Shake, Rattle and Quake.
Yes there was an earthquake in SoCal, no I did not feel it, nor did the coast of California slide into the big, blue ocean. I was contacted by quite a few people, not sure how they heard, hell I was a the NT LAN and not feel a thing. That is just how small a 4.3 Mw earthquake is. Okay so I was about 20+ miles away. Enough of that. Although I hear dokta would be scared stiff. This true, dok?
While hanging out at my job today [yeah, I was working, at least you can call it that], one of my co-workers gave me a small article out of Readers Digest. I felt is was necessary to share it with you gamers. In some way, shape or form, we can all relate.
As a professor at Texas A & M, I taught during the day and did research at night. I would usually take a break around nine, however, calling up the strategy game Warcraft on the Internet and playing with an online team. One night I was paired with a veteran of the game who was a master strategist. With him at the helm, our troops crushed opponent after opponent, and after six games we were undefeated. Suddenly, my fearless leader informed me his mom wanted him to go to bed.
“How old are you?” I typed.
“Twelve,” he replied. “How old are you?” [his Urban Terror friends]
Feeling my face redden, I answered, “Eight.” [Steve T. thats me]
She added those two minor comments in the brackets and then handed me the article. As funny as sounds, it is quite true. I am sure many of those who play Urban Terror are half my age [I’m 31] if not younger. But over the Internet, in a game everyone is even. Age, gender, race…..they all mean nothing. The only thing that separates gamers are their “1337 skillz.”
Spent some more time in the community today playing on servers and trying like hell to get Urban Terror set up correctly on a few computers at the Netzwerk Terror LAN. Of course play was very short lived as they felt the desire to play RA3 [yawn]. So what better place to get feedback, Internet servers. I hit Unknown TeRRoR, Barrysworld and ISPGN. Also encountered a few of the problems which were mentioned in the forums. Especially one regarding missing textures and shaders. I don’t believe it is a pak problem or installer on the part of Urban Terror. We do believe it lies in the baseq3 directory, we just can’t pinpoint it. Response to Urban Terror seems to be gaining more momentum based on the figures we see on the GameSpy stats.
Already gathering material for next week’s Oswald Rant, which will take a look at porting Action Quake 2 maps to mods like Urban Terror and ReAction Quake 3. Why? I will never understand. What is the creativity in designing NEW levels? Speaking of new levels, I finally received two new screen shots from WetWired and his level, Venice. Pretty amazing shots! Hopefully I can give them up in the coming week. He is still early in development, but he looks to have another work of art on his hands.
I thought I could get it up tonight, but tomorrow get ready to hear the words of Mark “BBQ” Klem, the talent and voice behind the Urban Terror theme song and level designer for SID, who is currently working on Rommel which will be released for Beta 2.
