| July 29 |
Kali for Linux announced
Good news: Kali, everyone's favorite online gaming service, will soon be available for Linux, too. Like this, finding players for Quake and Quake2 will become even easier; and Kali has also a great chat client. Because there are more than 600 servers world wide, everyone can play with little lag.
If you are interested, send a mail to majordomo@kali.net with "subscribe kalinix-digest" in the message body (and no more text, empty subject). As you can guess from the name, commercial Unices will also get their Kali client! Such a support is unmatched by other programs (Quake being an exception).
Unit statistics
BlackDouglas has assembled a page with the most comprehensive unit statistics seen so far. It covers:
| July 27 |
DirectX 5.2
The new patch for DirectX is only a very minor upgrade fixing most of the numerous bugs/GPFs due to language problems. There is no need to upgrade the existing version if it works (none of the bugs appear if there are no language conflicts). Even though Microsoft claims it to be "industrial standard", even the latest patch does not work with NT.
| July 25 |
New weekly theme
This week's theme at ES is about a deer hunt. It shows deer :) and nice pine trees. The next theme will be the last one for a while - probably because there is not much information left that Ensemble wants to publish at this early stage of the game (you may have noticed that there is no further information whatsoever about sea battles, which is probably the most innovative part in AoE2).
Interview with Bruce Shelley
Gamestats has an interview with Bruce Shelley. He does not tell too much about AoE2 (probably IRex was not allowed to ask too many questions about it), but more about his opinion on games and game design. There is also a short preview of AoE2 which is a nice summary of known features, but of course it cannot go into depth as Ensemble's official page does.
New hidden pics readme
Chris Wilson has updated the descriptions of the hidden pictures that can be found if you browse through the resource files of AoE. These pictures are not used in the game and cannot be accessed through cheats. This is nothing to worry about, almost every game has some unused resources. Enjoy the graphics; maybe some of them will be the base of an AoE mod.
| July 24 |
Want to evaluate a scenario?
I am still looking for helping who help me testing scenarios submitted by AoE players. You do not have to test many scenarios, one or two of them are enough to help me to speed up the evaluation process of the submitted scenarios. I could do everything myself, but it will take a while then until the scenario section is updated again - so if you want to prevent this, please help :)
| July 23 |
Scenario reviewer needed!
I have quite a few scenarios and campaigns to review, but not enough time, so I need help. If you are interested in reviewing single and/or multiplayer scenarios, please contact me. The scenarios that you will review will not only be used in this page (if they are good), but also be part of an AoE league that is going to be built up this summer.
Cannot save game "bug"
In case the install program fails and has to be killed, you may be unable to save the game. You "get an error message telling me to free up disk space and try again. (...) The install program did not put a shortcut on the desktop, so
I made one. When I did, I mistakenly directed it to the .exe file on the CD
drive. I have redirected the shortcut and now everything works as it
should."
Thanks to Ernie for that information.
New, very vicious Windows 9x virus
PCWorld.com has a report about a very vicious new virus - it is the first one since years that attacks the BIOS Flash ROM, which means that you will have to replace your motherboard(!) if the virus gets you. Only the WinDOSes are affected, modern OSes such as WinNT or Linux are secure unless you run the virus as root. Windows 98 is especially susceptible to this one, so make sure you upgrade your virus scanner or replace Win98 with NT.
Linux gaming site
A new gaming site, Linuxgames.com, has opened. It provides information about new Linux games or how to run Windows games (e. g. Starcraft) under Linux using the Windows Emulator. Age of Empires is not yet on the list of games that will be ported to Linux, but who knows, maybe AoE or AoE2 will make it...
Information taking from Slashdot.
Scenario version conflicts
When playing multi player scenarios, make sure that all players have exactly the same (latest) version of the scenario, or you cannot start the game. Kali supports automatical updates - it will copy the offered scenario to the right position.
| July 22 |
Poll results
In last week's poll, 92% of all people have voted that Ensemble Studios should support third party modifications, also known as "AoE mods". Right now, their support is rather passive (as usual with game companies, unfortunately). They have helped to make the programs that you can find at the downloads section more secure by verifying the reverse engineered data structures for correctness, but that is all.
As for most games, there is no documentation available about some crucial parts (e. g. unit statistics, scenario file format), and ES lacks the manpower to help people who want to develop their own add-ons (which would, in my opinion, only help the game). I hope this will improve for AoE2. However, they have not blocked any developments either (as, for instance, Blizzard did a while ago).
Mac version of AoE?
There is a rumor at Apple's page saying that Age of Empires will be ported to the MacOS. However, there is no further information at all (e. g. who is making the port and when). I wonder whether AoE is also going to be ported to Linux (since Linux is also available for Macintosh and many other architectures, they could get several ports in one then), since Linux has a much larger user base than the MacOS.
New weekly themes
Some new weekly themes at Ensemble's page have been posted while I have been away:
"Ensemble Studios recently hired two hard-core gamers as webmaster and chief financial officer. Mike McCart, the creator of Age of Empires Heaven, was hired as Ensemble webmaster, and Brian Moon, an experienced accountant and Age of Empires fanatic, accepted the position of CFO."Mike McCart has been working at a very popular AoE page before (AoE heaven), and is now pushing Ensemble's page beyond what is usual for official game pages. He posts a lot of information more or less related to the game at Ensemble's new page, thus pushing up the hype around AoE2. I hope he can keep up this pace until the release of the game. The fact that the CFO is also an AoE player is of course just a coincidence and has been used for PR at Ensemble's page ;)
| July 20 |
Telcontar is back!
I am back from vacation, and I will try to compile an update with the most important things that happened during the past two weeks soon. Thanks go to Giovanni for maintaining the page while I was away. I will be very busy during the next weeks, so updates will not always be of the same size each day.
AoE and Win98
I have heard reports from various sources on mailing lists. The summary is:
| July 16 |
AoE and Win98
I've just received a mail from Creede Lamberd, AoE fan and Win98 user. He says that he has no problems with Win98 and AoE, however he has 128 megs of ram and a K6 200.
At least we know that Win98 can work, you just need to feed him with lots of ram. If in your area ram is cheap, buy it, and then install linux :), and play AoE on Win98.
| July 8 |
Strategy guide update
Check this page often, because the (much needed) update to the strategy guide will be available in a couple of days!
| July 7 |
Mordor down?
Hi. This is my first update to this page, and it is a quite stupid one :). I can't access the mordor mirror of this page, so I fear the two pages will be not synchronized for a while.
Win98 and AoE
Send me more info about Win98 and AoE. We all want to know how bad it is. I've decided I won't install Win98 on my system, which is mainly a Linux system. However help will be given to all those who need help to make AoE run.
| July 3 |
Bye everyone!
I will be on vacation until July 20. This means that you should not send me e-mail and expect an answer during this time ;) Meanwhile, you can contact Giovanni Intini. He will be responsible for the news until then. Please do not send him scenarios or campaigns for reviewing; I will do that when I am back. I thank Giovanni in advance for taking care of this page, and have a nice vacation, too!
| July 2 |
Mrgrinch.com - a Yahoo for AoE
Mr. Grinch, Age of Empires Creator/Lead Designer, launches a new web site: http://www.mrgrinch.com, the Age of Empires "Yellow Pages". It is not an AoE page as such, but a site index to lots of other AoE pages, with links sorted by topics. So it's a sort of Yahoo for AoE :)
If you need information about something special, try the search engine from this page, too; then, if you want something that is not on this page, try his index.
You should also read his announcement why he started this project. It was a hard task, and he did a great job!
AoE and Win98 - more info
I have received more information from various readers about their performance with Win98 on "low end" systems. To sum it up, on systems with 32 MB of RAM or less, expect a performance loss depending on other factors such as the CPU speed. Because you lose 10 MB, your computer will swap to death if you run AoE and the Internet Exploder at the same time - so you should install Win98 without it. I don't see any need anyway for running a Web browser all the time, wasting a lot of resources. As I recommended at the lag page, you should close all programs when running AoE, especially if you are low on RAM. If you have 64 MB RAM or more, then you should not run AoE under Win9x but under NT (this means you can remove the FAT partition with Win9x unless you play 3D games).
| July 1 |
Supporting AoEII mods - poll
Right now, it is not planned to let third parties add their own "AoE mods" (like capture the flag etc.) to AoE2. In Quake, this is possible, and this is also a reason why Quake become so popular. Supporting such "patches" for new game modes (and also new sounds and graphics) would of course mean more work for the programmers, but I think that it would pay off, because many players will have good ideas. What do you think? Do you think that the predefined mods (yet unknown) and a simple editor (if any) will be enough, or should the interface of the library be open to anyone? By the way, I do not know how strongly the possibility to include third party code (in form of a .dll library) would affect the code of the program.
| September '97 - June '98 |
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