I went to Quakecon 2003 planning on getting some good LANage in. I got much more than i bargained for...a FREE BFG 256mb Geforce FX 5900 Ultra!
the story:
Nvidia had a booth setup and if you fill out this survey they gave you a Doom 3 t-shirt. So yesterday i took the survey, of course,to get the free t-shirt and I promptly put it on so i could feel 1337 like the hundreds of other people wearing the same shirt
. it was actually a really cool shirt, so i decided to wear it again today. So there i am playing some counter-strike and this lady wearing an nvidia shirt comes over and taps me on the shoulder. i take of my headphones and she says "you just won a gf fx 5900 ultra." i had forgotten that the purpose of the shirts was that nvidia was going to randomely pick someone out wearing the shirt to give them a card!
i'm on cloud 9 right now.
i don't have any benchmarks at the moment but i'm downloading 3dmark 03 and 01 right now and i'll bench this card in the morning. also attempting to get my hands the doom 3 alpha again to see how it looks now (if Id asks...i'm downloading the E3 movies...yeah...that's it).
Enough about the card.
I've gotten a lot of little snipets about Doom 3 from a lengthy Q&A session with various Id guys:
A) The multiplayer is
still limited to 4 players, despite the rumors going around that say otherwise.
B) The limit of players is simply a definition in the portion of code that is released with the game (i.e. you can mod it very easily to allow any number of players).
C) Their ESTIMATE for the minimum system requirements is currently hovering around a 1GHz proc w/ 256mb ram and a gf2. So all of you that are saying you will need a dx9 card at LEAST are totally bogus.
D) There will be no CTF with multiplayer. there is going to be deathmatch, team deathmatch, last man standing, and another variant of the sort i can't remember.
E) The Mac and linux versions will not be released simultaneously with the PC version and they didn't say how far behind it would be. but i don't think it will be too long because they do have running versions of Doom 3 on both platforms.
F) Modding this game will be unlike anything we've seen before:
1) Id will package the SOURCE for every single map. i.e. you can load it up in their editor and see every level, and how they did everything
2) The new editor allows for direct imports from Maya and Lightwave, no conversion is necessary.
3) The editor is actually a part of the Doom3 executable, and is launched by typing /editor in the console. This allows for some very cool things like real-time rendering of the map within the editor using the doom3 engine.
enough about Doom 3
Id announced a challenge...beat the Id team at Q3 Team arena and each person wins a brand new alien-ware machine. The first 4 teams all lost 10-0. A team actually did win tho later on (i have NO idea how it happened...although i think fatality might have been on that team...i know he was there and i heard a rumer he took up Id's challenge, not sure tho).
If you guys are big fans of WWII FPS then Call of Duty looks like a really good game. it seems to me to be a combination of DoD, MOHAA, and BF1942.
Also they handed out free Ratpadz to those in the BYOC. Basically this is a mousepad that is unbelievable for gaming. it actually increases an optical mouse' precision. it has a low-friction surface, and is large (good for low-sensitivity mouse settings). if you can afford one (415-$20) then i would HIGHLEY recommend getting one
I already can't wait till QuakeCon 2004!
ok enough rambling...time for sleep.
Good information about Doom3 as well! 
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