Bunch O' Stuff

[Gobalopper]

Well its a new year which will soon be bringing to end our 6th year of operation. Mahdi and myself are going to be working on the newsletter for December which will also be providing a recap of what happened in 2003. It was certainly one of the slower years as Westwood was closed and there was no sign of new games on the horizon. We did manage to create our own ladder, with a lot of help from Olaf of XCC of course, which has helped to keep Emperor from completely disappearing off our hard drives. Hopefully with the recent downtime with the WOL server we'll be able to find a better solution for online play and maybe even bring back the clan manager.

In other gaming related news the BF1942 Dune mod has been progressing since my last post. There are a few new images from the game posted and their website has being updated to include a forum. Check out images these ingame of the Atreides factory (1, 2) and renderings of the Sonic Tank (1, 2). If you are interested in helping them out be sure to drop by.

Frank Klepacki has started off the new year by adding the Dune 2000 music to his websites jukebox. It is a flash based player that contains all of the tracks from the game. He also mentions that the Emperor tracks will be available shortly and says the following about the music from Dune II:

For a brief history, Dune 2 was the first RTS game ever made. Westwood got the chance to remake it later on as Dune 2000 with higher quality everything, and that gave Frank the chance to remake the old fm tracks and turn them into what they should have been all along. For this reason, Dune 2 tracks will not be posted because Frank considers these the "definitive" versions. You can always here the old Dune 2 medley featured in "Songs of the Month" under the "projects" tab. Enjoy!

So it looks like we won't be getting the full tracks from Dune II but there is the compilation Frank made a few months ago.

Last up we have the poll results from the Dune novel poll. As expected the classic novels won out by a large majority, check the poll archives for the full results.

The new poll deals with WOL and what whether or not we should drop it and move to using the XWIS server instead. Check out the details and cast your vote.

[Dunenewt]

Nothing about the new forums?

[Andrew]

Also at Dunenovels.com

Orion Books in the UK has announced that they are planning to reissue the GREAT DUNE TRILOGY in a one volume hardcover edition on December 2, 2004.

Orion is also going to reissue the paperbacks for which they hold the rights: CHILDREN OF DUNE, GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE, HERETICS OF DUNE and CHAPTERHOUSE DUNE. These paperbacks will be covered in 'smart new jackets.'

http://www.dunenovels.com/news/DuneReissue.html

[Inoculator9]

On a side note, Dune Editing's contribution to the newsletter can essentially be a paraphrasing of the most recent news post. Just for Gob's information ;)

[GholiaT]

Dune 2000 music sounds much better on Frank Klepacki's website than in game. Finally I can take full pleasure in listening to that great music. This makes the beginning of this year very memorable for me. :)

I was waiting for something like this to happen for quite some time…