i've been as busy as fock
recently and pretty much neglected updating quake.ie and my column for the last
while but i'm getting back into the swing of things now. i just started computer
apps in dcu - pretty kewl course, easy livin and that.

a few things about the new
id point release i just thought i'd spew my mind out from a few hours of play
and say what i think of the thing :

less fps

ffs id when the game first came out i got about 300fps in timedemo and that's
down to about 190fps now ... can u stop making the game slower so we'll upgrade
our computers r whatever. in the earlier days i played on a celeron 400 overclocked
to 500 with a geforce ddr ... now this setup was perfect 100fps in timedemo
... it never dropped below 76 except in rare cases ingame it was a nice setup
that has been rendered totally useless now by the new patches .... the fps is
from 35-70 now constantly unstable too forcing me to upgrade to an amd 1ghz).

weapons

i find that plasma and lg are a lot easier to use in this version of quake 3...
the plasma doesn't randomly spew uncontrollably when i'm in a crowded area of
the map with a load of broad band ho's. however i haven't been having as much
luck with the railgun ... this is explained later on.

mouse

the mouse sensitivity is slightly different from what i have seen there's now
two "feels" available, the 1.17 feel and the 1.27 feel by either using
the commands in_mouse 1 or in_mouse -1 and then going in_restart. i haven't
had the time really to see which feel i like best so my rail has been a little
off recently because of this - hopefully 6 hours of ca will sort this out.





netcode

obviously the major improvement in the game is the new netcode at a 5:1 compression
ratio. i find this to be true certainly when i'm being spammed by someone on
cable or dsl or better ... i don't feel as lagged out, my movement doesn't stutter
as much - it's obviously a lot nicer... but i have yet to thoroughly test it
out in clan match settings.

so all in all, it seems
to be a significant improvement over 1.27 - which really isn't very difficult
to improve upon when you think about 1.27 was probably the worst patch id software
have ever released actually making the game crapper then it was before it came
out and disappointing many many people.... so here's hoping this will end the
days of 1.27 crapness.