The1Qwerty

Part of my Tremulous Skills programme taking you from a Trem noob to a Trem pro.

Trem Skills #5 Looks at the respective damage each human weapon deals out. Sorry that this post did not come out yesterday was busy playing with Wii Browser

Stage 1

• Blaster: 9hp
• Rifle: 5 hp per bullet
• Painsaw: ~200 hp per second
• Shotgun: 56 hp per shell
• Las Gun: 9 hp per bullet
• Mass Driver: 38 hp per bullet
• Chain Gun: ~75 hp per second

Stage 2

• Pulse Rifle: 9 hp per bullet
• Grenade: 290 hp
• Flame Thrower:~20 hp per bullet

Stage 3

• Lucifer Cannon: Fully charged shot deals 250 hp damage uncharged single shot 27 hp

A new release for the free FPS Sauerbraten (formally known as Cube 2) is out now.

For those of you who have not herd of Sauerbraten before here is a quick rundown of the games features.

Game Features

* Oldskool fast & intense gameplay (read: similar to Doom 2 / Quake 1).
* Many multiplayer gameplay modes, most in teamplay variants as well: deathmatch, instagib, efficiency, tactics, capture (domination/battlefield style), coop edit (!).
* Masterserver & ingame server browser.
* Lag-free gameplay experience.
* Two singleplayer modes: DMSP (fight a monster invasion on any DM map), classic SP (progression driven SP like other games)
* 7 weapons tuned for maximum satisfaction: double barrelled shogun, rocket launcher, machine gun, rifle, grenade launcher, pistol, fist.

Engine Features

* 6 directional heightfield in octree world structure allowing for instant easy in-game geometry editing (even in multiplayer, coop edit).
* Rendering engine optimized for high geometry throughput, supporting hardware occlusion culling.
* Lightmap based lighting with accurate shadows from everything including mapmodels, smooth lighting for faceted geometry, and fast compiles.
* Pixel and vertex shader support, each model and world texture can have its own shader assigned.
* Robust physics written specifically for this world structure.
* Loading of md2/md3 models for animated characters, weapons, items, world objects.
* Network library designed for high speed games, client/server network system.
* Small but complete configuration/scripting language.
* Simple stereo positional sound system.
* Particle engine, supporting text particles.
* 3d menu/gui system, for in-world representation of choices.

Seeing as it is open source sauerbraten is also free, so you can’t go wrong testing it out! You can download it via Sourceforge

With the release of the final version of the Opera browser yesterday, I have to say that I am rather impressed (writing this on it now though I wont do the whole post to hard to type lol)

Sure I never really used the beta of it, so it is all new to me, however, I think that the final version of the Wii browser is fantastic it’s great to be able to browse the internet pointing with the Wii remote whilst laying down or just sitting back. Once you have zoomed in to a comfortable zoom level the text is very clear and easy to read.

Start Menu

The main start page has a very nice clean interface as you can see from the pictures, if you are stuck with the controls that are used with the Opera browser simply click the Wii remote diagram and all the controls will be revealed to you.

It is pretty limited in what things you can change within the Opera Browser, for instance you cannot turn pictures on or off, you can adjust the zoom settings from automatic to manual. I find that automatic is the best mode to be in for general browsing however there only appears to be two levels of zoom when in it, so if you want to be able to have more control over your zoom options I suggest you use the manual mode.

Settings

More settings although not enough

You can set if you want, the view bar to hide automatically, never or on the control of a button. Button mode would probably be the best in my opinion.

Set which search engine you would like to use. The search function is really neat! You just click the button enter your search terms and it loads up the search results page (Google or Yahoo).
Delete cookies, no explanation needed.
Finally you can mess with your proxy settings.

Interface

Basically the main things you need are covered but more advanced features are lacking. Still it’s only for browsing on the Wii so you don’t really need to have all the things a fully functioned web browser has.

The favourites menu is very nice, make sure you add The1Qwerty in there

Netvibes even works (well kind of you can’t read the posts properly, but the headlines are fine).

Netvibes on Wii browser

I did find that a few things are lacking from the Internet channel such as:

• More advanced features
• Tabbed browsing
• A RSS reader would of been really nice

The1Qwerty on the Wii browser

Overall the final product is very impressive, visually appealing and all that is really required in a web browser for the Nintendo Wii. Plus it is free to download for a limited amount of time, (grab it whilst you can) so you cannot really complain about it.

The first nuke is actually footage that gametrailers recorded of me playing the game Enjoy !

The final version of the long awaited Wii internet browser/channel has been released.

I will get pictures up of it running soon, in the mean time you can look at nintendowiifanboy.com’s coverage of it.

Trem Skills #4 part of the Trem Skills programme helping to enhance your Tremulous skills, and help you to play Tremulous better.

Trem Skills #4 looks at the alien cross hair.

Isn’t it annoying how aliens do not get a cross hair! Well there is answer to that problem thanks to Chompers. Good job Chompers (I use to play with him till he gave up with Game Arena servers)

Default Alien Hud No Cross Hair.

Chompers hud is an alternative hud for both aliens and humans. The really important thing about it is that it gives all alien units a cross hair to help get the head bites in.

Chompers Hud Activated Gives Alien Cross Hair.

Some people consider Chompers hud as cheating others do not. I personally do not see anything wrong with it, and I am a big anti-hacker/cheater when it comes to gaming. Also if you play in Game Arena you can legally use Chompers Hud.

Download Chompers hud extract the files into the Tremulous/base/ui folder (make the ui folder since it will not normally exist) then run the following code in the console to set it up.

/cg_hudFiles "ui/hud.cfg"

/cg_hudFiles "ui/chompers.cfg"

Restart Tremulous and Chompers hud will be there ready to help improve your Tremulous skills.

If you wish to remove Chompers hud run the following code in the console.

/cg_hudFiles "ui/hud.txt"

That’s it for this Issue of Trem Skills, go install Chompers Hud and start practicing, it does take some time to get use to but once you have mastered it you will never look back.

Tomorrow I will be looking at the damage each (human) weapon in Tremulous does.

Some great new screen shots of SimCity DS have come out. To me it looks very similar to SimCity 2000, which is cool it’s going to be like playing the blown version on the PC but anywhere. Just imagine the possibilities playing on an aircraft flight, in the car or if your sneaky in class Not that I would do that!

Check out all the images over at Kotaku.

[Via Kotaku]

Part 3 of my Tremulous Skills programme, helping to improve your Tremulous skills and make you a better Tremulous player.

Trem Skills #3 covers the weapons which have bullets that travel slowly through the air and how to make the most of these powerful weapons.

Anticipate, anticipate, anticipate, I can’t say it enough. If you want to use the pulse rifle you can not afford to shoot directly at an opposing alien! It’s just not good enough. You have to shoot in front of it if you want to play better.
The pulse rifle, although having an extremely fast rate of fire travels slow through the air. Therefore if you shoot at an alien that is at a reasonable distance away by the time the bullet or the pulse rifle reaches the alien it has already moved onwards and is no longer there. To counter this problem you need to be shooting were you think the alien will be moving, this way you are almost guaranteed to hit the alien and take him out.

Aliens can make it alot harder for you to hit them by moving all over the place. I will discuss this in a future Trem Skills post.

Thats right, those of you GH fans out there, I only saw the game in RL for the first time today shocking I know.

Anyway according to the RedOctane support center:

Guitar Hero 3 for the Playstation 2, PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii are currently scheduled for release in the United States in Fall of 2007.

Pretty awesome, right it does look like quite a good game, with a good selection of music from what I saw today anyway.

Part of my Tremulous Skills programme, turning you from a Trem noob to a Trem Pro.

Trem Skills #2 Deals with basic ways to improve using your rifle against aliens such as the Dretch unit.

Alot of people who play Tremulous think that they can just shoot directly at a Dretch, however this is not the best way to go about it. A rifle does 5 damage per bullet and a dretch has 25 hp, therefore you need to hit a Dretch 5 times to ensure a kill. Sure you can shoot directly at the Dretch but I find that it is far more effective to shoot in front of the Dretch (this is particularly important with weapons that travel slower through the air, I will cover this tomorrow Trem Skills #3.)

Anticipating the movement of opponents is essential in Tremulous, thats if you want to be efficient in killing them. Always aim where you think the opponent will be next.