bitsifter
friday, june 28

[sift this] The signal to noise ratio on alt.games.quake reached a pinnacle this week as iD Software released the shareware version of Quake for general consumption. I've kept tabs on it's release primarily via Aftershock a page which was good enough to create a mailing list to inform folks when Quake was actually released.

As previously mentioned in this column, the primary reason everyone went so loopy over Doom was the ability to play against your friends and, at the time of this writing, I've had no success with multi-player Quake over the Internet, but I've yet to delve into the documentation. Plus, it's not the weekend.

As for solo gameplay, yeah, it's a 3D world. You look up, you look down, you get confused. There is light sourcing, moody environment sounds, and crisp, smooth movement. The architecture is beautiful and the underwater effects are stellar. And there is more, Quake is an configurable -- forget about the console window that opens up and givens you immediate access to Quake's innards, this game is a open platform designed with extensibility in mind.  This means that, come Christmas, everyone and their brother is going to using the Quake engine to design some type of 3D game. (iD plans to write a level editor for WinNT using OpenGL)

The only chink in the Quake armor must be the current set of monsters. They are children of the 3D environment. Folks who have played one of the many fighting games on the market have seen 3D characters evolve from blocky semi-human beings to smooth texture mapped fighting machines equipped even with personality. This is where Quake missed the boat. Sure, the monster movement is quick and the AI is sometimes surprising, but the monsters stick out like lego blocks at the Tower of London. My concern would've lessened if I'd seen improvement between the test version of Quake and the release, but I didn't.

Before I read the specs on the Alta Vista search engine, I was already in state of significant warm fuzziness. I'd been looking for a way to find images on pages and I was being fairly stupid about it -- searching for some type of informational resource rather than realizing that image names are just as much a part of an HTML file as the title is. I ended up at Alta Vista and, in a minor religious experience, discovered a hint beneath the field to enter the search term in.

Of course. My search (which took ~1 second) for images of Pug Dogs revealed approximately 200 images for me to sift through. Alta Vista reports that it provides "access to the largest Web index: 30 million pages found on 225,000 servers, and three million articles from 14,000 Usenet news groups." 1 second to search all of this?

Alta Vista is the end result of throwing an tremendous amount of hardware (You can see the list and drool, if you like) at the task of indexing the Internet. This seems the proper approach as the net continues to grow exponentially. Even more fascinating is the source of Alta Vista, DEC, whose last major public success was VAX.

• Find a person, business, federal office, or fax number
• Convert a host name to a Latitude/Longitude
• Find out who owns a domain name
• Send ANONYMOUS email to dear friends
• Lookup an IP address for relevant information
• Another Internet address finder, often yields better results
• Get A Map to Any US address, BEST SHOCK VALUE HERE, FOLKS