How was it? Not that I need to ask because Tim went but I may as well. :) 

Mosquitos are practically begging for a xenocide.

If I had a choice between getting hit in the balls with a mallet or being bit by a mosquito, well, I would have to take the mosquito bite, only because I'm not that stupid. Otherwise, it would be a toss up. 

I went to visit delirious grandparents and a crack-headed uncle. Oh yeah, and my mom was taking care of them all summer, so we went and kidnapped her and brought her back home.

I wish Gencon. :( 

I always like looking at siggraph papers each year. They do cool stuff. Here's a cool video from one of this year's presentations:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-SSu3tJ3ns 

That's brilliant, wish I could do that in photoshop, would be really useful sometimes. 

wouldn't be that hard to program!

Really cool technology there... especially the erasure o_O 

since they've explained the basic concept pretty well, the main effort would be tuning the algorithm that determines which is the "line of least important pixels." 

I now have Sock's mapping desk, Sock's mapping chair, and Spirit's quake rune.

I'm not in a living position yet to equip them both at once to see if they provide any set item bonuses, but if they do, I'd be curious what other relics exist out there. KungFuSquirrel tells me the the case that contained the computer that he made his Natural Selection maps with is still with him ... 

should definitly be exterminated.

lun, I think you need 3 items from the same bearer to get set item bonuses. See if sock has anything else. 

...a couple of the original studies for his egypt texz set should do it. 

Or at least be muted. Nothing worse than lying in bed and hearing their buzzing near one's head. 

So true neg|ke. But the worst I have ever seen is while camping in sweden/norway, during summer near a lake, it�s like the end scene of �300�, only with mosquitos instead of arrows :( 

That's what you get for camping! 

to add to death match, stay in one area
for more then five seconds mosquitoes buzz around you and nip hit points. 

In well-designed maps, camping is discouraged just by the fact that it is an inferior strategy. If camping is a good strat on a map, then it probably needs worked on :o 

does anyone know/remember how this was done in doom?

was it only pure wall following code, or did monsters actually search through sectors to work out paths? 

it was sector based. Google "nodes," "ssegs," and "reject" with regards to doom wads, there's probably a good explanation.

This explains it cursorily:
http://www.gamers.org/dhs/helpdocs/dmsp1666.html 

you're right though, it doesn't really go into much detail about it. but thanks all the same. :) 

it always just looked like they walked towards to the player and that was about it to me.

If you run through a level with noclip mode (idspispopd in doom or idclip in doom 2) and then look at the automap with all objects displayed (iddt - type multiple times on automap screen until monsters are visible) then you will notice the monsters just seem to walk towards the wall closest to the player and stumble around a little bit. A monster far away will pretty much never find the player unless a straight corridor exists that connects the monster's location to that of the player. It doesn't seem any different to Quake in that regard. 

i'm actually more curious to know how pathfinding works in quake, tbh. in doom, lines and sectors were put down as part of the map file, in quake, none of that exists, and all quake has to work with is a giant, flattened mesh... it's like magic. :( 

There isn't much to it in Quake. As has been said already, they pretty much just head straight for the player... even if there are walls in the way.

Sure, this means they're headbutting walls and trying to burrow through solid geometry half the time, but the fact is the player doesn't actually see that most of the time, so it doesn't really matter. 

I always thought the Nehahra solution was nicely done; the monsters head for the last place they have seen the player, instead of where the player currently is. 

...following the interest generated at my local e-cafe, during our two coop sessions through Travail, the owners are considering putting Quake on their LAN permanently (but especially for a retro marathon). Seems people are craving some of the coop action missing from newer games. What's the story with licenses? Do they need to purchase a registered copy of the game for each machine in use? Is one for the "server" enough? 

I strongly suspect there needs to be one license per machine. Otherwise, people in 1997 would have downloaded the whole game from a single netquake server, legally!

It'll cost about... 5 USD per seat, I think. :)

You could have them contact id, too. 

and pose as netcafe owners whose customers are always complaining that no games released since 1997 have stood up to quake coop.