An anonymous reader writes "QExpo 2003 has opened its doors, and this week-long virtual fair is the center of activity for the classic Quake community. From July 5th to 12th, exhibitors will put new maps, mods and engine improvements on display for the online crowd. All work is based on the original Quake (Quake 1, NetQuake, QuakeWorld). Several competitions are scheduled throughout the week, including speed mapping, modding and running, and the expo builds on the experience of the successful 2001 event in a community which this year celebrates the 7th birthday of Quake."

a-freeman writes "I frequently play Everquest and Quake III with some close friends that (now) live far away, and we've been looking for a solid voice-chat package to encourage trash-talking and taunting during our raid/frag sessions. We have variously tried Roger Wilco, TeamSound, TeamTalk, and Microsoft's Sidewinder GameVoice, and all of them have various limitations. TeamTalk has the best latency and sound quality but poor compatibility, TeamSound has terrible latency and requires lots of firewall holes, GameVoice requires a .net passport and Windows Messenger, and Roger Wilco is horribly unstable. This is a fairly simple problem, and I refuse to believe that these are the best-of-breed solutions. Can anyone recommend a solution that they are pleased with?"

Peter Wayner writes: "If you're a handicapped Windows user, Microsoft offers suggestions and assistance -- but XBox users were out of luck until Andrew 'Bunnie' Huang finished his book Hacking the XBox. Don't be fooled by the title. Officially, Huang's excellent book is not about helping the differently-abled. That would be against the law. Huang was forced by the DMCA to hide his humanitarianism under the cloak of 'reverse engineering' because this is one of the few legitimate uses given a small amount of protection by the law. But if you've got an urge to help the handicapped or any other reason to tinker with your XBox, buy this book before the Man sees through this ruse." Read on for the rest of Peter's review.

joestar writes "Just released today at ISC2003, Germany, is "MandrakeClustering", a high-performance computing Linux distribution/solution, which sounds interesting, at least in the PR: Pentium support with optimizations made with the Intel compiler, 64-bit Opteron support (with in this case, up to 16 GB of RAM for each cluster's node!), parallelized URPMI (Mandrake's apt-get) and other dedicated tools. This product is based on a one-year research project "CLIC" involving MandrakeSoft and partners. A good snapshot of the product running a 3D real-time demo is available here. The interesting point now: MandrakeClustering's goal is to provide a system which is easy to deploy, easy to administer and use. Well... Mum would certainly love to play Quake with this toy."

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the official Sega announcement that most of their Dreamcast game servers will be shut down starting this month. According to the site, "Effective June 2003, the only Dreamcast titles that Sega will continue to support online are Phantasy Star Online and Phantasy Star Online ver. 2. No other Dreamcast titles will be playable online after this time." This means that titles such as Alien Front Online (which pre-dated Xbox Live with a headset feature), the Sega Sports titles, Quake III, and even the classy Chu Chu Rocket will no longer be online-compatible, admittedly long after their prime. Perhaps someone could find a homebrew solution?

solarisguy writes "I saw earlier today on JavaGaming.org that Reality Interactive released a non-playable demo of Quake in Windows or Linux flavors, implemented entirely in Java. It runs natively on Linux, 1280x1024 at 60fps on my box with around 65% cpu. Could this be the future of games on Linux?" This ties in neatly to our recent posting on Sun promoting Java for higher-end games development.

sYn pHrEAk writes "Monday, June 9th at 9:00pm EST has been announced as the opening date and time of registration for the world's best LAN party (is it a WAN party?). Last year's QuakeCon included over 1300 people and computers in the BYOC area and well over 3,000 attendees. This year there's $125,000 on the line through three official tournaments: Quake 3 1v1, Quake 3 CTF, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Frag ya there!"

0x4B writes "Some researchers from Vanderbilt University have used id Software's Quake III Arena to test a model of the human prefrontal cortex. The model was injected into the control systems of a Quake Bot, allowing it to flexibly adapt to changing enemy characteristics. The bot was required to identify the vulnerability of its enemies to different types of weaponry through repeated combat trials. Not only are the bots busy shooting each other relentlessly, but you can catch the action by joining the battle as an observer. Source code and Quake virtual machines are available for download."

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing out that the official Unreal Technology page has been updated with a software renderer for Unreal Tournament 2K3. This is an interesting step for those gamers with fast CPUs but inadequate 3D cards. The Pixomatic technology powering it was co-developed by Michael Abrash, John Carmack's right-hand man during the development of Quake, and a famous programmer and writer (at Microsoft and elsewhere) way before then.

rekrutacja writes "Soldat is a multiplayer action game which takes the best from games like Liero, Worms, Quake and Counter-Strike, and gives you fast action gameplay with lots of gibs and gore. It only requires a modem and a PC with a 333mhz processor, since it was written to meet the reality of the Polish Internet, still dependent on modem connections and cheap computers." For those countries and locations where you can't get broadband, and PCs just aren't that swift, what other action-based shooters are still reasonably playable?

Sim9 writes "Recently, Anachronox: The Movie released its final episode. The movie is based on the PC game, and is actually rendered using the Quake II engine! (Note that the official mirror is usually full, so also try: Fileplanet, The Archive, AusGamers, and Fileshack. Enjoy!" Update: 04/12 04:58 GMT by T : You can also find BitTorrent files at f.scarywater.net.

Obiwan Kenobi writes "Online Journalism has an excellent article on video game reviewers and the ethics of such a position. It includes comments from the editor of gamespot and insights from well-known movie critics who are subjected to the same junkets that try to influence reviewers into writing good things about terrible products (or just mediocre ones). Inside I talk about my limited experience in video game reviewing and the influence free stuff can have."

An anonymous submitter writes: "The NYT has an article - Do Cheaters Ever Prosper? - Just Ask Them. Hmmm.. Wireframe walls in Quake?"

A reader writes:"I just read this very in-depth interview with Brian Hook on a site called Curmudgeon Gamer. Hook used to work for id Software (Quake 2 and 3) and later for Verant (Everquest) and he apparently worked on Glide for the old 3DFX cards. Now he runs his own smaller game company called Pyrogon. In the interview he talks about development styles of Q2 and Q3, MMORPGs, the lessons of 3DFX, and development of cross-platform games like his Candy Cruncher (which is available for MacOSX and Linux!). He even gets into some criticism of modern games and the life of a smaller game developer. Lengthy read, but lots of stuff to think about there since he tells it like he sees it."

Michael Buhrley writes "I felt a pretty good earthquake this afternoon in Tokyo. I immediately went to the Japan Weather Association earthquake information page to see if it had registered the quake, which it had not (the ground was still shaking at this point.) 20 seconds later when I refreshed the page the server had slowed to a crawl. I had been looking at traffic graphs for one of my servers earlier and thought it would be neat to correlate the traffic data with the seismic data for the event. I wonder how quickly a noticeable traffic spike could be detected and what other information could be gleaned from the web behavior. Lots of traffic = big quake or quake in big city. The U.S.G.S. Pasadena Field Office has a page that compares this phenomenon to the Slashdot effect."

gleeklet writes "Has anyone else seen that there is a need for inexpensive 3D visualization software for presentations and classroom lectures? There is a Chemical Engineering package available but compared to video game software, the graphics are a bit lacking. My goal was to create a chemical plant with the process control algorithms coded into the Quake II source. As a short demo I spent several hours creating a unit cell demo Quake II level to demonstrate the use of open source video game technology, which I found was well received by undergrads. Has anyone used video game technology as an education tool for science or engineering?"

Most of the questions we got for LinuxWorld exhibitors were pretty general, with no specific exhibitor attached to them. I did my best to get appropriate people to answer them. Here are the results. (And for those who wonder... Kevin Mitnick emailed - he's been traveling and busy, but hopes to get his answers to us shortly.)

ctwxman writes "There's no doubt governments around the world have built a fine network of sensors to monitor earthquakes. Yet, when I want to see what's happening, I go to the Redwoood City Public Seismic Network, http://psn.quake.net/. Within five minutes, amateurs, most far away from Redwood City and using homebuilt equipment (yes, there are links to instructions on how you can build your own), have posted their seismogram plots http://psn.quake.net/cgi-dos/event.exe. It's astounding that 'just plain folks' can sense the Earth move halfway around world. And, It's neater to see with your own eyes."

Obiwan Kenobi writes "Looks like they guys at Maximum PC got lucky -- they scored the first ever GeforceFX benchmarks via an Alienware prototype machine. Two 'marks to notice: The Geforce FX scored 209 FPS in Quake 3 (1600x1200x32) and 41fps in 3dMark Game4 demo, while the Radeon 9700 Pro attained only 147fps in Quake 3 yet came back with 45fps in the 3dMark test. It seems that the GeforceFX is the clear leader in pure processing power, but in memory bandwidth the 9700 Pro is still king."

nilesh writes "Yesterday, Reliance Infocomm launched one of the largest CDMA networks in the world [Google news]. This wireless network will cover 90% of India's population on a backbone of 60,000 kms of optic fibre. They have dreams of providing an Internet-enabled Java-powered CDMA2000 1x phone to almost every Indian citizen for around tariffs as low as 40 paise per minute or 0.8 cents per minute. The Samsung/LG/Kyocera phones will be replete with applications ranging from internet banking to video on demand and online gaming. Now all we need is Quake for Java and we'll have college kids playing deathmatches with each other in classroom at 144kbps. The next game revolution is in sight."