Well well well, isn't it funny how amazingly conflicting people's experiences of the same situation can be. In total I`ve received about two dozen mails regarding running Q3a demo servers, and another forty odd along similar lines with UT demo, none of which actually agree.

Got a mail from Cliffy B and one following immediately after from Polge regarding the networking patch Steve put out a couple of weeks ago for the demo. Now some friends and I played around with that tonight, and although connections felt a lot better we still had the same problems with CPU spikes and hard disk accessing making game play fall over when several clients came into view of each other. Now this may just be us, cos so far all of the people that mailed in to say they were having similar problems with the Unreal Tourney demo have since said they were getting much better results after applying the patch, but there's still some issues there on our setup that I'll look into a little deeper and hopefully we'll have some recommendations for you soon. This patch I might add is in the final so I guess we'll find out some time in the next week or so anyway. J

As for the Quake 3 Arena demo I`ve had some seriously conflicting mails on the subject. A lot of people seem to be having problems getting the com_hunkmegs setting to stick, which appears to depend on where the setting is on the command line. With that in place a server with hunk size 16, (the minimum available in the next demo) runs at around the 38Mb mark, which by itself is all fine and dandy. But this is where things start to get confusing, as a dozen or so sysops with similar spec boxes are finding vastly different results when running multiple servers. Some are reporting nasty bouts of paging which usually starts the first time one of the servers changes map and then ping pongs continuously after. Some like onethumb who is running on a release candidate Win2K box are finding they can run other programs on top of the two servers without any compliants from clients. And all these people are running boxes around the PX 450-550 mark with a minimum of 128Mb. Now this surely can't be right... And I`m sure 99% of this is box configuration. Carmack updated regarding a high CPU usage problem that he's since fixed, but this shouldn't effect memory usage a great deal under the conditions we're imposing... Considered the possibility of m$ vm handling being at fault and whether or not the box was set up to let the OS handle it's own virtual memory allocation, but until we've played more we'll have to wait and see.

It is nice tho, to get some kind of response regarding the subject from both games companies. It's rare anyone in this industry listens to it`s punters are we're all supposed to be too thick to understand, and the two giants show a commitment to their communities that others would learn a great deal from.

Got a lot of mails asking about Zoid`s CTF maps. Not in a position to share I`m a afraid but I`m sure like anything at id more will be available when it`s deemed ready.

Anyway, back to the grind, will keep you informed on what comes out of this rather controversial debate, but in the mean time, there`s always Tetrinet. J