Tournament Lips is coming! We will soon have some shareware levels up, so everyone please calm down! We are working as quickly as we can; nobody expected a dinky little game like this to take off the way it did, so we're a little slow on the uptake, okay? Kru has a castle half-built, and my TF fortress levels translate very well into the Lips format, so it won't be long before we have something into which you can really sink your teeth! We intend four classes at first, with some limitations on snipers to make the game faster and more fun for all classes! Hang on to yer helmets, grunts! Help is on the way! And don't forget--you don't need twin voodoos, T-1 connections or special dll's to run our Tournament Lips Games!!! Any internet connection of 28.8k or better, on a P-133 or faster will do! Not only that, but believe it or not, you can run a non-dedicated server right off your own computer, don't need a high-level connection to run or play it, and can automatically find any Galaxy or Godd game on the net as soon as you log on! It's all built-in, and we had this a decade ago!!! We are gamers, and write games that are fun to play. Movement, speed and action are to us far more important than sales-oriented glitz. Notice how most commercial games are only good for one play-through, and some of them aren't even worth finishing, right? Well, buy those expensive games if you want to, but since we built and own our rendering engines (we use four different kinds, all interwoven seamlessly), we don't have to lease an engine at half a million dollars a pop. Of course, it cost four of us almost sixteen years of our work-lives to do it, and we've just now finished our fourth engine, but it was worth it, because it has things in it that no other engine has, and does things nobody else has thought of doing yet. What things? Wait'll you see! It isn't about color--we deliberately reverted our engines back to 256 colors when we saw what was happening to machine processing, especially in internet play, which is what's wrong with most of the internet games recently released; they're top-heavy, and that's why most serious gamers don't play them much. We also took out all our outboard voodoo card crap, because it also slows down the gaming; who the heck needs all that smoothing out of textures, and that huge pixel-hungry screen with all those fancy atmospheric effects? We can get the same general effect, maybe not so fancy, but you can feel the battlefield, hear it, it moves the earth under you, and what more does any screaming combat-ready grunt need to get it on??? What we've been developing all these years is an engine that can take the internet latency and massage it into a playable real-time experience that's fun for all, not just the LPB's. Our internet play is absolutely the most superior you will experience, bar none. Where we need work is in weapons, Tournament Levels, character design for multiple classes, etc....Of course we have them in place, but those are our concepts; what we're excited to see are the levels from other contributors, such as Norman, Intrepid and Rat-Eyes, all of whom have promised Tournament Lips Levels "real soon"...Again, nobody knew how fast this would go, so nobody was prepared at release to put Tournament Levels on the net, but they are working as fast as their little mices will allow~! Stay tuned for more! Here's a few screenshots to whet your appetite!

Here's a longshot of the overall view of the first of our Tournament Lips fortress castles. It's modeled of poured cement blocks, each about 40 tons, requiring several months of labour from the Engineer Battalions. Some of the blocks are moveable and can be built up by Engineers to form defensive ramparts. You'll notice a spanner bridge across the water. I've decided to opaque the water in this map to give the swimmers some chance against the Snipers. Otherwise it'd be totally impassible. You can surface and take a breath if you want to, but the only shields are the bridge's huge pilings. Defensive artillery (yes, I do mean cannons--hehe, I told you, we're gamers!!!) can be placed anywhere, even in the enemy's fort, so beware! There's even a potential to nuke the enemy fort by penetrating their War Room, in which case, anyone--including your own teammates--take the damage if they're in there when the Mushroom Cloud goes off! If a fort is nuked, it recycles with a ten second delay to allow the humiliated team time for reflection...

This is the main entrance to the Red Fort over the spanner bridge. There are other ways in and out, but this is where most of the action will take place. Once a tournament "holds the bridge", the only other way across is through the water route. I'm thinking of adding a Secret Spy and Thief Tunnel (with traps along the way to make it harder) and maybe some sort of Sourcerer's Transport for the Magic Users (oh, yes, there are Magic Weapons, Runes, Pentacles, Athame, Dorjes and what-have-you, and what's more, you can collect them, make them and/or trade them with other players online or by email!!! I told ya--we're gamers!!!!) and was planning to add yet another route for SkyWalkers, DreamWalkers and other Shamanic ShapeShifters (yes, they can change their shapes at will, using their special keyboard config.)...And then there are the creatures in the dungeons below....but we won't speak of them now...brrrrr....gives me the shivers!

On the way out of the Red Fort with their flag...there are two choices here, and several additional ways to go at ground level or higher. The Spy, the Ninja and the Thief have it made from there on! Soldiers, Marines, Engineers and Snipers have their own edges, of course, mostly in defense. Scouts and Elves are likely to pass rapidly through lightly defended areas, but in the thick of it, they need their orcs for water attack and...hey, in this mess, all Lips look alike!!! Blobs of goo all over!!! Yuk, yuk!!! GoreBag Likes It.

This is the Ramp Room in the Red Fort. It actually uses ledges, with narrow stairs to allow autoweapon defense emplacements and archers to rain arrows down on attackers. Of course, bombs, grenades, RPG's and the usual Boiling Oil also carry some persuasive weight. The reason I generally avoid ramps except for special occasions is that you will not typically find them in any real architecture for the simple reason that they don't last well, they wear in the center and are hard to repair and/or rebuild, plus they don't offer good footing in bad weather. The ancients avoided them except in their temples, and I agree. Arches are different. I like arches, and use them wherever I find an excuse to put them in. Round doors? Except "demon-doors" in Chinese temples and airlocks on spacecraft, they just don't occur in architecture that's meant to actually be occupied. They aren't ergonomic, except to the alien race on "Forbidden Planet", and they went nominally extinct ages ago, probably for that very reason. Same thing with slanted floors. Just doesn't make sense, uses up floorplan space, has no reason to exist, and once again, builders don't use them for the same reason as always; they cost a hell of a lot more and they have no functional reason to be there except to cause foot traffic to crowd in even closer to the center of the aisle. Doesn't make sense, and you won't see slanted floors much, outside the Crazy House at Knott's Berry Farm. Why are they so prevalent in 3-D games? Because most engines can't tolerate an infinite number of "faces" or planars. Ours can. We can make a single room out of our whole map, and our map is about forty times the size of the average gaming map's whole potential. As I said, we've really worked to develop a gamer's engine!

You can see all three sniper decks from here. Snipers can have a lot of fun, but do not dominate Tournament Lips servers!!! Engineers can build up defenses and set up crossfire killing lanes. The Sniper Rifle is being rebuilt by Norman[DK][LoL] and the scope will be modeled after the Redfield 70x NightScope, with greenish tint for night levels, slightly greyish lightfield for daytime, with a choice of dot, crosshair or none.

Diving down into the water below the bridge, one can use the huge cement pilings as cover when the chase gets super-hot! It also makes underwater combat much, much more interesting, and underwater combat levels will be a main feature of Tournament Lips!!! Be sure and .

This is the current underwater effect from VAL. I like it as-is, but as usual, he's obsessed with "improving" it....we shall see. Meanwhile, I'm working on the water tunnels & underwater traps for Tournament Lips(tm) and a few of the Advanced Lips Levels for the Advanced Levels Pak due sometime this spring along with the Tournament Lips Paks....whew...