and not answering questions if you don't have time", so lemurboy felt that he would be up to the task. Also, xris beat an ahnuld/eeevil team on both DM2 and DM4, staging come-from-behind wins. The man is a monster. Think what would happen if he actually played Quake more than once every few days. Errmmmm, what else... we have volunteered the port 26004 server for use in the MQF CTF 4.0 tournament, so MQF games have priority on that port. And speaking of CTF, we have a QuakeC fix for non-QuakeWorld CTF 4.0/4.1 that prevents autocrossdressing with the server-assigned shirt colors; mail us if you want it.

04-28-97
Hummmm. The eeevil/havoc vs. ahnuld thing is starting to look like a regular affair, so I'll just track the current record in the intraclan match records.

04-23-97
A few little bits of news. On the server front, we got our CTF server (port 26004) onto IronMan's server list. Also, The Experimental Pits has not picked up much traffic, so I'll be trying something new with it soon. Maybe Quake Rally when it is released? In other news: eeevil and havoc finally took ahnuld in a best 2 out of 3. Woo hoo!

04-19-97
Got null's page mostly done.

04-17-97
Revenge is sweet... or is it? Convinced, or at least reasonably sure, that they could take ahnuld in a rematch, eeevil and havoc faced off with our Bavarian yet again for a best 2 out of 3 series. Starting off in DM4 again, the vengeance-minded pair unveiled their radical new strategy of Not Shooting Each Other and claimed a one-frag victory as time expired. However, a little tipsy from the heady wine of victory, they let ahnuld sneak away with a 2-frag win on DM3. The clincher on DM6 was a disastrous romp for the Bavarian. I won't post anything about the score here since they claim that they tanked the match once it got out of hand, and watching the demo I have no choice but to believe. The demos will also remain undisclosed until I need blackmail material.

04-17-97
Here's a couple of undocumented CTF 4.0 features as a reward for reading this news page. Impulse 70 toggles the status bar on and off, and impulse 141 identifies the players you are currently looking at.

04-17-97
Created a new demos page for stuff like the "grudge match" demos from a few days ago, and added a couple of CTF 4.0 demos to it.

04-16-97
Update about CTF. First of all, for you CTF veterans, please tell your CTF buddies about our server (port 26004), since getting a non-default-port server onto all the big server lists is like pulling teeth (and in the case of Stomped's list, impossible). Second of all, if you have yet to try CTF, you can go to the Threewave CTF home page to check it out. If you already have CTF 3.01 installed, you just need the CTF 4 upgrade; otherwise you need the whole banana. Installation instructions are included in what you download. Do it, CTF is cool! And until we get more players on our port, you can use it as your private practice arena. :-)

04-15-97
Play CTF? Check out port 26004. We're giving CTF 4.0 a trial run to see if we (and you) like it enough to put up a permanent CTF server at that port.

04-14-97
A 2-on-1 intraclan match splattered giblets all over the nice clean corridors of the Mothership today, with ahnuld putting the hurt on eeevil and havoc. Details have been moved to the demos page.

04-14-97
Two tidbits, one bad (but expected), one cool (and also sort of expected). First of all, The Experimental Pits is back up and running but without the Reaper bots, for the foreseeable future. The Reaper code, awesome as it is, is just too unstable... which I almost could have lived with except for the fact that it would often enough wedge the Quake server process so that I would have to reboot the machine to kill it. With several other servers running on the machine this was not acceptable. Oh well... that's why we call it "Experimental"! In other news, the inimitable null has donned the C9 mantle in a super-secret ceremony aboard the Mothership. Watch for null...C9, and, umm, I guess kill him or something. Now I have to go make him a page in our Personnel section...

04-03-97
Doh. Fairly bad news at The Experimental Pits.

04-01-97
Changed the weapon-switching code a bit; details on the Mothership page. Also updated the servers listed on the Sightings page.

03-29-97
A significant change for The Experimental Pits, to try to solve the problem where player A connects, sees nobody there, disconnects, 30 seconds later player B connects, sees nobody there, disconnects, etc., etc. We need something to convince them to hang around for a few minutes, so...

03-23-97
It's here... and ahead of schedule, even.

03-21-97
Only three days until the official opening of The Experimental Pits... actually only about two days since I'm allowing for lag time in getting the word out to the server lists, Web pages, and newsgroups. Everything is actually ready to go at this very moment, but I'm still poking at things making sure they're solid.

03-19-97
Continuing signs of my Quake Destiny: for two consecutive Jack-in-the-Box visits, my total bill has been $6.66!! Strange but true! Also a programming note of sorts... I'll no longer be reporting on other clan's battles on our servers, since often no C9 player is there to observe. (This lack of reporting has been the de facto policy for a couple of weeks now anyway.) From now on only news directly related to our clan members or our servers, unless something really super-duper occurs.

03-19-97
OK, the new frameful Web pages are up. Mail me if some link is obviously not working or is interacting badly with the frames (like nesting when it shouldn't). I punted for now on getting graphics for the navbar, so a few little graphics and simple JavaScript touches are still left to do. The site does work OK with non-frames-capable browsers, but if your browser supports frames, you don't get the option to "go noframes"... there is no rational reason for objecting to that lil' navbar, at least not one strong enough for me to worry about. All the issues should be taken care of, including the URL-minder compatibility, except for the page registration at various server lists (which I am now working through).

03-18-97
Lots of good things in the works. The beta testing for the levels for the new server ends today; info about that will be up soon on the server page. Also the Web site has been "tastefully" redesigned to use frames; I'm holding off on installing it because of a lack of nifty little buttons for the navbar, vacillations about supporting noframes, and worries about how this will interact with our server page registered at several server lists & with the URL-minder. Should have those things figured out/done soon. Finally, we have installed a continuous auto-admin presence on both of the Mothership servers for kicking players from Known Obnoxious Subnets. Much more flexible than the built-in banning capabilities of Quake v1.06. (The Golden Flying Saucer Medal of Valor has been awarded to ahnuld for this cool tool.) If you think that it kicks you in error, let me know.

03-09-97
Still alive. Working on new look for Web site and new server. Bye now.

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