That said, RR2DO2 has asked me to add that he feels that walking around Mesquite, given it’s average temperature, humidity and complete lack of pavements, is one of the most dangerous journeys on earth..

We also decided between us that one of the main goals for the day would be to secure invitations to the GameSpy/Artemis Toga Party :)

Once we had a server running, the PCs filled up pretty fast, and we left them all playing Q3F for a quick journey around the other exhibitor’s stands - present were Nvidia (showing off the new GeForce2), Apple (with their new machine), Sega (having 4 machines running Quake 3 on a Dreamcast - a console ffs!), Discreet (for 3DsMax) aswell as stands for the new Wolfenstein, Soldier of Fortune Gold and Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force - none of which drew our attention quite as much as Quake 3 Team Arena - if I were to say that Team Arena was simply fantastic, I wouldn’t be doing it justice - think ace hud, loads of new content and dynamic classes, and you’ll be about halfway there.

Personal Note: Fluffy is the only man alive I’ve yet met that talks to more people than I do at these types of events - the man is a living breathing social networking machine! Amongst those he cavorted with, he was the first of us to meet Hellchick from PlanetQuake - one of the nicest women you’ll ever meet, guaranteed.

RR2DO2 seemed to spend most of his time asking developers questions they didn’t understand, not because of his accent, but because of his intellect I suspect :)

One of the strangest encounters was with the guy running the Apple stand - turned out he was a big Q3F fan, a member of the Q3F clan that asked us to add L^ to the Insiderz network, and promised us he’d have Q3F installed on all 40 exhibition Macintoshes by the end of the evening! He also linked us up with someone to help with porting the Q3F installer on the Mac, and another guy who might be able to help by providing hardware for us to test Q3F on.

Our concept artist BoboTheSeal, a real life Texan, arrived around mid-day, armed with a case full of artwork - much of which blew me away completely. He did a fantastic job of showing Q3F sketches to just about everyone that walked by - all of which seemed as impressed as me, which was nice.

We also got to meet the Urban Terror Team who are a really great bunch of guys. For some reason they’d only been given general passes, so I took Oswald (a man competing with Robert Duffy for friendliest man of the year award) down to meet the people who give out the decent passes and secured their team proper Exhibitor access. Ph33r my contacts :)

We spent much of the afternoon with CriCel (one of Urban Terrors coders) in my suite, demonstrating our advanced entity system, our implementation of spline math/bezier curves, and discussing various other coding ideas - as a result of this (and later conversations with their lead coder), we’ll be working quite closely with the Urban Terror team in the future - if you haven’t already seen their mod, be sure to check it out - it has excellent potential and in my view is the best reality mod for Quake 3 available. Note that CriCel gets the award for saying "Awesome dude!" more often than a Californian surfer :)

Out on the two with Urban Terror Team - From left to right: RR2DO2 (Q3F), Wils (Q3F can just see his face), Oswald (UT with cap on), CriCel (UT), Cro (Barrysworld), Fluffy (Q3F), BarBQ (UT), Dokta8 (UT with cap on), Dokta8’s wife, Someguy (UT), Locki (Q3F blue shirt) and Someguy2 (UT)

As a way of saying thanks (I think!) the Urban Terror team invited us out with them for the evening to a diner called Hooters - which as it’s name suggests is all about eating good food, drinking beer and being served by waitresses with nice breasts - quite an experience I can assure you and whats more Oswald picked up the bill! Nice chap Oswald.

We also met AlphaWolf (if you haven’t heard of his fantastic modelling skills, then you should definitely check out his work), Derek Hauffe (an excellent web-designer, and colleague of AlphaWolf) and a very drunk Rogue13 (the owner of Polycount). AlphaWolf has offered to give our new models a look over and provide some feedback, which should prove very valuable indeed.

One thing to note is that the Mesquite area is a dry country - this means technically they aren’t allowed to sell alcoholic beverages at all! Luckily for us all the local restaurants have found a loop-hole in the law, and formed a private club - for one dollar you sign up for a UniCard, and providing you produce this on request - you can buy beer! Ace concept - but still bad for poor RR2DO2 who STILL couldn’t drink beer as he’s underage according to US law - quite funny really since in his country you can drink beer at 16 and smoking cannabis is perfectly legal :)

After a long evening and much food and beer, we retired to my suite to work on our ‘Done List’ - a compilation of all the things we’d achieved that day. It was at this point that Fluffy and I decided to rename Wils to Matt ‘I’m not drunk’ Wilson - since he argued in a fairly drunken manner for 45 minutes that he wasn’t in fact drunk :))))

I finally drifted off at around 2am, leaving RR2DO2 to code in b-splines for a demonstration we wanted to give id Software on Friday.