Diamond's own gaming-related web site, the Diamond Undergone, has undergone a facelift, and it is now open for business once again as the DMM Underground. The portal offers users a number of game services such as servers hosting Quake II, Unreal Tournament, and Tribes multiplayer games as well as game patches and software updates for S3's video and sound cards.
To commemorate the relaunch of DMM Underground, S3 has posted seven new deathmatch levels for Quake III Arena. The levels are enhanced to take advantage of the company's S3TC texture-compression technology and boast textures that are large and quite detailed. "With the license of the Quake Arena engine, S3 now has the ability to demonstrate the full potential of the enormous texture datasets made possible by S3TC on the Viper II board, unconstrained by compatibility with more texture-limited cards," said id Software cofounder John Carmack. "A 4x increase in the unique texel count can make a dramatic difference in the visual quality of a scene."
All the levels were professionally developed by a number of well-known level designers with past Quake 2 and Quake III modeling experience, and they are available for download for free. An S3 Viper II video card is required to run these levels, however.
The levels, linked to the right, can be downloaded right now from DMM Underground.