Playback.dem

In Memoriam

Tronyn, a fellow Quake level designer and community member, has passed away unexpectedly at the age of 42.

He was around since the beginning, and encouraged different generations of people getting into Quake to pursue their creativity within the community - all while being a master of the medium itself. Something a lot of us can only look up to.

Play some Quake in his honor, he will be missed by many.

RIP Dustin ‘Tronyn’ Geeraert

Frag-Net Status Report

We hope you enjoyed the Halloween theme, as always. The Halloween event should have been announced sooner - a few people couldn’t make time for it last minute - but we weren’t sure if it was going to happen because one of us had surgery and that complicated things. All is well now, in case you’re worried. We all had a good time in the end.

Gaming News

Yet Another New Half-Life Beta Build Found & Released

Last month gave us Net Test 2, now we go back one step further to Net Test 1. Besides some higher-res textures on some of the models and early menu prototypes being visible in the files the real highlight is the insight into the original Xen Campaign that got changed quite a bit for the final release.

Play As Doomguy, But In Quake

Longtime acquaintance in the Half-Life community Magic Nipples has released Duake, which allows you to play through Quake as ‘Doomguy’. In short, like DOOM its weaponry, HUD and so on? It looks pretty authentic. Check it out.

Tetris Rebirthing

Turns out that you can play Tetris forever. It was commonly believed that an overflow would be fatal, but a teenager proved otherwise. Thanks Ars Technica.

American Wasteland, reTHAWed

Here at Frag-Net, we are big connoisseur of skating games and skating culture. We hope you are, too. Get your latest Tony Hawk fix with reTHAWed, which updates the PC version of Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland to include comprehensive amounts of fixes and additional content. It’s got improved MULTIPLAYER also, so you know that gets us excited.

The trailer can be found here!

QuakeWorld Hub

Recently the QuakeWorld Hub went live. It’s powered by FTEQW its FTEQTV application and a web build of the client, which allows you to view the game through a proxy - in your web browser. You no longer need to start up the game to spectate games. This is a great collaboration between the engine-dev and competitive-play parts of the Quake community and deserves mad respect!

New DOOM 2 WAD, 11 years in the making

A new type of mega WAD is out there and it took a real long time to make. It names itself DOOM 3 because it attempts to be a direct sequel to DOOM 2.

Here’s what the author has to say about it:

This mod let’s you get back into the fight against evil and it’s gameplay is modernized while still playing very much the way Doom and Doom II did.

Fight your way through 2 Chapters of new levels, SinglePlayer or Coop. Play as Doom Guy, Doom Gal, or one of the other selectable characters.

Customize your difficulty by chosing your Character, Skill and Save-Point amount. Alongside the well known Doom monsters, there are also many additional monsters, as well as new items, weapons and power-ups to help you fight back the demons.

PS: Difficulty is on the hard side, so I recommend playing it first time at difficulty 0.9 or 0.75 to have some room with the ammo.

Codemaster’s Micro Machines

Read The Making Of Micro Machine by Keith Stuart to learn about how the original developers managed to get their vision out there and how their very own Game Genie peripheral came in use to prevent a major disaster during production of the cartridges.

Tech News

Internet Archive Hack

The Internet Archive got hacked into and prompted an immediate shutdown for all services. Game emulation only went back online around yesterday at the time of this writing.

We had intended to update our game pages to incorporate some files that fellow Quake community member Jason Brownlee tracked down for us (more on that soon), and coincidentially the whole infrastructure went down at the same time.

x86 Getting More Obsolete

What? You can’t switch away from PC x86 because you’re afraid you won’t be able to host servers for games and stuff? Well, if you can use Box64 to host x86 servers on a Raspberry Pi then that might no longer be a problem.

Thanks Interfacting Linux for this report!

I know what you’re wondering: Dedicated Servers? How About Games?!

You’re right, who said you couldn’t use the same power of Linux and open-source to play AAA games on Apple’s RISC machines at pretty good framerates? And it’s going through at least 3 layers. FEX, to emulate x86 on Arm, trusty old Wine and the wonderful combination of DXVK coupled with vkd3d-proton.

Well, I guess that settles it then! Cheap Anti-Cheat solutions will still be a thorn in your eye - but that it is regardless of architecture.

Disclaimer: We don’t tolerate game cheats on Frag-Net, except if they’re playful ones planted by the game designers themselves. But we are strongly against kernel-level backdoors and rootkits.

Intel Isn’t Doing Well (Hot Take Warning)

As we’ve alluded to in our previous posts, Intel hasn’t been doing well for a while.
The platform they created, x86, is kind of their bread and butter. If you disagree, well - ask yourself why your phone isn’t powered by Intel Atom or something.
It has been struggling to push the dying x86 platform forward in any meaningful way in a long time, while other architectures have had pivotal breakthroughs.

This long hasn’t interested the PC community, but the thing is that PC customers don’t get to decide much at all these days. It doesn’t help that PC gamers are very resistant to change themselves, that’s why they’re all stuck on Windows still and dealing with predominantly 32-bit software. It’s all about legacy compat, baby!

Well, if you don’t innovate you simply will be left behind. We hope they recover, because we need diversity in the PC hardware space - and they still have some leverage there. Sadly the only innovations we’ve seen in the past decade concerning the broader PC hardware space, besides growing GPU workloads (gee, wonder why), are the different varieties of RGB lighting. Wooooow…

• AMD Outselling Intel In Datacenters
• Will Collapsing Intel Stock Get Kicked Out Of The DOW?
• Intel Kicked Out Of DOW, Replaced By NVIDIA

Misc News

Dreamcast Prototype Fundraiser

You can help Laurent Comby, a long time Dreamcast preservationist who is known for running this wonderful website, to acquire more prototypes for several Dreamcast games in order to preserve them.

Without him, we would not have the opportunity to study several builds of important and/or cancelled games for our favorite game console - including Half-Life.

We hope you can contribute!

That BattleZone 98 Reviewer

PC Gamer recently interviewed Scott Smith, who is really big into Battlezone 98. Why does this matter? Because it highlights multiple problems with keeping games alive and game preservation in general. How a bad re-release can even cause damage to a community by fragmenting it, forcing it to deal with new bugs and changes in the game design that objectively make the game worse.

If you’re a developer working on a re-release, bringing a classic back to life - it also highlights what you might want to avoid doing altogether. Who do you wanna work with to prevent this sort of mess? The community. Or maybe just give them the damn source code and let them handle it. Worked damn fine for id Software…

All in All

That’s it. If you think we’ve forgotten commentary on last month’s news that’d be important to include, be sure to let us know.