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Play the Outlaws Movies From Your DesktopOf course with my keen eye for the international scene, I can tell by those screenshots that Smoker is definitely from Australia. I have a gift for this type of thing, see. * * *
Sunday 8/11/02 Returning with Gas The Returning! cMD (shot) by Gas: Old-time Lawmaker Gas has been doing his patriotic duty of army service but now maybe he's been promoted or something (I suppose we should probably call him Captain Gas or whatever rank he's up to now) because they're giving him ADSL soon so he'll be back in six-gunning action online. To celebrate his impending return he's kicked out his first map in quite some time and you can immediately see that he certainly hasn't lost his touch for making very solid maps that have something of a free-flowing atmosphere to them. This time around he's got three small buildings in a U-shaped canyon with a higher ledge between. Nice looking with a good framerate, of course. If anyone can figure out how to get that plate up in the barn... well you're better at this than I am. I dunno as I'd spend too much time in the barn though—there are horses behind the cows and I don't see anything good coming out of that particular arrangement of livestock. A Modding We Will Go Speakin' of old-time Lawmakers, Chet sends word that the Outlaws Mod for Half-Life will be getting an update soon, to feature improved models, possibly some new features, fixes, and three new maps by Chet hisself. It'll be interesting to see what he's cooking up in the Half-Life engine... So if you've got Half-Life or some offshoot like CounterStrike, go on and check out what TonToE, Trigger and the gang are up to. (I can't seem to get to the site right now, hopefully it'll be cleared up by the time you read this.) Take Me to the Movies The Smoker tells me that he's found a way to watch the movies in Outlaws without actually playing the game: you browse your OL CDs until you find the ".san" files, which are the movies. Then double-click one of 'em and in the "Open with..." window that comes up, click "Other" and then point it to "olwin.exe" in your Outlaws directory. Now when you double-click a .san file it should just play the movie. Well, that's what he said. I tried it in Win95 and NT and couldn't seem to get it to do it right—Outlaws runs but just stays at the main menu without playing the movie. I've probably done it wrong, somehow, so give it a shot and see if it works fer you. Shoppin' Michelle Rimmer, having read about how Drdeath2 was still able to find OL on the shelves Down-Under, thought it worth pointing out that those of us not fortunate enough to live in Australia can settle for buying the game online at Lucasarts' very own online store, right here. A mere $14.95 is what it'll set you back (plus shipping of course) and Michelle says that it is the spiffy new updated version of the game that already comes with the patches applied, so you just install the game and you're all up to date. How's that for convenience? * * *
Sunday 8/4/02 Well You Can Go To Hades CKMD (shot) by Dog_Holliday: DH has one hell of a map on his hands here. You'll need a relatively fast rig to run smoothly (ie, it might not take a liking to that p120 you've been playing OL on all these years) and it's a hefty download (1.86 MB) but this very detailed city map packs devilish rewards a-plenty. Action takes place on at least three levels (two floors, rooftops) throughout the dozen or so buildings, each lovingly crafted with custom textures and memorable layouts—for instance you won't be forgetting the spiral staircase in the central tower anytime soon, I tell you what. The sly humor throughout is the icing on the cake. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got reservations at Hotel Perdition. Speak of the Devil
Drd2 also mentioned that he recently went out and bought the "Fistful of Missions" version of OL (comes with the patches built in, basically) at a retail store in his native Canada for $7.99 (Canadian). He didn't say if it was a particular chain of stores or something but the impressive thing is that OL is actually *still* in stores (some of them) in this decrepit day and age. Hell in a handbasket! Fire Up the Ol' Player Pianer After my previous update I somehow found myself composing a song. I'm not sure what exactly I was thinking at the time as I was obviously in an odd frame of mind. And rhyming obviously isn't my forte. Anyway, here it is, don't forget to sing off-key (if you don't it won't work because the words aren't quite all nice and metrical ;) and if you can do it in an old dusty tavern late at night with lots of happy old drunks around who won't notice that it's a complete rehash of much better songs, it'll probably go over better:
Where'd I Be Without You Darlin'?
x x x
Thursday 8/1/02 Thanks Every so often, over the years that I've been updating this site, I get a mail from someone thanking me for keeping it going. I'm always flattered and gratified by these but a bit flustered too, because a site like this is invariably an ego-trip for the webmaster. It's come to mean a lot to me, to how I see myself as a person, that I'm able to provide this site for Outlaws players. Aside from serving as an avenue for venting some creativity, or perhaps more often some frustration, it also simply means a lot to me to know that I can provide something valuable to a good number of very intelligent people. So I feel a bit guilty, you see, when someone thanks me for doing this web site. I should be thanking you. And I don't think I've done that before, really. So thank you. Thank you for visiting this site. Thank you for sending me news and maps. Thank you for pointing out my mistakes. Thank you for raising my traffic counter. Thank you for giving this site a reason to exist, because it would not be here without you. I've been lucky to be able to continue working on this site all this time. With your help it'll be around a good deal longer. I don't mean that I'd run out of money to host it or something, I mean that without input from all of you this site would have shrivelled up and died long ago, no matter how much news I would have tried to make up on my own. ;) Fortunately (and much to my surprise, I'll confess), there always seems to be someone out there who comes along and gives me something new to give you. Thank you. ¤ ¤ ¤
Wednesday 7/31/02 A Message From Moly Molycoat wrote to say that if you play his two maps "Shanghai" and "Nuthouse" back-to-back, some of the rifles and rats won't look right because OL keeps the little critters from one map into the next, whereas they should be different. So if you want to see the maps in all their customized rifle and ratty glory be sure to quit and restart OL after playing one of them, before going on to the next. The Real DrDeath2 Stood Up DrDeath2 dropped me a mail to let me know that it was not, in fact, he who gave "permission" for altered versions of his "Mountain Cabin" to be released. So I won't be posting the recent "Midnight Madness" modification. * * *
Sunday 7/28/02 Two Remake Maps Paydirt CKMD (shot) by Cutter: Remake of his "Motherlode" map (which has been removed at his request) with changes to "the pit" (the part between the buildings?) and the addition of CTF mode, as well as some cosmetic improvements. Framerate is perhaps a bit higher in spots but still on the low side but Cutter obviously didn't care to compromise the amazing look of the place just so that it would run lighting fast on older machines. If you've got the horsepower, crank this baby up. Midnight Madness CTKMD (shot) by The Crow: Remake of DrDeath2's "Mountain Cabin" map. Mountain Cabin's readme is very specific about saying that authors may not use it as a base for later maps ("Authors may NOT use this level as a base to build additional levels. Make your own level from Scratch like ME!!!"); Crow's readme says he got permission from "DrDeath2_20" in the Zone but I'm still not convinced enough to post this yet. Maybe the real DrDeath2 would care to contact me and let me know. The level itself is a cut down version of mcabin (which was quite tiny to begin with), taking out the looping path and inserting quite a few powerups, including cream and badge, and a very powerful AI Sanchez. I'm not exactly convinced that these changes are for the better... *shrug* * * *
Wednesday 7/24/02 Many Maps from Moly Molycoat sent in three maps. Well actually he sent in one, "Sandbar," and said that I could stop by Mr. Bone's HQ for two single-player maps that Moly just released as well. Seeing as how Mr. Bone has the scoop, I think I'll leave out the direct links to the two single-player maps, and recommend that you go visit Mr. Bone's swank new pad to pick them up. Sandbar KMD (shot) by Molycoat: Neat tropical island map with an overcast, humid feeling. Seagulls and other nice custom graphical touches abound. Framerate is a tad low since the whole island (islands, actually, since you can skip over to another one) is open to view but not too bad really. The scattered huts and tents make for a varied, realistic feeling layout. Nice. Nuthouse SP (shot) by Molycoat: Layout taken from Last1Stndin's old map "Mystical Fortress." (Contrary to what is said in Moly's introduction, *was* released (mystic.zip) and was based on Marshall's older map "Tunes." I don't even want to think about how much time I just spent trying to puzzle this all out around the fact that Oze's "Mystic" map originally overwrote Last1Stndin's map, and that Last1Stndin didn't bother editing the "you can use this as a base for other maps" part of his readme template so at first it looks like he says you can't use it as a base, but then you realize that right below that is the second option saying that you CAN... oy!) Moly took tons of custom props, sounds, and gewgaws and threw them together in a giant melting pot that is part free-form single-player mission, part wacky effects museum, and part animated shooting gallery. I'm not quite sure what to call it but it's one of the most amusing maps I've seen in a long time, incredibly inventive stuff there. Just as an example, there's an evil robot that launches crows (black chickens) at you. Why? I don't know! Best of all, Moly invites LawMakers to make use of his custom items for their own levels. Dig in to this one, there's a ton of great material here. Shanghai SP (shot) by Molycoat: A single-player rendition of the island seen in "Sandbar" but here it's considerably fleshed out with more trees, ambient life (I *love* those crabs that skitter all over the place), and tons of nasty boss bad guys. Not much of a mission aside from killing everyone but they're coming from all sides, hiding in canoes, standing on rooftops chucking dynamite, etc, and it makes for a jolly couple of minutes indeed. And when it says in the intro that you start in a rat-infested pit, it means it: there are actual animated rats, and stuff they're knawing on, and animated spiders, and all kinds of great prop touches like that. The framerate is a bit low in the shoot-out out on the island but hey, it's single-player so that shouldn't hurt anyone but those on like P100's. Link Madness
Boy, I feel silly for not noticing that the OGB site has been back online for weeks now. VSync Reminder from His SpeKness TheCrow, or "SpeK" as he seems to want to be called today, sent along another of his rambling discourses on getting OL running in various ways, this time covering disabling VSync ("Sync to Vertical Refresh," a setting which you generally want to disable for gaming since it lets your framerate go above your screen's vertical scan rate, which may be limited to 60Hz depending on your monitor/display settings) on a GeForce card. Here goes: This is just for Geforce 2-3 users playing Outlaws. -I have been experimenting with my GF2 Card for a while, and I noticed turning off Vysync on my video card gave me 380 FPS when before i had it on i had 75, so thats a pretty good increase. how i did it was MY COMPUTER, CONTROL PANEL, DISPLAY, SETTINGS-right top corner where pixels and color setting would be. ADVANCED then GEFORCE 2 400/400 MX click there and disable vysync in Glide or Direct 3D. i personaly like D3D because i cant see the flags or people in games untill i get really cloose to them...so :P It would be good to check your framerate after that. also i brought my MB usage up to 90 MB when ruinning it and rendering no more than 200 frames ahead, i dident even mmess with the clock setings so everything should be fine =)Now, I hastily double-checked the display properties for my GeForce2 at work before rushing home this evening and I still don't see a "disable vsync" option for Direct3D (there is one for OpenGL, but that's different and won't help you in Outlaws) in the drivers I'm running there, which are the reference drivers from Nvidia (nvidia.com); but SpeK may be running drivers from his specific card's manufacturer which expose the "disable vsync" option (I also don't know why a GF2's display options would have Glide settings...). If your card doesn't list a "disable vsync" option I suggest downloading "PowerStrip" from EntechTaiwan.com, which knows how to disable vsync as well as tweak many more options for just about every video card in existence. Voodoo owners generally have it pretty easy when it comes to disabling vsync, as 3dfx generally left this setting clearly visible in the display panel. The older Voodoo cards (1 and 2) sometimes made you put the vsync-disabling command in your DOS-based autoexec.bat file—the video comparison page has an example of that if you're still using one of these older cards and want to milk as many frames as possible out of it. Fanning the Sequel Flames Speak of the devil. OzE mailed me to say that a friend of his works for Lucasarts and there's a big rumor going around there about an OL sequel coming up using a full 3D engine, which his friend thinks is "probably true" and will possibly be out "next summer." Now that sounds pretty darn sketchy to me but hey, everyone likes a good rumor, and we haven't had one of these high-class "my friend who works at Lucasarts says..." rumors in a while now. * * *
Sunday 7/21/02 Home of the MoL People MoL House CKMD (shot) by Sixshooter: A big two-room building taking up a chunk of a squarish valley at night. If you stumble around out in the dark you may be lucky enough to find some rifles. When We Was Fab Zeurdoos sent me scans of screenshots of the OL Zone that he found in an old issue of PC Gameplay (says the shots are dated July 1997, not sure if that's the date of the magazine issue as well). The humorous thing, of course, is that the chat they took a shot of contains a naughty word or two, which they couldn't very well have missed though being German I suppose they could feign ignorance. Anyway get 'em while they're hot: ein, zwei, drei! More On Next OLSet Yackin had a few more bits of juice concerning the upcoming 1.2 version of his OLSet utility that lets you swap between multiple OL control configurations on the same machine: "Now ya got stuff like telling OlSet what config's you want applied when applying\loading full configuration" [make of this what you will] and that the new OLSet will be able to configure and save/load the following aspects of Outlaws' configurable stuff: Keyboard, Mouse, Joystick, Taunts, Options, Sound, Music, IP Address List. Wav Goodbye Proximo pointed out that the custom "area51.wav" file which has been causing some discussion in a couple recent maps came from the map Gangsta, made by meegs in 1999. Gangsta's readme specifically states that the level may not be used as a base for other levels and that the components may not be distributed separately, so that means no re-using that .wav in your own maps, dig? * * *
Wednesday 7/17/02 Let Me Show You What We Do With Troublemakers... A little while back I got two maps that were pretty close to the same thing, "crow6" and "thedomes." In all the confusion of trying to figure out why I should post both of them I neglected to notice that the custom .wav file they put in your OL directory, area51.wav, is also the name of one of Outlaws' built in sound effects (the moaning / weird alien chatter thing), meaning that if you extracted either of those maps to your OL directory you will now hear rap music instead of that alien chatter sound in any other map that tries to use it. A bit of a ruckus was raised about this (it doesn't take much to qualify as a ruckus in OL these days ;). Recently one of the mapmakers involved tried sending me a "corrected" version of these two maps, which makes it so that they don't overwrite each other if you install them both, but still causes the area51.wav to override OL's real sound effect. So I'm not going to post that, because I could care less whether two poorly thought-out maps from the same author interfere with each other (though I mentioned that when I posted them originally). Overriding a default OL sound for all maps is a no-no though, so here's what we're going to do. First, if you installed either of those maps, I encourage you to go into your Outlaws game directory and look for a file called "area51.wav." Or use the "Find" function in your Windows Start Menu to look for a file by that name. When you find the area51.wav in your Outlaws directory, delete it. Problem solved! The rest is up to me. Let's see now... ftp.paleface.net/maps/crow6.zip... Deleted. ftp.paleface.net/maps/thedomes.zip... Deleted. And that should about cover it, I think. If the authors ever care to try again I guess I'll take a look although at this point it seems to be a little more trouble than it's worth. Preview of OLSet 1.2 Yackin sent along the addresses of two screenshots he's got of the upcoming 1.2 release of his "OLSet" utility which lets you store and configure multiple Outlaws control profiles on a single computer, similar to Cia_Bpi's long-released "Outlaws Configuration Manager" which you can find on the useful files page. Yackin, of course, is looking to add additional features to his own utility. The upcoming version will have bug fixes as well as the ability to configure your Outlaws sound, music and game options all through one handy-dandy Windows-based interface. Check the preview screenshots: shot 1, shot 2. * * *
Sunday 7/14/02 Look Ma, Two Maps! War_grnd CMD (shot) by Prophet_CG: Very concretely built CTF map in the two-buildings-facing-across-ditch style, but with various twists including a cliffside sniping point a ways behind one of the buildings and bunkers in the cliffs flanking the ditch. The whole map is unusually non-symmetrical for a CTF map so it will be interesting to see how it plays out. For instance, will two bunkered gats in one building prove too advantageous for the defenders, or will the attackers be able to capture the guns and turn them on their owners? Framerate is very good considering the open nature of the level. The lovely lighting effect in one of the bunkers makes it more of a pity that the rest of the map is just one bright uniform shade. Texture selection is a bit quirky in places (grass on top of a building, for instance). Halloween H20 CKMD (shot) by Hollywood: Celebrate All Hallows Eve early this year with this simple map with a "twist." Sure, four very rectangular rooms with pickups sort of scattered about briskly sounds rather dull and certainly there isn't much to look at but there doesn't need to be: there's no light. That's right, get ready to squat in the dark waiting for someone to fire off a shot of to be foolish enough to light their lantern; or just go nuts with TNT and hope you remember where the walls are. It's got "moxie". Seriously, check that Moxie link. :) Q3 Sound Mod for OL Who sent along a 1.5 MB download of a Quake 3 sound pack for Outlaws. Unzip the "olpatch4.lab" to your OL directory, run the game and you'll find your usual weapon sounds (and a few other sounds, watch out for one with a certain four-letter word) replaced with custom sounds, mostly from Quake 3: the rifle sounds like a ray-gun, the TNT sounds like an atomic bomb, you hear "Quad Damage" when you pick up a badge, etc. Pretty cool in a way. What's really cool though is this method Who used for "patching" the game. Outlaws must automatically look for and load a certain number of "olpatchx.lab" files at runtime. Put your custom content in such a file and you've got yourself a "mod" which works in every map. Neat! And as Who pointed out, if you get tired of the sounds, just delete the "olpatch4.lab" file from your OL directory and everything will be back to normal. This kind of mod is super-easy to make, it'll be interesting to see what else folks come up with. By the way I'm not going to be hosting these types of mods as they really aren't as vital as maps and can take up a lot of space besides. Who's sound pack is in my temp folder so get it while it's available. Webbins HomeLANFed has an interview with one of guys doing the Western Quake 3 mod for Quake 3 (didn't see that comin', didja?). He mentions OL as their primary video game inspiration, aww. (I bet he did that just so I would link them :) A beta version of this mod has been out for a good long time now but they're coming up on "Beta 2.0" which is looking quite impressive judging by the screenshots on their site. TenTacos continues to update his TensTake.com site, he's recently added the "Los Caza 3 Ladder," a friendly ladder which you can join to see how you stack up against other OL players (hurry up though, the first few matches have already begun). Ten adds that Garbo has been a big help getting things going. © 2002 The Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Sorry, The Microsoft Corporation now owns this gaming site and we will only allow posts which wholeheartedly endorse our products and policies. Don't worry about your ex-webmaster, he'll be "fine"... eventually. By the way, we're happy to announce that we have nearly crushed the despicable competition in the PC graphics arena! Take a look at the minutes from the latest meeting of the ARB (OpenGL Architectural Review Board). Unfortunately the author adopted a very dry, summary writing style which wrings most of the pathos out of the dialogue, so we'll try to fill you in better. Basically, the master tech-heads from a dozen of the larger PC graphics companies get together and talk about how they can improve their little "OpenGL" graphics API, instead of just bowing down and using our own Windows and DirectX. Despicable heathens! Fortunately, we weaseled our way into the conference. Our man sat quietly like a lovely little snake in the grass, so still you'd never notice him, as the eggheads sat around exchanging ideas in a disgustingly free and collaborative fashion. Then, when they got to talking about a certain vital area of the API, as we knew they would, our man whom everyone had forgotten about in their naive enthusiasm said, ever so softly, "By the way, the Microsoft Corporation believes that we have Intellectual Property rights to this technology." You could have heard a pin drop! Those code monkeys were caught completely off-guard. And it's almost sad how defenseless they are to this kind of thing--when will these fools learn that it's not being smart and innovative that matters, it's who can come out owning it in the end? See, we've been oh-so-carefully buying up patents to little bits of graphics code from cash-strapped companies who contributed freely to OpenGL in the past, like those saps at SGI (oh man, I'm laughing just thinking about that one--and it was an SGI man taking the notes at this meeting! Ah, delicious irony. I'm sure he appreciated it as he was writing this up. ;). Now anyone with any kind of brain at all could tell you that it's ludicrous to claim that you own any part of a technology base that is inherently open to anyone for free use but see, judges don't know this kind of stuff at all! We just needed a way to wedge our foot in the door and now that we're in, our triumph is assured! You think any of these ARB members are going to be willing or able to pony up the dough necessary to counter our legal army? Hah! It's almost pitiful. ;] So after they'd all picked up their jaws a little and started blinking, our man offered that although we'd of course have to charge a slight fee to anyone wishing to use this technology which we feel we own, we'd be perfectly willing to negotiate a trade for new patents instead. Isn't that reasonable? People can pay us in ideas rather than just money! I'd say that should be just about perfect for all these sandal-wearing, tree-hugging tech-heads, wouldn't you? They've got ideas a-plenty! Well they quibbled and waffled and gabbled a bit. It must have been rich to see, I tell you. I wish I'd been there! Well eventually they went back to trying to keep on their little idea agenda and even almost managed to forget about our little assertion as they got excited about their ideas and so forth. Can you believe they actually went back to cooperative debate!? Amazing. So our man waited again. And sure enough, pretty soon they got to another area where we're gonna claim ownership based on the vague and (just between you and me) vaporous patents we've bought. Hehe! And then he said, again just loud enough for about half the people to hear distinctly: "Oh, we're pretty sure we own that, too." If I could only have seen the looks on their faces! This must have been the crushing blow to their fantastic little world of sharing and peace and lovey-dovey crapola. One of them had a little presence of mind left and asked to be provided with a list of our patent claims. Hah! Right into our hands. We'll send those along--with about two truckloads of fluff whipped up by our lawyers. Let them deal with that snow-job while we move in. These poor bastards still don't know what's hit them. Pretty soon now anybody trying to do anything in PC graphics is gonna hafta come crawling to us first. And oh, we'll make them squirm! The very name "OpenGL" will be a bitter mockery! I'm rubbing my hands together here just thinking about it. Any innovation, any revolution, is gonna hafta pay us our due first. Make no mistake, they're gonna get 0wn3d, as the leet kids would say. And their little dogs, too! $ $ $
Wednesday 7/10/02 Once Upon a Time in the West The post about "Mad Dog" in the last update got Spikerama (aka "Larry") thinking and he came up with a lengthy list of Old West PC games. Here 'tis: Lar' says he's had light-gun compatible PC versions of Mad Dog and Mad Dog II for some time now, as well as "The Last Bounty Hunter," another game from the same company, American Laser Games. I've only played a couple of the games listed above, though I sure played the heck out of Oregon Trail back in grade school. You've gotta love state-sponsored edutainment, dontcha? Oh, I almost forgot, I've played Westworld 2000, in fact it turns out that I wrote a scathing bit of nonsense about it four years ago (do a search for "Westworld 2000" on this site, you'll find it). It probably hasn't gotten much better since then. I'll save you the trouble and just hook you up to the best part of the game right here. Mwah! Ah, I was so full of gumption back in those days. Nowdays I get all tuckered out just doing three bullet lists in a single update... Don't Forget Kids, It's Morbid! Priest: The Real Hardgore MMOG, an "action-horror" massively-multiplayer online role-playing game "set in the midst of a lost land of the American Wild Western Frontier" was announced on the net a couple days ago. In addition to the official site linked above (and yes, it is spelled "Hardgore") there is now a preview on GameSpot (thanks to sch_007 for that link). The official site by Korean developer/publisher(?) is JC Enterprises Corp. is kind of a hoot. They make the bold claim that Priest "creates a grim and gruesome ambiance while providing a healthy dose of gory, violent action." It's based on a Korean comic-book of the same name, apparently. The odd thing is that they say the game follows the "trials" of the main character from the comic, and they brag that it will have "30 Playable Characters." They don't really explain how this can work in a massively-multiplayer game :P. Also, we are encouraged to remember the following bullet-points (among others):
Hey, A Glide Wrapper Been a while since we've had a new Glide wrapper, hasn't it? MortalCandy pointed out that you can grab the latest version of the "eVoodoo" Glide wrapper from glideunderground.com/ (check the "files" list in the upper right). A Glide wrapper, of course, is supposed to allow you to play Glide-accelerated games, such as Outlaws, on a non-3dfx video card. The eVoodoo readme says that this latest wrapper is optimized for video cards based on the following chipsets:
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Sunday 7/7/02 Dome Duplicity The Domes (Crow 6) CTKMD (shot) by Crow: The big multilevel open part of LEC's "Granary" level looks to have been cloned and set side-by-side with it's genetic brother, forming a two-section CTF-type map that's rather heavy on the pickup items. This is a pretty interesting layout, I must say, and it should be challenging to assault the top position since there's only one way up. Not content with this, Crow and his frequent compatriot Who have added a button that plays a bit of rap music (something about "my weapon" and "steppin'") and some sort of switch system which I didn't quite figure out which causes an AI Sanchez to appear and run around blasting everyone, which could be annoying or fun, I suppose. There's an odd rendering artifact in one of the "domes" where walls appear at the corners when seen from far away. The Domes CTKMD (shot) by Crow: Are you ready to be a little confused? This is virtually the same map as "Crow 6," indeed they share the same file names so you can't have them both installed at once. ;P The difference in this one seems to be that multiple Sanchezes spawn in simultaneously after a minute or so (to allow you to collect weapons, presumably). I generally had about four pop up and fill me fully of lead pretty effectively. I guess this is fun... Of course, if they come steppin' on my weapon, there'll be hell to pay. Beta Control Configurator for OL James K sent me the URL for a Beta Control Configurator for OL (1.9 MB). The link is to a self-extracting executable—just point it to wherever you want the program to reside on your hard drive, then go there and run the "olset.exe" file, in theory. It didn't work on my machine in WinNT (something about my "COMDLG32.OCX" being out of date :p) so I didn't get a chance to really try it out. What it says it does is allow you to save a control setup for OL so that you can change your controls, then go back and reload the setup you saved previously whenever you like—so you could swap back and forth between control preferences for two different people playing on the same computer, for instance. Now, there's already a utility that does something like that (see the "Outlaws Configuration Manager" on the useful files page) but, of course, this one might work better for your needs. If it sounds useful for you, check it out. This is beta of course so use at your own risk etc etc. Still Mad After All These Years Sulaco2d pointed me over to the Digital Leisure, Inc game page where you can find details on the upcoming PC version of "Mad Dog McCree," the venerable live-action western shooting game with super-cheesy acting that debuted in American arcades a dozen years ago. Yes, you'll soon be able to live the adventure on your very own PC (it's been out for DVD players for a while now, apparently :P). Mad Dog! Before Outlaws There Was... Outlaw Speaking of old Western games, I was traipsing around GameFAQs, as is my habit, when I stumbled upon some details of an old Atari 2600 game called "Outlaw." As you can see in these screenshots from The Video Game Museum it isn't the most complex shooter in the world but durnit, since when did fine gameplay require fancy colors and so forth? Anyway, I haven't played it (I remember playing some kind of two-player tank game on the 2600, and a horrible version of Pac-Man, but the rest is a blur) but there's a pretty entertaining reader review on GameFAQs which describes the game in glowing detail, which you might get a kick out of (and let's not try fooling ourselves, we're all in this for the kicks). Site-ly Viewing
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Wednesday 7/3/02 Taco Stand Takes Ten (Film at Eleven)
LEC Looking for Interest in OL Sequel Who seems to be hooked in to this top-secret Lucasarts email newsletter thingy, and sent along what he says is the latest delivery, with news of a little sequel survey:
To: LucasArts Customers
The poll is well written and seems thorough. I'm
curious as to why it wouldn't be on lucasarts.com if
it's an official LEC thing but nevermind me being
paranoid, the important thing here is that the poll
asks several questions about which LEC games you'd
like to see a sequel for—Outlaws included. So now's
your chance to cash in your chips... wait... to buckle
your swash... no... to jingle your spurs... uh... ah
heck with it, just go vote already!* * *
Sunday 6/30/02 Death Riders A Pale Discourse I got a telegraph from Outlaw who let me know that the Death Riders posse site, whose server he runs, is offline but will be back soon. The old server's hard drive died so he's in the midst of putting together a new server machine and then getting that one online. He estimates that the downtime will be at least two weeks, possibly a bit longer, but fret not as the riders of www.deathriders.org will be back in the webbed saddle in the not too distant future. High-Steppin' obh CKMD (shot) by John Thibodeaux: Been a while since we've had a new low-gravity map, hasn't it? The dark sky above this box canyon is actually a solid ceiling designed to keep you from drifting off into the starry night. Two little side chambers make up the rest of the map, so there'll be a lot of good 'ol driftin' and dodgin' here. The low architectural complexity makes for high framerates and happily a gat is supplied in the middle of the canyon floor for executing one of my favorite techniques, the Flying Gatter. :) * * *
Sunday 6/23/02 A Pretty Place to Die Cataract MD (shot) by Dog_Holliday: This is DH's first published map but I'll be dog if it doesn't look like he's been doing this since the first cows came home. Great sounds, naturalistic lighting and texturing, lovely use of trees and plants and some incredible water works (are three waterfalls in one small map enough for you?) make this one of the best-looking new maps I've seen in a good long time. And the eye-candy would be useless if it didn't play well but I'm betting it does; he's got some great jumps in there for you spry mountain-goat types and a few strategically located twisting tunnels will keep things unpredictable. I particularly like his use of the vertical plane, something very tough to do in the OL engine but incredibly effective when done well—and it's done very well here. Parting tip: watch that last step on waterfall #3 (the big one), it's a doozy. XP Voodoo Driver Follow-Up Somewhere around the beginning of the month B.T. Justice sent word of a site with some user-tweaked Voodoo 3 drivers with which he's had great success in Windows XP. This page also has custom V4/5 drivers. Today he sends along a supplementary notice regarding their V3 drivers: I forgot to say that when you install this driver to also ignore the 5 errors that come up during the install. After rebooting the computer, you have to go back to "isetup.exe" and run it again to fix the errors. This is completely normal and after running "isetup.exe" twice, everything will work correctly.So there you have it. Even with all that it sounds easier than installing V5 drivers on a Win95 machine without IE 4+. Heck, this sounds like a walk in the park by comparison. * * *
Wedneday 6/19/02 How Red is Thy Neck Redneck MD (shot) by Hooter: Unusual map begun by a friend of Hooter's, Redneck Jon, who happens to be an avid Redneck Rampage mapper. I'm not sure but the slightly offbeat layout may be due at least in part to Jon's experience with different tools. Anyway, things are kind of more open and intertwined than is usual in OL maps, with a bunch of freestanding buildings and intricate rock formations all in the same area. Surprisingly fps doesn't suffer as much as you'd think and the freestanding structures provide a lot of channels for pursuit. Buildings are a little blocky and the textures could use a little oomph but shadows are used to fair effect. Major "wow" factor here comes from the animal sprites by Molycoat—those horses you see in the screenshot are actually in perpetual motion, running back and forth. They're quite stylishly animated, too. Then there are the eagles and a couple other animals who I'll just leave it to you to discover. I really could do without the robots and that durn demonic poodle, though. * * *
Sunday 6/16/02 Look Honey, a Map Canyon Dam CMD (shot) by Yackin: A big dam/bridge/road crosses a very large canyon. Rather plain aside from that and a number of gatling guns, but still the framerate is on the low side, perhaps due to the mammoth scale. CTF from either side of the bridge could be interesting briefly (not much in the way of cover) but just try not to lose the flag over the edge. Kind of nice winding effect to the river's course but the obvious tiling of the textures at long range kind of sticks out. Note: appears as "WDam" in the map list. Calling All Slaters_dogs Who is trying to find the ol' LawMaker known as Slaters_dog so's he can ask for permission to make a map based on one of Slaters' levels. Unfortunately for Who the email address in Slaters' old readme files seems to be out of date. If you know how to get ahold of Slater, or if you are Slater yourself (;), go ahead and drop Who and I an email. Of course, in general if you're thinking about using someone's map as a base and it doesn't say in the map's txt file that you have permission to do so, it's best to not spend too much time on the project until you've actually obtained their permission. This will end up saving you a lot of hassle in the end, believe you me. * * *
Wednesday 6/12/02 Maps for Everyone Repair at Dusk CTKMD (shot) by Who: Based in part on a concept by TheCrow, Who took Pattern Repair, gave it a dark brownish color scheme and threw in long slanting shadows to dramatic effect. They don't even seem to lower the framerate significantly, which is pretty durn cool. The items have a ML arrangement, there's a large anachronistic poster upstairs (I think this was a Crow touch) and the yard outside seems to have gotten bigger, or maybe I'm just getting slower. Arena 3: Last Man Standing MD (shot) by Yackin: No sooner do I dig up his "Arena 2" than Yackin counters with "Arena 3," the third in his seriers of strict arena maps. This one keeps the oval arena with tiered, partly sheltered seating, but shrinks it down quite a bit, changes it from day to night and sort of narrows down the pickup distribution, which is good. Not much cover at all to be had here so don't count on living too long no matter how good you are. The place could use some lighting and heck running sounds would be nice, but there's something almost pleasingly retro about his texture choices (dig them glass walls, baby). CutJab C (shot) by Spikerama: A CTF-only level based on Chaabo's "Lil'gulch," in which you only have fists, knives and TNT with which to claim ownership of this tiny two-building town. Should be an interesting way to fight. Spikerama (Larry) said something about playing it in DirectDraw, though I didn't see any particular 3dfx problems in my run-through. In fact it looks pretty good in there and while the framerates are somewhat low for a small level, you can see the payoff in the architectural detail. FairCTF C (shot) by Spikerama: The great Spikerama clearinghouse continues with another CTF-only offering, in which two teams must race together (I think) to get their flags home. The "track" is in a big jagged loop so you'll have to watch out both behind and in front as you hustle along. DirectDraw was recommended though again all looked fine in Glide mode—in fact it looked pretty darn good. Bob Graham's Gold (updated) SP (shot) by Spikerama: Updated version of his single-player puzzle game has some gameplay tweaks, for instance the huge gang of badguys waiting for you just past the start point won't kill themselves now in their zeal to get to you (and considering that you're armed only with your two fists, this is going to be a challenge—but apparently you can think your way past it somehow...). DirectDraw again recommended by the author (I think I know who could use a Voodoo 5 for Christmas :). * * *
Sunday 6/9/02 Sneaky One Arena v2.3 KTSCMD (shot) by Yackin: Old map, just found it a site URL given me by James K (GAC—see below). Not sure if it is related to an even older map called "arena.zip," and I guess I'm not gonna lose much sleep over that. Very wide and flat except for the slightly depressed floor of the main arena. I like the color scheme here but I can't say I'm big on huge formations of ammo pickups, and those weird 2-d ceilings, and the way you can see two different skies if you jump around. Oh and the framerates aren't the best. You probably won't have to worry about running out of ammo though. So Many Games, So Little Time
Yahoo! For Outlaws BTJustice sent me the following: I was thinking. There are problems with IRC security as we all know and not too many people populate the Zone anymore to play Outlaws. Perhaps something easier is needed. I am on Yahoo! Chat right now and have created a room called Outlaws under the User Rooms in the Game category. Nice thing about Yahoo! Chat is you can either use it through Yahoo! Messenger or go to it on the Yahoo! webpage. Also, you can easily ignore anyone there. And the voice chat is nice too.I think you have to have signed up for a Yahoo! account before you can hit the Yahoo! chat rooms, but they make that a pretty easy thing to do. Once you've signed up you can hit the "user" part of the Games section here and look for "Outlaws" in the list. When joining it'll ask if you want to install the voice chat stuff but you can skip that if you want. The chat interface itself reminds me a lot of Kali, and like Kali they make it easy to pick custom fonts and colors and stuff. The UI is a bit funny feeling at first but I imagine you get used to it, and I suppose you probably get used to the banner ads pretty quickly as well (these would be nothing new to Zone users, certainly). So there you have it, a new OL meeting place, easy as that! * * *
Wednesday 6/5/02 Get Paid While You Surf! Sorry, I'm afraid I've misled you. No money for you here. However, if you're a h@rdc0r3 OL fan, or just bored, perhaps the the following links may amuse or entertain you:
BTJustice tells me that he's updated his Buford T. Justice's High Speed Pursuit site, adding a section on how to use a freeware CD ripper-burner program to make high quality, legal mp3 copies of your personal CD collection for purely archival purposes (*cough*), more tips to his already extensive and excellent mIRC section and even an update to his Outlaws-specific section, including a new poll on who's your favorite Outlaw character in which Sanchez currently enjoys a stunning 2-to-nothing lead over the rest of the pack. And I only voted once, I swear. GoJo's Current Project page has been updated by the big "dawg" from himself with some notes and musings about his new "Hack Resistant" version of Sanctuary (which you can also download from that page). He's wondering if anyone would be interested in a smaller version of the level, since the full-blown 4.5MB download may be intimidating to modem users, and has a poll up asking several questions regarding that issue, so go punch in your thoughts on the matter. There's also a rumor that one report of someone being able to hack the map has been reported, though no details are provided (and as GoJo points out, hacking a 4.5MB OL map may be something of a Pyrrhic victory). * * *
Sunday 6/2/02 Web-Based Chitlin's BTJustice pointed me to this page for what he says are a great custom-tweaked set of drivers for Voodoo3+ cards under Windows XP. At any rate, he says that they've run all his games flawlessly on his Voodoo 3 under WinXP, "just be sure to have the installer overwrite any newer version of files it finds when you run "isetup.exe" to install the driver and 3dfx Tools." The page offers Voodoo3 drivers for Win9x/Me and Voodoo3/4/5 drivers for Win2k/XP. Use at your own risk, of course—but come on, what else do you have to do with your now-obsolete Voodoo card (aside from Outlaws, naturally ;). There are, of course, many user-made distributions of Voodoo drivers besides these. The discussion board at x3dfx.com looks like it's still a pretty good starting point for digging in to this whole "underground" driver scene. Adventure and blue screens await! Doc sent me a link to a recent Clint Bajakian interview on GameSpy.com, offering up a lengthy Q&A with the composer of the OL soundtrack, plus a photo of him looking relaxed and happy in his new digs, since he's recently left LucasArts to head out on his own audio and gaming related endeavors. The upside of this for us is that he's now much more free to answer questions relating to his past work at LEC. Of course, we want to know about Outlaws. And wouldn't you know it, they actually ask him a direct question about what inspired the OL tracks. I'll just paste in his reply: Daron Stinnett asked me for a spaghetti Western score in the style of Ennio Morricone. I had always loved his scores to films like For a Fistful of Dollars, Once Upon a Time in the Old West, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I listened to the soundtracks a lot and internalized the musical style. I then got away from them and created the music originally, but based strongly in the style I had learned so well. While an homage to Morricone, I experimented and took some risks. I think the fun we had shines though in the music.Now I don't want to be a wet blanket here but it's always seemed to me that the OL tracks are a lot more than just "in the style" of Morricone's "Man With No Name" soundtracks. We're talking note for note, scream for scream here. I mean, they're obviously recomposed and they sound fine and all but sheesh, original they are not. Go listen to sound clips of the originals (cdnow.com has free 30 second previews of many of the tracks) and then play the OL soundtrack on your CD-ROM, and I think you'll note some shall we say similarities, and the only "risk" I can hear is that LEC probably stood a good chance of having a lawsuit on their hands if the owners of the original compositions had thought it would be worth their time to object. But I digress! Go read the review, it's a lot more interesting than just this one question. It seems Clint's company does quite a lot of work for LEC as an independent contractor. Want more web-based Western fun? Try going to Google and doing a search for "chitlins." Watch out—this is dangerously close to "edutainment." * * *
Wednesday 5/29/02 For a Few Hacks More Sanctuary HR 1 CKTMD (shot) by GoJo: First off, this is a nicely touched-up version of Sanctuary. GoJo has aligned things you didn't know were misaligned, dug up buried powerup items, and noticeably improved the framerate around the well. Plus, you can now go on the rooftops (really opening things up for dynamite chuckers ;). As far as I'm concerned this just might be the nicest version of Sanctuary yet. That's just for starters though. The main thing is that this map is "hack resistant" (thus the "HR" designation). Outlaws has a built-in file verification scheme to check that a player joining a game has the same files as the host, but normally this is only used to check a few small attribute files. In SancHR1, it checks *everything.* Which explains why the file is so large, because GoJo had to cram pretty much all the player weapon sprite files in there. Whew! On the bright side, this should make the map quite a bit harder to use hacks in than your average OL map. Be sure to read the readme. Part of the hack-prevention scheme requires that you switch to a different character while in the SancHR1 lobby. If you don't, your weapons may lock up when you fire. :P Take that, hacky types! There's also a little file shortcut you can use to speed up the character switch routine—all spelled out nice and simple in the readme, so take a gander while you download. Weighing in at 4.5 MB, this is the largest level download that I can remember. GoJo is hosting it from his GoJo's Current Project Page so just pop over there to grab it. He's spent literally weeks and weeks combating some of the nastiest hacks the OL world has seen, and so far it looks like he's been pretty darn successful. By the way his system is available for examination in this map, so other LawMakers are invited to take advantage of his research. Full Throttle To Sequel Land! rant_2 pointed out that since Lucasarts has just announced Full Throttle II, a sequel to a seven-year-old game, then Outlaws, a mere five years old, may still have a year or two to go before THE INEVITABLE SEQUEL IS ANNOUNCED! Well okay I jumped the gun a bit there. Still, if they're just startin to make a sequel for a game two years older than OL, then it may be too early to count an OL2 out. * * *
Monday 5/27/02 Take It To the Bank BankJob M (shot) by Spikerama: Another new game from gamesman Larry! In this one, one team plays bank robbers, and one team plays the group defending the bank. The robbers (red team) take a long road to town, giving the blue team time to take up defensive positions. Once they arrive the fun begins and only ends once all the robbers are killed or when they've escaped with the gold. If you die, you respawn in a separate "consolation map" area. The town is a modified version of the single-player Sanctuary level (actually, it's a modified version of Chaabo's "Ourtown") at night, with many little additions including multiple holes you can dig to get into the bank. Very neat concept, it sounds like just the thing for a group of folks looking for something different than the usual running and gunning. SnotE Shots SnotENoze is workin' on a three-part single-player adventure and he sent along shots of the first level: shot 1, shot 2, shot 3, shot 4. Let the debate on the etiquette of placing a piano in front of the window begin! Network Traffic Taskbar Thingy BTJustice pointed me to NetPerSec, a little utility which sits in your system tray and shows a tiny graph of your network traffic (registration at pcmag.com required for download). It seems to work fine, though I have a hard time reading the graph since it's so tiny. I kinda like DUMeter, an old freeware version of which you'll find on my Dial-Up Networking Optimization page. Anyway one thing's for sure: knowing what your internet connection is actually doing is a very useful thing. Catch a Train... On Your Desktop MarshalNuts sent me an Outlaws wallpaper (35KB) which he made, consisting of a 640x480 shot from that cinematic where Anderson jumps on the back of a train, with the Outlaws logo in a white box in the upper-right corner. This image should be familiar to most of you but did you ever think of putting it on your desktop? I'll bet you didn't. Unreal Western Mod Page Update Joël from Belgium pointed out that "Unreal Badlands," a western mod for Unreal Tournament, has moved here. The site also looks quite a bit more developed than I remember it, with a very nice design, details on the project (which is still in development) and some very good looking screenshots and weapon renders (dig all those rifles). One of their maps is named "Outlaws," which I'd say is probably not coincidence. Tripping Through the West I missed an update a week or so ago but I have a good excuse: I was visiting some old college chums in Montana. Not that I went to school in Montana, but one girl I knew in Chicago lives there and two others were going out to visit from Iowa so I figured I'd drop in too. I wimped out though and flew most of the way instead of driving the whole thing like I did several years ago when I went out for her wedding—her town is within spitting distance of the eastern border of the state and Montana is one BIG state to drive across (not to mention Washington). So I flew to Billings and rented a car, which worked splendidly. The Billings airport is kind of cute, some clever folks perched it on the top of a big bluff so you just kind of roll off the end of the runway and you're automatically airborn. Montana was a blast as it always is for me and I'm sure that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I'm always on vacation when I happen to be there. Before I left my friend said "well it'll be great to see you all. I don't know what we'll do though—after all this is Montana." Well we figured out some things to pass the time, including:
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Wednesday 5/22/02 Psst. Free Maps SancN ("Sanctuary at Night") CKMD (shot) by Rowdy: Familiar theme but with significant new touches, including an outer canyon running most of the way round the level, a very large, irregular and brightly lit wooden basement area beneath the town, and a bunch of one-way walls around the place. Based from Saxster's Sanctuary_ML. I'm not a huge fan of one-way walls, and that double-jump over a deep pit to get to the weapons cache may be pushing things for multiplayer, but it's hard to go too wrong with even mutant Sanctuaries. The files were a bit disorderly so I cleaned them up and .lab'ed 'em together--heck I'm surprised the darn thing runs now. Um... let me know if it doesn't. MySTiC CMD (shot) by oZe: Rather spiff looking little CTF level with two forts with their backs to each other and a high canal between 'em. There seems to be a gat in the tower and a hole in the rooftops but I don't know how to get to these aside from maybe a TNT assist. Handsome construction, impeccable balance and a nice tight size have this one looking like a winner. Oddly, you have what looks like the other team's flag in your base right by yours, but it turns out to be a dud. *shrug* Is "Dead Red" True Blue? E3 2002 is in full swing and darned if it isn't tough keeping up with game news at the rate that PR announcements are being made this week. I noticed though some intruiging screenshots in a videogames.com preview of "Dead Red Revolver," a third-person PS2 western shooter in the works at Angel Studios, to be published by Capcom. The screenshots look great, with amazingly subtle accents of light and color, along with what looks like some depth-of-field effects, creating a brilliantly murky Old West look. They posted a movie of it in action today though and I'm actually a little less interested now, since the action is quite arcadey (shouldn't have been too surprised what with Capcom, the arcade king, being involved) and it looks like the main character is using his six-shooter like a submachinegun. Oh well, just check it out of the screenshots (and no, I don't know why they're fish-eyed like that). Oh, The Carnage! LeCaillou was kind enough to go through all the links on the link page and found a huge mess of dead ones, so I've done some spring cleaning on that page. Ye gads, it looks as though some of the free hosting services (especially xoom and geocities) must have dumped a lot of old sites recently (budget cutbacks, you know) because overall 30% of the links on the page had gone dead, most of them being xoom or geocities. In fact there's not a single xoom site still active, so I guess that's pretty much that for them. Here's the full kill list. Well... the page loads a lot faster now. * * *
Sunday 5/19/02 Win98 Expiration Date BTJustice pointed me to this page on Microsoft's site which tells you when they plan on ending support for their various operating system products. '95 and earlier are already gone. Next up are '98 and NT, whose support periods expire at the end of June, 2003. I wouldn't be too surprised if MS comes out with a new version of DirectX around that time, and doesn't release it for Win98. Whee! GoJo Hacking Away GoJo is digging even deeper into the seamy (not to mention pathetic) world of OL hacks in his efforts to come up with a method mapmakers can use to render their maps relatively hack-resistant. He's finding more and more interesting things every day, check his Current Project page for the latest. Please Publish Our Western Game Zombie Studios continue to search for some publisher to shell out the dough for their "Wanted: Dead or Alive" Western FPS currently in development. There's an interview with the head Zombie guy on homelanfed.com about the game, going into detail on the branching mission structure, etc. Also a couple new (and at least one old) screenshots, which still don't look incredibly impressive but... well, heck let's hope some producer picks the game up so we can have the chance to at least play a demo of it. * * *
Sunday 5/12/02 Maps Go In Here FightOut CKMD (shot) by TheStamper: CTF-oriented level with two double-story haciendas facing each other across a narrow river, with several standalone walls on either side providing additional cover in the field, and a tunnel below to mix things up. Drawback of having almost everything visible outside at once is low framerate, particularly when standing in the bushes (something nasty about rendering through all those sprites at once, though I've never particularly noticed that before so it might just be my Voodoo 5 acting funny). There's also a largish gap in the ground behind one base in Glide mode, and no footstep sounds in most of the level. Hidden (updated) CMD (shot) by Munky_34: Updated version of the recently released small CTF/DM level, sporting various tweaks most notably running sounds (I forgot to mention the lack of these in my earlier release notes, whoops!), custom nwx showing up correctly (GoJo's rifles), additional rifle ammo, lowered windows so you can see that nasty Doc standing there sniping at you, and a fix for a "hole" near the upper waterfall. Men of Law and the Web Sites Who Love Them
Hack Resistance Update GoJo has updated his Current Project page with notes on a shortcoming he found in his experimental method for making maps resistant to common OL hacks, and a description of the steps he is already taking to resolve it. It'll entail a brief delay in the release of the first "HR" map but the added security should make it well worth the wait. * * *
Wednesday 5/8/02 Red Beans and Rice Hidden CMD (shot) by Munky_34: Nice looking hilly desert canyon map with multiple buildings, a little stream and waterfall, and some cliffside bunkers. The directional shadows cast by buildings, trees and cliffs are pretty; I suspect they bring down fps a bit but nowhere in the map is framerate all that bad (the same can be said of the extremely detailed stream course). Clumpy trees ala GoJo and nice details like a stack of papers and an inkwell on a desk in the second floor of one of the buildings round out the detailed scenery, and the fairly tight layout should keep the lead flying. New Cold Blood smac has given the CBO - Cold Blooded Outlaws posse site a completely new design which still manages to contain all the great stuff it had before (files, map hints, downloads, graphs of character power levels, etc etc etc) plus it now has a fancy schmancy message board. smac is even offering a free board section to any clan that would like one. Well that just warms my cold cold heart. Discful of Music I was listening to the music CD I have called Ennio Morricone: The Legendary Italian Westerns - The Film Composers Series, Volume II when it occurred to me that this is one darn fine album that I don't think I've mentioned before. Then I go check the price over on cdnow.com (click the link above) and see it's going for a paltry $9.95 these days (plus you can get another $5 off that if you sign up for their buyer's club thingy, though I don't know if that is a scam or not ;) and figure it would be a crime not to mention it now. So consider it mentioned! Err well to flesh that out a bit, Ennio Morricone is of course the Italian composer who did the soundtracks for Sergio Leone's famous "Fistful" westerns starring Clint Eastwood as "The Man with No Name": A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Lucasarts copied tracks from these soundtracks literally note for note when they made the music for OL but they didn't quite capture the wild and raw sound of the original orchestrations. Morricone went on to do hundreds of films since then and has become one of the most prolific composers in film history—he's still composing to this very day, in fact. However, aside from the amazing soundtrack to another Leone western, Once Upon a Time in the West, which essentially put Charles Bronson in Eastwood's boots, his other compositions, though excellent, just don't have the awesome raw and wild energy of his spaghetti western roots. Back to the album at hand, this disc has a whopping 31 tracks of Morricone western music on it, including seven of the eight tracks of the Fistful soundtrack, eight of the twelve tracks of the For a Few soundtrack, and four of the thirteen tracks from the Once Upon a Time in the West soundtrack, including Man with a Harmonica which may be the most powerful and haunting piece he's ever written. Alongside these are tracks from a few other Morricone western soundtracks; I particularly love A Gringo Like Me, a cheesy yet blunt ballad of survival in the Old West. In fact I typed out the lyrics four years ago (7/8/98, stale vittles baby) and man, I still get them stuck in my head. ;) So anyway it's a great album if you want a big dose of the music that inspired Outlaws all on one CD, and it's hard to beat the price. Oh yeah, the cover (you can see it on the cdnow page, the first link I gave in this post) kicks butt. ~ ~ ~
Sunday 5/5/02 Sitations
GoJo has run into a hitch with the "Hack Resistance" scheme he's been working on recently. Check out his Current Project page for the details, and help him find the solution which will work best for you by taking a moment to answer the two related questions in his web poll. œ œ œ
Wednesday 5/1/02 A Map Called Wallas Wallas CKMD (shot) by LaNkMaN: This map comes by way of The Crow, who "found" it, and then TheOutlawDad, who tells me that it wasn't working in DM, Teams, or KFC, so he "fixed" it. Woo! Anyway, it's a kinda small CTF-style canyon with some cliffside bunkers. It lacks running sounds, is a little inconsistent with lighting, has a funny glitch on one rooftop and very "clumpy" object placement but not really a bad medium-sized map, with a sort of "open" building arrangement. Pretty good framerates, too. Screenshot of Long-Suffering Project I'm experimenting today with email titles as post titles, so the credit for the phrase above goes to Cutter, who sent along this preview screenshot of a map he's working on. He says that he'd been trying to get the OL engine to swallow his initial plan which called for a moving steamboat with working water wheels and smoking smokestacks but then reality hit in the form of LawMaker so he's been sort of beating it into shape for the past week or so... and might have it ready to go "soon"! Yay! It sure looks nice so let's hope he doesn't have to "scuttle" the old girl before she sees the light of day. Fw: Listing http:// www.paleface.net (and more) Okay so this email-title-as-headline thing may not be working out. Anyway, GoJo forwarded me an interesting mail in which he also happened to mention that he's updated his Current Projects page with a bit about his upcoming "hack resistant" Sanctuary-based map, which I posted preview shot or two of a while back. He describes a bit of what he's doing on it now, and how the "hack resistance" aspect is going to be used. deadlands shots Haha I can blame that lame headline on myself since I sent myself a little mail reminder to post this after seeing it earlier today on Blue's News. The producers of the upcoming third-person alternate future horror adventure Western thingy game "Deadlands" have some new screenshots of it in action on their Deadlands product page. Hey, it's kind of a western... I think. Important Announcement for All Zone Members Microsoft Gaming Zone sent me a mail today. Mr. Zone said that zone.com was doing "spring cleaning" and all old Zone accounts that haven't logged in within the past six months will be sent to the big Recycle Bin in the sky. They don't give a date for this event, which seems a little suspicious. Anyway, Mr. Zone says that if you have an old account that you haven't logged in with in the past six months (like me) which you want to keep (unlike me) then you should head over to http://www.zone.msn.com/services/support.asp and speak with the man in charge. Thanks, Mr. Zone! ™ ™ ™
Sunday 4/28/02 Get These Maps Cover Me! CKMD (shot) by TenTacos: Update of this CTF map adds KFC mode and more "ambiance." The night sky is nice, could use interior lighting/shadows though, especially in the bases where the flat lighting makes it a little hard to spot exits and entrances. The slide is still cool though, and lookit all those bunkers and bridges and things. And it's still got them moderfied rifles. Chasm CMD (shot) by Hooter: CTF version of the memorable LEC single-player level where Anderson wends his way up a deep chasm with a river flowing through it. Should make for some interesting (and difficult) CTF play since there's really just one long, narrow path between bases. Extra points to Hooter for getting one of the coolest bodies of water in the game into multiplayer (not counting the old co-op version :p). I love how the shadow the natural stone bridge casts over the deep pool of water at the bottom of the ravine, with the waterfall behind it. Jumping down into it is fun, too—and actually might come in handy for a quick flag getaway. :) Downhill SP (shot) by Spikerama and MarshalWho: A brand new game for your playing pleasure. You've got to get to the end of this slippery ravine course before three minutes are up. MarshalWho devised this really neat timer that you can actually see (see screenshot) and hear counting the time. Tick... tick... tick. Hurry! Of course there are all sorts of nasty pits and traps along the way. In fact, Spikerama's design is downright evil in places. You'll be cursing him, and your computer, and probably anyone else within earshot. All I can say is: save often, and to multiple save slots. And get good at hurdling the livestock. Once you make it to the goal in time though the little surprise ending somehow makes it worthwhile—well, it brought a smile to this impatient fella's face (and I've had to play through three times now, so there! :p). Make OLHL Maps for Fun and Profit The Outlaws Mod for Half-Life site has details of an upcoming map-making contest for their mod (that is, making western maps using the Half-Life/Q2 map tools) which will offer cold hard cash for the best mapping efforts, sponsored by Kid Macoo: $25 for third place, $50 for second and a whole $100 cash on the barrelhead for the first place winner. Submissions are due by June 21st. Now, you can't buy love, but you can't eat love, either, so that money could come in handy. $ $ $
Wednesday 4/24/02 Hack Sanctuary? I mentioned recently that GoJo had more up his sleeve than the now-cancelled "People's Map" and now I can say what it is: "Sanctuary HR." The "HR" stands for "Hack Resistant" as GoJo's got a few surprises up his sleeve for would-be hackers. I'm not going to give 'em away since they're still works in progress, but in the end maps which incorporate GoJo's new measures should be much harder for people to cheat in. And that sounds like a good thing to me. Of course GoJo wasn't just content to stick to anti-hack stuff, he's also got a map to play with, after all! Sure you've seen Sanctuary in many, many versions... but have you seen it from this angle? Or how about this one? Interesting, eh? He's even managed to fit KFC and CTF in this lil' old map, plus many other little optimizations and tweaks. It's gonna be a Sanc to remember. Now, I don't know when he'll be done with it—this being GoJo, the only answer is "when he's done." In fact judging by recent developments he's gonna be a while with it, but I think the wait will be worth it when all is said and done. I guess that's about all I'd better give away for now. :) Adult Swim Rash TJHoenecke beamed over the following news flash: Back by popular demand, the Cartoon Network will be re-airing the half-hour western cartoon "Saddle Rash" on Adult Swim this coming Sunday night, 11:30PM EST. "Must-See TV" for any fan of Outlaws! ;) TAPE THIS ONE -- it's a keeper!I'd tune in except my cable modem repair man snipped my free cable TV access, rendering me an uncultured law-abiding citizen again. So I actually have no idea what this whole "Adult Swim" thing is, but anything related to "Adult" and "Rash" is probably worth checking out if you're one of those households enriched by the warming glow of cable television. © © ©
Sunday 4/21/02 Webbin's Somehow I always end up doing the update at about 1:00 am. It's because I work better in a pinch, right? Uh no. It's because the day is too short! Arrghaghagg. :)
Matthais Brunner has updated his German-language ms-discoveries: OUTLAWS - Single Player's Goldmine site with a spiffed-up design, plus easy access to single-player level downloads and retail level walkthroughs (in German, natch). Don't sprechen sie Deutsch? Well neither do I, but it's a nice lookin' site (and you can still download the maps, too! :p) and if you click the little English flag on the front page you'll find a nice little intro from Matthais. And if you do speak German, well you're in for a treat, plus you can now chat it up in the site's new forum. Headfirst Productions has some nwe Deadlands screenshots showing previews of the action in this alternate-history Western game in production. Kind of an action/RPG thingy, apparently. But look ma, six-shooters! GoJo's been busy at his cyber House lately. Check out his Custom Objects page for easy downloadin' of his really nice custom NWX objects, like the ubiquitous breaking candles and propped-up guns. By the way, if you use one of these objects (shown in screenshots for easy identification) GoJo would really appreciate being given due credit in your map's readme file—as is his right, 'far as I'm concerned. Truth to tell, if any author ever complains to me that their work is being used in a map without credit being given, I pull the map. Simple as that. Now, most folks, like GoJo, are kind enough to overlook a trespass or two, at least for a while... but just save yourself trouble later and put correct credits for any third-party material in your readme. And of course if the resource you want to use says "do not use" or something to that effect, don't use it. :p GoJo is kind enough to present his work for free use but please do the kindness of giving proper credit for stuff that isn't your own. GoJo has also updated his People's Map page with word that this project, which was to tailor-make a map based on results of web polls, has been canned 'cause not enough "people" were voting to make it really meaningful. Low voter turnout, an unfortunate modern problem really. Happily I can tell you that he isn't daunted in the face of such player slackerdom, and has certain other fascinating projects in the works already of which we will be greatly undeserving and downloading in mass quantities. Z Z Z
Wednesday 4/17/02 See a Pattern? Crow's Night Out CTKMD (shot) by Who: Pattern Repair at night is hardly a new subject but if you just can't get enough (or if like me you're too lazy and forgetful to try looking up past versions) then here you have a nighttime ML version with no gat. Yahoo! Two Plus Two Look out, here comes a SPOILER / hint thing! ... End SPOILER thing! Double Hmm My cable was out all last week (some kind of busted framistat in the control whatsit at the cable box) and now my email is acting up, so if you don't get an update or mail back from me then I blame these gremlins which appear to be haunting my cable line. Shoo! * * *
Sunday 4/14/02 Singleplayer, Multiplayer Aunt Rosie's Legacy SP (shot) (shot) by Mr. Baggins: Impressive singleplayer campaign with lots of neat effects like new skies, custom characters and sounds (love the music bits) and palette effects. There's some tricky key-hunting involved... so far I'm stuck at the train level (I'm not good at key hunting hehe... I just hope the conductor didn't have the key, he went on a little TNT flight overboard ;). And the levels can be rather dark--they're sometimes based on singleplayer LEC levels, but mostly at night. But the production is very impressive and paced just about right. The flashback level is priceless. By the way to run it you run the "aunt.bat" file which you'll find in your OL directory after extracting the .zip, then load it from the "Historical Missions" menu. Los Casadores 3 CKMD (shot) by TenTacos: Reissue of Sonic55's map (with permission) fixing various glitches and so forth, leaving the basic map pretty much the same (big CTF level with intricate bunker/tower system, mod rifle). Looks very nice and the framerate is improved in this version. Web Sitings
TonToE tells me the site for the "OL Mod for Half-Life," recently released as a public beta test (that means you can download and play it now :) has now moved right here. Nice front page picture. ;) Also the site news has mention of some tweaks they're considering based on feedback, and asks for help tracking down an elusive server crash. Plus of course you'll find info and downloads for the mod there. # # #
Sunday 4/7/02 Maps Galore Cross Fire 2 CKMD by Taco: Not a new map, but Hooter just noticed that the .zip was made to extract the files into various subfolders which would prevent you from actually playing it, so he fixed it up in a new .zip file. :) Munky Shelter CKMD (shot) by Munky_34: Pretty nice looking CTF level with the usual river-between-two-buildings motif. A couple side and underwater tunnels mix things up a bit. Solid looking with restrained ammo placement, though the framerate gets a tad low looking across the middle. RantRage CKMD (shot) by Rant_2: Very small level—so small that it's hard to take a good screenshot of it hehe. Sort of a weird layout of a shed in a road next to a cliff/building thingy, err. Looks better than it sounds though and has some nice use of shadows and good framerate, as well as an extensive use of barricades. Good thing too 'cause you're gonna need some cover in a map this compact! Dark Dungeon 2 CTKSMD (shot) by ShiftyTuco: Not exactly a new map, more of a remake of the first one for CTF. Complicated lighting design and cool thunder and lightning effects make for some very nice atmosphere. Overall dark level though pretty good looking, with high framerate and multiple levels in the big old stone jail. Should be pretty memorable for CTF. Neat custom medbottles too. OL Mod for Half-Life Public Beta TonToE sent out the announcement that the Outlaws Mod for Half-Life has been released for public beta. That means that if you have Half-Life or the stand-alone version of CounterStrike you can download the mod from their web site and play it on your very own computer. It's a lot like good ol' OL except in a full 3d engine and with dedicated servers and stuff. I haven't tried this version yet but the alpha I tried months and months ago blew me away, so I'm sure with all the time they've spent on it since then it's gotta be pretty darn amazing now. The download is about 30MB which ain't bad considering that it's got almost all of Outlaw's textures and sounds in it. So go download it, play it and make sure to give the mod guys plenty of constructive feedback! Converting Levels from Text to Binary Well I was asked this recently and had clean forgot about it so I asked Raptor and he'd forgotten about it too but says he found it on the Code Alliance site, credited to my site. Ehh so I just used my handy little search field on the left there and found I posted it over a year ago as reported by SnotENoze. Oops! What I'm jabbering about is, of course, the command line function you can use to convert your ASCII Lawmaker-created level into nice compact binary format which takes up less space and loads faster. Sounds good eh? Well here's how it's done, as I put it last year (the benefit of having a poor memory is that sooner or later everything old is new again ;): To expand upon this, you don't need Laber or any other program to wreak this thrifty compression upon your map. Just stick your .lvt and .obt files into the same directory as your olwin.exe. Then open a DOS Command Prompt and type the path to olwin.exe followed by the "/tokenize" option followed by the name of the file to convert.Okay, I'll try to remember that this time. :P Updated Sites Sighted Rant_2 mentioned that the Rant Outlaw Posse site has even more Civil War photos and trailers of Western movies available for download, including clips of newer movies like Shanghai Noon. Don't let your internet connection go to waste, start downloading stuff! GoJo's public map design project marches right along, the latest polls for determining what kind of map this is going to be have started narrowing it down, now he's asking about specific landmarks and so forth. Go read the current plan and vote to determine this map's fate! * * *
Wednesday 4/3/02 Wanted: Any Western Game Since I know some of you are always interested in seeing what other Western games are on the horizon, though we know they have almost no chance of measuring up to Outlaws :), I thought you might be interested in this "Wanted: Dead or Alive" interview on nofrag.com. The site's in French but the interview is English, go figure. They're interviewing John Williamson of Zombie Studios, the Seattle-based game design company working on this independent Old West game. The game still doesn't have a publisher and the interview doesn't introduce any new screenshots but manages to touch on a couple semi-interesting facets of the design including the multiplayer "King of Boot Hill" mode and that Just as in any good Western movie, you can shoot the gun out of your opponent's hand. When you do so in single player, the opponent will surrender, when you do so in multiplayer, your health is restored and you acquire all your opponent's ammo.I'm not so sure about the health-restoration aspect but hey, could work. * * *
Sunday 3/31/02 News Bits GoJo has moved on to the second round of design questions for his next map. The first round of feedback determined that it would be a CTF-based level. Now go vote on what kind of setting you want it to have! TonToE sent along the latest URL for the Outlaws Mod for Half-Life site. Apparently they've been fighting with one or two particularly persnickety bugs but they seem to be back on track now and hope to have something folks can download by next weekend. It may be around 30MB. I don't really have the bandwidth to host it but hopefully they'll get some download sites lined up (visit their site and contact them if you have access to a high-bandwidth download area :). * * *
Wednesday 3/27/02 A Little More Whiskey Sanchez Rides! SP (shot) by Cutter: Take his sharp multiplayer open plains town map, throw in about a bajillion bad guys plus one very nasty Sanchez and you've got yourself a darn hoot of a single-player shootout. No key finding or anything like that, just shoot everything that moves, then shoot it a few more times to make sure. Just how tough is it? Well, I died a good many times playing on "Good" difficulty, but then again I tend to just charge in guns blazing. Well okay I did try backing off into the desert to snipe a bit but those darn dynamite chuckers on the roof got me. So yeah it's pretty tough. Now I did buckle and saved my game halfway through because well frankly I was running out of time to do this write-up hehe—good thing I saved too because a shotgun blast from out of the blue had me reloading a few moments later. Ahh, good stuff. Worth mentioning I guess that the AI here seems pretty on its toes. I forgot to mention in my recent post of "Payback Time" that a lot of times in that adventure the AI would just stand there. That happened just once or twice in Sanchez Rides, so yay! Probably because there's so much noise and shouting and glass shattering that it's hard for even the AI to miss the fact that something is going on. ;) Oh, good variety of badguys too. Besides of course Sanchez himself a few other OL bosses (and certain other memorable characters...) make appearances, and the regular badguys are pretty well mixed in too. Now I gotta try this thing on "Bad" without saving. *gulp* Umm... I'll... err... have to get back to you on that. But there's just something so grand about crouching down beneath a shattered window in a dark building with bullets whizzing over your head while you load your last few bullets into your pistol. I'll get every single last one of those dirty sons of— Help Wanted For Stupidest Map Ever GoJo doesn't dream small, you can say that for him. Recently "retired," he's apparently still got a few itches left in that trigger finger of his. The feller has declared his intention to make "the stupidest map ever." He's probably being a little hard on himself. What he's actually doing is designing a map by allowing people to vote on all the major design choices. The first question, naturally, is whether it should be made primarily for DM, Teams, CTF, etc. Go to the poll and pick what you want! This is your chance to design a map without having to lift a finger. Well okay one finger lift to click that link, one to open the poll and a third to vote. Wait no two to vote because it's with radio boxes. So that's four finger lifts. Can you manage that? Tell you what, work your way up to it slowly. Click that link above, then rest a bit before going on to vote. You can do it! * * *
Sunday 3/24/02 Spring Cleaning Have you ever hand-polished an entire car? When you had to press really hard to get the streaks out of the darn paint-protectant renewer junk? Ouch, my arms. Darn that spring-like weather for inspiring me to go out of doors. morpheus sent along an updated version of his recent map morph1, the difference being that he's added medbags to the the level for those of you who keep getting, y'know, injured and stuff. Rat sent along the sad news that he's retired his longtime Outlaws site. For old time's sake I'll just post my little link article (the link is dead now, of course) here one last time:
Rat didn't take it down with all hands though, he sent along this picture to remember it by. Neat image, thanks Rat! The site will be missed, it really was unique and fun. Best wishes to Rat in his next abode, wherever it may be. As I mentioned when I posted it last week, Sunset_Rider had warned of intermittent problems saving the game in his map "Payback Time." I didn't encounter save problems when I played through but Blackyolero says that he did, on levels two and four, so it sounds like there is indeed some elusive problem there. If you find you can't save, well... just don't get shot. :) * * *
Wednesday 3/20/02 A Tricky Triumvirate Payback Time SP (shot) by Sunset_Rider and Moonlight_Rider: I wasn't going to play this all the way through this evening. I really wasn't. I mean, a six-level Historical Mission adventure? Sheesh, that'll take forever! I'll just do the first few levels tonight... Well an hour or so later I sort of came to realising that I hadn't been able to stop and had and played the whole thing right through. Mind you, I didn't get all of it because each level has the primary mission, which ends the level, and secondary missions, which don't really get you anything aside from some extra gear and a little additional satisfaction of leaving no loose ends. The missions and the lengthy storyline are spelled out in depth between missions. The whole "objectives" thing works quite well in giving the whole story a real sense of purpose while allowing for extensive exploration and freedom of choice, and keeping things hopping by tossing multiple plot points at you simultaneously. This is especially impressive given that most of the levels/missions take place in Sanctuary. Yep, you'll finish one primary objective, go through a map load, and find yourself right in Sanctuary where you left it, but with a whole slew of new baddies to bust. And bust 'em you will. I dunno if this is old or young Anderson who you're playing but one thing's fer sure: he's one mean S.O.B. who literally takes no prisoners. Well he sort of does only then he shoots them. The mission briefings feature pretty iffy grammar but some lines of dialogue still stand out, such as: "I walked towards the cemetery, with the taste of blood in my mouth." This Anderson channels some Max Payne-esque pulp angst. Rather nice change of pace though it may not be everyone's cup of tea. You'd be doing yourself a disservice by missing this Sanctuary epic though. And don't be a cheap shot and play it through on the easiest skill level, like I did! :p Oh, and don't give up in the big desert, things perk up quite a bit after you slog through that. And oh again, the readme notes that sunset ran into a problem saving or quitting in the first level, I'm happy to say I didn't have any trouble there. Maddie CKMD (shot) by Listerine: Big ranch house with basements and catacombs and stuff. The uniformly dim lighting in tandem with the odd proportions (really narrow doorways, huge stairs, etc) makes for some rather awkward navigation although the house offers plenty of places to explore. The nifty view into a distant valley outside is just for looks, since you can't get down there, and unfortunately brings down the otherwise speedy framerate a good deal when looking in that direction outside. morph1 CKMD (shot) by morpheus: Large grassy valley with buildings spaced around the outer walls. Decent framerate and nice and big for real rifle action. The bright, tiling textures get a bit hard on the eyes however and 3dfx users will encounter significant visual glitches in several of the buildings. Building construction is fairly crude and item placement sometimes clumpy, though since this was built with CTF in mind that may make sense. * * *
Sunday 3/17/02 Plenty More Maps AMAZING2 SP (shot) by Who: Re-issue of the map first seen last week. Turns out that the first version was starting you right at the end so you missed most of the actual maze madness. Now you start at what we suppose is the beginning so you'll have many more chances to get crushed to death in the dark! Be sure to pick up the lamp oil in the first room and don't go into the tunnel and then back out because it'll shut behind you, trapping you. And here's a tip for when you're in the tunnel: run. MoL CKMD (shot) by morpheus: Another re-issue from last week, apparently some people had incompatible versions. So this one is supposed to be compatible with whatever these crazy people had who didn't get the map from me (like I said, crazy). Day & Night CKMD (shot) by Diablo: The .zip is called "Day&Night" but the level actually shows up as "Learning" in your level list. And it looks like the author is just exploring some basic, single-level layout here, though you've got a bit of both interior and exterior, plain though they may be (hey, at least framerates are high). Item placement is a bit clumpy. Thud Tower (Enhanced) CKMD (shot) by Who: Souped-up version of LEC's "Thud Tower" level with some changes to one of the pit areas, a rooftop level on the tower, some item placement changes and probably other stuff I didn't notice. The readme notes that OL may crash when looking up the stairs to the rooftop, which did indeed happen to me, though only once (the readme estimates there's less than a 15% chance of this happening, yay). Overall very similar to the original version as far as I could tell. Killer Diablo CKMD (shot) by Diablo: Huh this one shows up in the list as "Untitled," rather a post-modern touch there. Another big'n'flat level, all indoors this time though it has a couple hidden areas as did Day & Night. Come to think of it I don't think either of these levels have footstep sounds. Concerning these re-issues and various other submissions I received this week in un-postable condition, I'd like to encourage map-makers to take your sweet time getting your stuff all set and working correctly before throwing it out into the world, as it were. The very best thing you can do for your level is to give a beta version to a few friends for some good hard playtesting. A lot of the great levels we have today wouldn't have been quite so great were it not for their authors having taken the time to test them, make tweaks, and test again. Also, I'd personally appreciate it if you could make sure that the attachments you send me actually work: for instance, take what you intend to send, wipe all traces of it out of your OL directory, then install the file (usually a .zip) you have ready to send me, and make sure it works. Finally, check the mail you sent me and make sure you actually included the correct attachment. These simple steps can save us both a lot of time and embarrassment in the long run, believe you me! What'd You Say 'Bout My Momma? The Crow likes to send me things and one of these things this past week was this taunt which you can of course use for OL by dumping it in your OL directory and configuring it as you normally would configure custom taunts. Crow says this is his actual voice, so now you can put his vocal powers to use in insulting others for you. He sounds kind of like a sullen Weird Al, which is rather impressive as far as I'm concerned. This is in my "temp" folder so get it while the getting is relatively good. * * *
Wednesday 3/13/02 Tons and Tons of Maps! Well okay just three maps really but that's a good many by current standards. :) MoL CKMD (shot) by morpheus: Presumably named after his "Men of Law" posse, the author's first map initially seems to follow the usual first-map line of big, flat and featureless, however after a fair bit of jogging around you'll find that the large building and the wall fort opposite form a reasonably solid CTF layout, and one that's rather unusual as the two sides share almost nothing in common. The vast empty no-man's land in between provides zero cover from snipers and gatters so get ready to run. Lots. One of the upstairs rooms has a minor 3dfx rendering glitch. AMAZING2 SP (shot) by Who: Err well it's a little maze thingy, emphasis on little since as far as I can tell once you get past the achingly loud pounding stone blocks and the tunnel that suddenly whisks you into a deep pit, you're done. In other words, you die a couple times learning the traps and then you're done. Enjoy. (?) Grand Canyon! CTKMD (shot) by Who: Multiplayer conversion of the very beginning of the single-player "Canyon" level. Lots of rifle work here, watch that first step. If you're not into long-range fighting you may not get much out of this one. Contains a couple mysterious additions like what looks to be an elevator, and a buzzsaw deathtrap beneath the gatling gun. (??) Rest of Stuff Who, busy fellow that he is, couldn't resist passing along some links to some free graphic images he liked of sort of high-tech gatling guns (here, here and here). He also sort of reminded me that you can still give Stealth suggestions for things you'd like to see in a possible updated version of LawMaker by posting on the Outlaws Editing board at the Code Alliance web site. * * *
Sunday 3/10/02 Two Maps hilltop CKMD (shot) by Janitor: Old but previously unreleased CTF map with two bases on opposite sides of a looping canyon. Very nice (and loud ;) use of wind sound effects, and the dim winding passages of the cliff base feel really neat. Framerates at the other base are a tad on the low side despite the simple architecture. Pack a rifle along and watch for snipers in the windows if you go flag hunting. The Gamesta's Hangout KMD (shot) by Gamesta: The author describes his first level as looking sort of like a small Doom level, which is pretty accurate: flat, low, squared walls and a pool of lava all feed that impression. Which isn't to say it's bad, of course, in fact you'll enjoy a high framerate, simple flowing layout and probably non-stop shooting, though going around the same tiny loop constantly may get tiring after a bit. Don't neglect the surprising number of secret areas packed in here. WinXP OL Trix As is his tendency, The Crow rambled in to my inbox with a long freeform discussion, this time apparently on improving one's Outlaws experience in Windows XP. Sit tight, it gets a little bumpy: Heyas, I have got a few good tips for those outlaws players using windows XP... hit shift 5 times and take off everything in those settings so you WONT, yes thats right WONT,! get booted from games! also.. those people not using voodoo cards or G force's.. download that D3D thingie from the outlawdad.com 's files page; then get the D3D updated.. people wont go floating in there air anymore! also I find that if you cant host and are on windows XP, me and a few others have tried this.. open your internet options and ENABLE all that stuff,and then for some reason you can host.. also when - b 4 u start killing CTRL + ALT + Delete and close REALPLAYER, and WhAgent, those take up a lot of Ping in zone... so if you have that and other junk running close it all so you can get a better ping, another thing, I noticed a sysop names "+Scuzzy" talking about how he/she (<~~ doesent know..) found that they have had 2 or 3 different IP's running on there Cable modems, so make sure you only use 1 if you wish to host.. Mail me at [removed] if you want more help/ tips on XP using, I found that it isen't all to bad after you know how to use it! Message Board Redux In light of Truffle's semi-official community message board going offline, TheOutlawDad has decided to keep the fires burning by hosting a general Outlaws message board on his site. There seems to be a lot of confusion and cursing going on at the moment—in other words, things are back to normal. =) Mobile Forces Head West HomeLan Fed has a Mobile Forces Demo Screens and Impressions page discussing this Unreal-engine first-person-shooter from Rage Software. I just mention it because the demo level appears to be an "Old West" setting, and it's interesting to see what current game engines can do with this theme. Just ignore all the sci-fi weapons and vehicles. :P * * *
Wednesday 3/6/02 A Patterned Repair Crow's Repair CKMD (shot) by LAWMarshalWhO and TheCrow: Clever idea here, taking the building from Pattern Repair and mirroring it to create a CTF-style layout. Two buildings instead of one results in lower framerate but I don't expect there's much you could do to avoid that if you still want them to be out in the open pasture. The second building has a couple new touches including a flat roof with a large hole in it allowing you to drop from the roof into the second floor loft, which might make it a bit easier to capture the flag there depending on where the flags are placed. * * *
Sunday 3/3/02 GoJo's Back in the House GoJo's House is back online, now hosted at his new ISP. The downloads for his LawMaker tutorials are still offline but if you want 'em you can just mail him and ask. When his page went down I was kind of struck by how few actual LawMaker tutorials there are on the web, so I'm quite happy these are back in action, particularly since they're so thorough that even a melonhead like me could probably understand them, given time. :) Truffle's Hideout Flushed Truffle has taken his "Outlaws Hideout" site down, as well as the "Outlaws Message Board" (or "OLMB") which he's been hosting. He didn't give me any particular reason for this. I'll miss both of those pages, there really aren't enough fresh OL joints to visit on the web and those were two of them. Thanks to Truffle for having worked on them them up to this point! * * *
Sunday 2/24/02 Wash Out Your Mouth Young Man listy CKMD (shot) by Listerine: Cute little one-story house in a little round desert canyon, at night. Great framerates and pretty nice texture/lighting work. The doorways feel a bit narrow but you know, people were skinnier back then. On the other hand, they apparently had a lot more guns and ammo. * * *
Wednesday 2/20/02 Give Suggestions for New LawMaker SnotENoze tipped me off to a lot of recent activity at the Code Alliance site—note the new address for starters (by the way someone tell 'em to update the the URL printed in their HTML page title ;). There've also been layout/script changes to the site and the message boards. But the real news comes from posts on their "Forums > Outlaws Editing" message board by Stealth, one of the Code Alliance head honchos and developer of the LawMaker level editor, in which he... oh heck I'll just copy in his post from an earlier thread there started by Nowhere Man: K outlaws section is pretty well done.. First one :)And he did! A genuine man of action, this fella. So if you have some features/fixes which you're dying to have in an updated version of LawMaker, you better get over there, sign up and start posting, pronto. And of course you can give him your site link for their link page. I really don't know what he means by "specs"—the specific thread he made for that one starts with "Leave Info here for any changes/additions that need to be done to the specs. Try to be somewhat specific. ( I don`t have time to check out things myself)" which still leaves me in the dark as to whether he's talking about updating system requirements or features or something else for LawMaker or other new/old utilities, or if he's talking about making actual mods to Outlaws itself, or what. Well, lots of you guys are smarter than me so I'm sure you'll figure that one out. Now git goin'! Of course, if you're going to post any suggestions there, please take the time to 1) read through things that have already been suggested so you don't end up repeating them and 2) don't waste the man's time with poorly-considered suggestions—think before you post (and no I don't practice what I preach, which is why I'm too scared to post there :p). [Too tired to go back and re-write earlier part update.] If you check the codealliance.com News page you'll see a recent series of news posts by Stealth. Looks like their old domain name was expiring, thus the address switch. Actually it looks like sometime in the past couple of days he had a change of heart and decided to jump back in to OL a bit, since the first few posts are of the "well bye we've moved on to real life" persuasion. It's good to see that the video realm still has Mr. Lovejoy in its icy electronic grasp. :) Farewell to the International House of GoJo The long-lasting GoJo's House, a repository for some OL etiquette and LawMaker lessons by this opinionated map maker, has gone down, a victim of the recent Excite@Home debacle. They've set up a forwarding page but GoJo tells me he has no way to access the account at the new address, so even if by some miracle they repost the site there he won't be able to update it or even correct any of the now-broken URLs. Err so I'm not sure why I'm posting this since you can't get there anymore but umm it's been slow for news, okay. And besides I liked his site. Hopefully some of his LawMaker tutorials will find new homes on the web—his texture alignment tutorial was particularly impressive. Careful With IE 6.0? HaWk sent me this: I.E. 6.0 crashed my system and I am trying to get Dell Tech Support to get me back up and running. Not sure if this problem has been stated b4, but I know I didn't hear about it when I downloaded the update for my home computer. Anyhow, I'm sending this so no one has to go thru what I went thru.I haven't bothered installing IE 6.0 on any of my computers since as far as I now it doesn't really add anything new that I would need. Hmm the IE 6.0 review at browsers.com says pretty much the same thing, and adds that there are some annoying new "features" and security holes in the new version. So anyway you may want to do a little research before installing the latest version. * * *
Sunday 2/10/02 O EBA Agradece Sua Visita
WooWoo ChooChoo MD (shot) by Hooter: Remake of the (very) old map "Ghostown" by Lynxeye. It looks a lot like that map as far as I can recall, though with some new bells and whistles (almost literally ;) around the train and station. There's a ledge running around the whole valley now and the item placement has changed some. Still very wide and pretty open, as in the original, and also retains the original's rather low framerate. That's the price you pay for putting a nice looking train in the middle the of level though. When the Fat Lady Browses Man, that's probably the crummiest title I've had in a while. Ah well. Lightning has struck twice in the past week: not only did I get introduced to the cool text-based browser Lynx which I gushed about in my last update, but the very same feller also pointed me to Opera, an independent GUI browser. I looked at Opera three years ago or so when I was doing web design and found the interface really rough and clunky but this browser has come a really long way in the past three years. Its rendering engine is super-fast and very accurate (to the point where some of my html hacks break--gah! :p) and it offers some truly innovative and useful functions to speed up your web browsing, chief among them being the "gesture" control system which lets you go forward and back and every other which way by just clicking the right button anywhere on the screen and flicking the mouse in a certain direction. Sounds tricky but it quickly becomes second nature in practice, so much so that after using it for just two days I find myself trying to gesture-browse in Netscape and IE. =P Another thing I really like about Opera is that while Netscape and IE assume you're doing most of your browsing in a single window, Opera embraces multi-window browsing by making it incredibly easy to open and control multiple windows at once. You can easily scale and zoom the view in any window independently. And the email client does everything I want it to do... well okay it can't share itself between two different operating systems like Netscape 3 can (after some registry hacking ;) but it has easy-to-create mail filters and other junk like that. Opera has finally convinced me to give up my dearly-beloved Netscape 3 which these days sadly is encountering more and more pages that it just can't handle. Stupid style sheets. :P Opera has none of these problems and continues to undergo active development by its Norwegian development company. About the only drawback is the steep registration fee: $39 is way more than most folks are going to think about spending on something they pretty much have for free already (and you can use it without registering but you get an annoying banner ad stuck in the top of the interface). But for people like me who spend way too much time browsing multiple web sites at once, that's money well spent. Addendum: Oops, I just discovered that Opera doesn't display incoming mail very well in Windows NT. Phoop. More incentive to drop NT I suppose, since all I use it for these days is updating this web site. ;) * * *
Wednesday 2/6/02 Three Maps and a Baby Big_Nut CMD (shot) by TenTacos: Sometimes you feel like a... Just look at the automap and you'll understand. Nice tidy arena-style CTF type of thing. The texturing is a little repetitive but so are my map previews, and hardly anyone ever notices. Granite!! CKMD (shot) by TenTacos: Now here's a texture set that says something. To me it says "palomino"; I don't know why, it just sounds right. I love the black and white tiled walls and ceilings here. Spend a few minutes and you'll realize that what looks like a simple largish grey arena (perhaps somewhat lacking in contrast) is actually a maze within a maze. At times it feels like you're inside The Man With No Name's poncho... at least, maybe in the first movie before it got really dirty. :p The framerate isn't that high but it isn't that low so you should be okay. thinline CKMD (shot) by TenTacos: We're through the looking glass here, people. Somehow I feel like Alice in Wonderland running through what seems like a jumbled collection of wonderful design ideas. There's the graveyard, the ruined fort, the natural amphitheater, the mission, the druidic circle, the mystical caverns... all sort of tumbled together. It's big and you'll probably spend a lot of time being lost while you try to piece things together. Frustrating but somehow brilliant. Framerates stay consistently high and the texturing is nice and varied throughout. There's a custom TNT model which I couldn't figure out how to reach. This map will have you running around in circles... but they're nice circles. Who sent an updated version of his map The Town, with fixes for three bugs in the original version (or apparently I grabbed the wrong version of something). According to Who this version fixes: 1). Small Damage Flag set in a sector 2). TNT mod crashes on cirtin places 3). the INF had a horrible amount of LAG in MP. Zoning Light_My_Fuze has been abusing Win XP and found the following way to log in to the Zone multiple times from the same computer: I am not sure how many people know about this but i figured the people who dont use Win XP should be aware of this trick i found out. I recently bought a new computer and xp came with it. I was screwing around with it and stumbled upon a way to log onto the zone under 2 different names at the same time. All you have to do is establish 2 user accounts on your Win xp. (you can make as many accts as you want, so i guess you can log onto the zone each time also) Log onto xp under 1 acct and then into the zone with 1 of your zone names. Then click on start/log off/switch user and then use that acct to log back onto the zone with a different name. You will see your 1st zone name and it will also show 4 green bars and a ping of 0. You can switch back and fourth and use each zone name. You can also launch a game with your 2 names in 1 room however only 1 user name will make the launch. I think you also have to have cable and not a modem. It is actually kinda neat to do it and most that i have shown in the zone are not aware of it. I think people should be aware of it now because i could see some using it to mess with others. I havn't yet tried to see if 1 name gets banned or both by sysops but ill try it soon. I have also only tried 2 names but i am pretty sure you can use as many names as you have accts for.Of course, those of us who have multiple computers in the same room can pretty much do the same thing. Not that I would *ever* do such an underhanded thing, of course... Half-Life Mod Beta Set for March 1st TonToE sends word that the Outlaws Mod for Half-Life has a new web address along with news that they expect to release a beta version of the mod by March 1st now that they've got CTF mode working. Conveniently enough there's a screenshot of the game running in CTF mode along with the news update on the site (now where is that flag stuck behind Two-Feathers? ;). Got Lynx? In this day of super-multi-media web browsers, why the heck would you want a text-only browser? Well for one thing there's the lighting-fast speed, fewer distractions, miniscule system footprint... I could go on but by now you could already have visited and downloaded Lynx for Win32. This isn't new by any means, I'd just never tried it before this evening. I likes it a lot. :) You can change the colors around by messing with Colors section in the lynx.cfg file. Not so surprisingly, this here site has probably never looked better than when you strip out all the garish colors and pictures and just read the straight news updates. ;) * * *
Sunday 2/3/02 Who's Your Daddy? Who is single-handedly responsible for all the news items today. No that's not a question darn it, that's his name. The Town MD (shot) by Who: Yes it's Sanctuary... but it actually isn't very safe at all. You see, if some chap scoops up the death's-head cannonball, takes it to a blue area inside one of the old buildings and nudges the wall, the whole freakin' canyon drops about a mile down except for a couple red "safety" areas. Not to worry, the ground comes back up shortly thereafter (after everyone else has fallen to their death). Also, you get a text warning and an air-raid siren a few seconds before the ground disappears. He pulled this off with the help of a custom local.msg file, which will overwrite the one from any other custom map you may have. There's also a really cool day/night cycle where the whole map actually gets darker and lighter gradually as you play, and a couple modified weapons like a really nasty shotgun. Sanc veterans will probably get a real hoot out of this. Some of the textures look a little odd, especially at "night," but who cares about textures? :P His page on this map is right here. Huckle 2 CKMD (shot) by Who: Modification of HardknoX_3's "Huckle" which was based on Marshal's "Sniper." Who appears to have tidied up some lighting, water and texture effects, and added in some custom modified weapons such as the semi-automatic pistol seen in the screenshot. If you like either of those other maps chances are you'll like this one too. His page on this map is right here. Dr_Mengela CMD (shot) by Who: Probably my favorite of the bunch, this is an original map though very reminiscent of the first single-player mission ranch, but more compact. Good framerate, nice and roomy for fighting and has some funky customized weapons, like a cattle prod. Hmm and there are some cows right over there... Also, I love the sound you get when you pick up a knife—a real shocker the first time you hear it hehe. Also some nice lighting and texture touches to give it a polished feeling, good stuff. His page on this map is right here. Who's Site Is This, Anyway?
Who's Got LAN? In response to the question posed by _Soul_Katcher_ (man that is annoying to type :p) in the last update, who is having trouble getting OL going on his LAN which relies on port sharing off his DSL modem's IP address, Who had this to say: i just now read the news about the LAN for OL thats just what im using (NAT) Network address translation. you gotta re configure it to "send DEFAULT packets" to a single IP (the IP that is given by the router) the bad news is only 1 computer can play OL at a time or just have an internal LAN party with no lagNow I dunno if that's gonna let you play with multiple machines on your LAN but I guess its worth a try. The other way out of this is either to shell out extra money to get some static IP addresses, or to switch to an ISP who doesn't require all this NAT junk. Most ISPs are wising up though and it'd be hard to find one like the good ol' days where you could pay for a single account and network as many systems on to it as you wanted to. Ahh those good old days of massive web venture capital, we shall never see their likes again. :P * * *
Wednesday 1/30/02 Ba-wheep Gra-na-wheep Ninny-bom Slow news week thus far. I'll dole out what little I've got, or what passes for news in times like this. ;) _Soul_Katcher_ is having trouble playing OL on his LAN using DHCP. He's wondering if there's a solution. I had the same problem when my old DSL provider switched over to PPP mode or whatever, where all the computers on my LAN had to share ports on a single IP address held by the modem/router. As far as I can see, Outlaws needs to have a unique IP address for each computer. Does anyone know of a way around this? Oh, _Soul_Katcher_ is also wondering if anyone can run OL on the DHCP LAN if you use the "static IP for the server"? Dude noticed that the Outlaws page at Shacknews.com doesn't have any reader reviews posted yet. So here's your chance to be the first! Get on over there and write a review. The Crow mailed me a lot in the past few days, I think he's got too much time on his hands. One thing he mentioned, though, is that the flag .nwx files in Base's Batman collection will change the default CTF red and blue flags into American and Confederate flags if you put the files in your OL directory. Hey, nifty-keen. Those interface ones probably do a job on your interface too, I suppose. The Crow also suggested that I put up the game modes allowed by a map (DM. CTF, etc) when I post them. I've resisted doing that because it means a little more work for me with each map and because its not like I'm really going to take the time to verify that each mode actually works in that map. Also, nobody else has asked me to do that before. I guess I'm mulling it over and might give it a shot... depends how I feel about it the next time I post a map, I suppose. Uh so if you have strong feelings on this, go ahead and hit me while I'm waffling. * * *
Sunday 1/27/02 Retro Raptor DaTrain (shot) by Raptor: It's not too often these days we get a unique yet authentic Old West environment in a map. But you've never played an Outlaws session in the pits of a train yard repair facility, have you? Based on a steam train he knows in real life (down to the "crap" color scheme ;), this level lets you jump around a parked engine and coal car and run through the access pits below the tracks in the facility. The length and short width of the building, like a train, force the action along tight straight lines without a lot of room for dodging—in this map, you'd better be the first on the draw. Raptor took years (literally) to do the custom textures but they pay off with breakable coffee mugs, coal chunks and buckets and, best of all, an animated steam engine dashboard whose gauges have moving needles and whose furnace sports flickering flames. Parts of the map feel like they could use a touch or two to spruce up their dimensionless lighting and drab textures but hey this is a train yard, what the heck do you expect in interior decor? The compact, linear layout makes for a heck of a tight deathmatch in a genuine period environment. Batman: The Dark Sprite Returns Base, who handed over the "Wally" character sprite last week, scratched together other old stuff he had laying around the hard drive and sent it in a file called Batman. Fer yer download you get a Batman .nwx file (first appeared in the old "Gotham" map) and a Punisher one as well, which I think I may have posted about two and a half years ago, temporarily. There are also some interface and CTF custom graphics in there for mod makin' types to tool around with. This all has a home in the custom characters section at the bottom of the character page. OLHideout and OL Message Board Get New Server Truffle now has a new server for his Outlaws Hideout site, and likewise since he hosts it the popular Outlaws Message Board has a new address. This server should probably be faster/more reliable/spiffier than the last one, so go enjoy the upgraded facilities! Voodoo Tragedy It's long, rambling, semi-illiterate and mostly incoherent. Which is why it fits right in on this site! Err anyway Kwik_Wiz decided to share this sorrowful and perhaps instructive tale of the death of his dear departed Voodoo 5: What is the loneliest number since the number Voodoo5 well must be TNT 2 its no Voodoo5, or Voodoo3 My Voodoo3 is being use by a friend. Frame rates are only 149 to 335 with the TNT 2 Model 64 by AOpen. But the games this week at the zone have been laggy. Or the TNT 2 just doesn't fill the bill, Well just wanted to pass this little bit of info on as to how to tell if you Voodoo card is going bad and what You do about it.(Note this Voodoo5 was previously overclocked before the problems started) (in a three week period this may happen)So there you go kids, don't do drugs or something. * * *
Wednesday 1/23/02 Here's Wally... Again! Some while back (last April, actually) Base sent me a custom character .nwx named "Wally." Who was withdrawn shortly thereafter because he was being used in a certain exclusive project, or something. Well, I can bring you the happy news that Wally's project has been cancelled so Base sent him back here where we're just all tickled to have our prodigal son returned. Seems like a swell excuse to cut'n'paste my old news article back up... Heeeeere's... Wally? Base sent in a custom character file, Wally. I'm gonna go ahead and stick a link to Wally at the bottom of the character page just because he's a top-quality example of how you can create a standalone custom character sprite. Base is an old hand at this: though the name has changed he's the guy who made that old Batman character sprite in the "Gotham" map as well as a Punisher character that I had up for download a long time ago. Base had some help from Oze on this guy and he's really nicely done. Never saw an Outlaw with a red and white polka-dot bandanna before? Say hi to Wally. Just don't point at him. He hates that. The readme says Wally can be used for anything folks might like, so hopefully we'll be seeing him popping up in some other folks' upcoming levels (one nice thing about Wally is his trim size: while most custom characters in the past have added about 100k to a zipped map, Wally's archive weighs in at a slim 51K. That's 'cause he lives on what he kin catch with his knife, of course. PSX Bang Bang Spikerama mentioned that there's a budget (looks like $10) light-gun shootin' game for the Playstation (the original one, not just the second one :p) called "Gunfighter: Legend of Jesse James" wherein I guess you shoot lots of lowdown varmints before they shoot you, ideally. Now for $10 you could probably get another copy of Outlaws but supposin' you already have that, why you could go get this too. Although seein' as how I ain't played it you might want to check out reviews at psx.ign.com, videogames.com, gamefaqs.com, etc before plunkin' down cold hard cash on the barrelhead. And remember it uses a light gun, not yer old Smith & Wesson (which might be more fun but definitely less replay value). * * *
Sunday 1/20/02 One, Two, Three: Maps! MineCamp (shot) by Spikerama: Declaring that for once he's going to do a "pretty" map, Spike is good to his word here with a detailed mining camp strewn about a lovely rocky river gorge. The river itself is a real piece of work, going through three or four waterfalls before finally winding away off into the distance though a lush valley. That end part is my favorite piece of the map, 'cause you can't get down there (well, without dying) but you can see it and move around the cliffs above it, so it really feels like part of the map. Also, he's got some sniping points out there on the rocky ledges but the catch is that the ledges dropping down to them are *just* above your jumping height so you can go snipe if you want but you won't be getting back out. The ramshackle buildings of the camp itself and the mine tunnels have quite a bit of detail and variety (love that plank fallen out of the wall of one of the huts) though some of the tunnels and riverbed areas take a good deal of jumping to get through, so watch your stamina meter and watch for snipers who've worked their way up to the upper ledges. Framerates aren't the best, in fact you could just say they're pretty low but Spike declares his goal is a pretty map, so framerates be durned. Ah and there's a badge tucked away here too but by now you know that Spikerama is a guy who likes to make his own rules, Marshal Law or no. ToTheTop (shot) by Spikerama: Now this here's one of his "ugly" maps, where he makes up his own game. It's CTF-only but there's a lot more to it than just grabbin' the other team's flag 'cause ya see in order to get to it you'll hafta scale a long winding patch up a steep hill with blockades along the way which can only be opened by a certain item. These items sit on or in structures in the middle of the valley and are made available after the previous one is used. So that means a lotta runnin'. Not only that, the other team is trying to get up an identical path on t'other side of the same valley, using the same items. Frankly I don't see how anyone's going to live to see daylight out of this one but if you've got the patience for it you'll have a chance. If you're tired of plain old vanilla CTF and want a good deal more of a challenge, this here's your huckleberry. Bunker Zone (shot) by maus2: A big low rectangular valley with a big low rectangular building in the middle and bunkers all around and on the roof. The construction is fairly simple, a bit dark in places and lacking in texture stitching but framerates are high and if you like bunkers, well you'll find yourself well served. Outlaws, Anime-Style Though you might get a hoot out of this, especially if you've any interest in the stylized Japanese animation known as "anime." Anyway, this's a teaser video for an upcoming Playstation 2 RPG called "Wild Arms Advanced 3rd" in Japan (it'll probably just be "Wild Arms 3" if it comes to the States), in modem and broadband sizes. Why would you be interested? Because the game appears to be a spaghetti western, at least as much of one as you'd find being made in Japan. The teaser video sports dust, cowboy hats, revolvers and whistling a-plenty. I dunno about the game itself but I like the video. ;) While I'm on a little media blitz I might as well share this. It's a silly thing but I just can't get enough of playing that over and over. =D * * *
Wednesday 1/16/02 Game Spy Arcade Has Outlaws, Remember John "Doc" Holiday sent a little reminder that there's another GUI online area besides the Zone (well okay and Kali) in which you can find an Outlaws gaming niche: GameSpy Arcade. While I personally don't care too much for the barrage of ads (you can turn them off if you pay $20 to registrate, apparently) and the somewhat overdone user interface, I'll admit that GSA makes it pretty easy to hook up with other players for a game of just about any sort. Keep in mind that with Outlaws you'll be using DirectPlay, like the Zone, rather than the faster WinSock (which they tend to use on IRC, for instance), but most people are used to playing DirectPlay from the Zone anyway so that may not matter to you. Last I checked I didn't find anyone in the GSA Outlaws area, and neither did Doc nowadays, but don't let that stop you from being the first to start up a new GSA posse or somethin'. Who's got the pioneering spirit? * * *
Sunday 1/13/02 A Couple Maps Desert Arena (shot) by Mars: A good illustration of how to do a lot with a little, this author's first map turns a simple valley with a river crossing into a large CTF arena which almost looks like it popped out of the Wile E. Coyote cartoon thanks to the use of unexpected angles and well-chosen textures. Very wide open (with nice framerates) so don't forget to pack yer rifle, and maybe a bandana in case that sandstorm in the distance hits (curiously soundless though... guess we're in the eye of the storm!). Blah! (shot) by twobitt: Named when the author couldn't think of any particular name, we're fortunate that the map itself certainly isn't lacking in creativity though its the kind that those who haven't played OL much may not appreciate at first glance. This here's yer classic small DM map in an old west setting (ruined villa) with lots of windows, broken ceilings, sunlight, dirt and wood to play in while enjoying the sparklingly high framerates. This is the kind of quality map that don't come along too often, so you'll grab it if'n you know what's good fer you. Be a Lousy Cheater in Westbang Paul Williams pried some cheat codes for Westbang direct from Pavel Tovarys, one of th' Czech software developers who made this low-down gunslingin' freeware game. Pavel (or "Tovy" as he signed himself) said: Hi, my English is not very good but: When you start a new game pust ESC key, you will pause the game. WHen there is a screen SURE DUDE YES NO press left SHIFT and wrote some of these words (you may not release the SHIFT key!)If you've gotten through the first few levels in the game I'm sure you'll agree that the "youngguns" code sounds like a dream come true. ;) * * *
Wednesday 1/9/02 Fresh c0d KiL_Ler_ sent in c0d 1.1, an updated version of his just-released little CTF map with touch-ups like fixing that sky-textured ceiling, adding footstep sounds and more bottles to break. Sounds good to me. LEC Game Polls Who sent me screenshots of Lucasarts game poll results which look like they may have come from www.lucasarts.com, but he didn't say. Heck they could be fake, but uncertainty is what keeps life interesting, right? The questions and bar-graph answers are: Which game has your favorite original music? How are you connected to the Internet? Which of these is your favorite LucasArts video game? Now, clearly they didn't tip off the OL fanbase before counting up the results (I'll bet at least one person mailed me about this at the time though... but I can't remember however far back this may have been :p) but err at least they have a nice color scheme. Actually I think for that last one they may have just been voting amongst console games ("video game" rather than "PC game"?). * * *
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| vittles | twenty-first highest | Stuff on th' shelves. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
