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I went to the website -- people are still actively playing this game. You should read this thread, explaining all of the user-made patches and mods that you need to go through just to make the game tolerable.

If you have to go to all of this trouble just to make the game what it should've been, it isn't worth it (and I certainly haven't tried).

What of the Independence War series? Realistic physics and very realsitic ship designs were its hallmark. The original was more of a space ship simulation than a space game. The sequal, Edge of Chaos, was a beautiful and very under appreciated game. A true underdog if there ever was one. Heck, people are still modding it, nearly 5 years after it came out! There are two major mods coming out for it, one a Star Wars TC and the other a kindof Elite salute, with trading etc.

Check out the still thriving communities at:

http://www.i-war2.com/

and

http://ina-community.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f orumid=137

Might I suggest the Wheel of Time? It's an FPS that requires brains and patience to play - it is not a twitch game such as the Quake or Unreal series, but it is exceptionaly fun. The game won several game of the year awards - including GameSpy iirc. It is about 5 years old so should run just fine on whatever computer you have. The community is very dedicated to the game and has no known cheaters. Also, we are extremely helpful and if you ask for help on the servers 90% of the players will jump to [Teacher]name mode and the current games will go into teaching someone how to play.

We truly do want new players. You should be able to find WoT in the bargain bin somewhere. Stop by the official WoT Clan Forums and introduce yourself and ask for whatever help you need (the main Game forum is basically empty these days).

Might I suggest the Wheel of Time? It's an FPS that requires brains and patience to play - it is not a twitch game such as the Quake or Unreal series, but it is exceptionaly fun. The game won several game of the year awards - including GameSpy iirc. It is about 5 years old so should run just fine on whatever computer you have. The community is very dedicated to the game and has no known cheaters. Also, we are extremely helpful and if you ask for help on the servers 90% of the players will jump to [Teacher]name mode and the current games will go into teaching someone how to play.

We truly do want new players. You should be able to find WoT in the bargain bin somewhere. Stop by the official WoT Clan Forums and introduce yourself and ask for whatever help you need (the main Game forum is basically empty these days).

The solution? Discussion with gamers is going to be at its most helpful for the company during the early parts of game development, when ideas and features can be requested and demand can be built up in advance of a marketing campaign. As the project approaches beta testing, employees should cease discussion with the outside world and instead talk only with the beta testers, and interaction with gamers should be done with fancy advertisements in magazines and giveaways until the product hits the shelves.

For what it's worth, Quicksilver, developer of Master of Orion III, ended up following that same pattern, with various staff members contributing (often cryptic) information about "The Elephant"--the design document for MOO3. The initial transparency and calls for fan participation drew many people (myself included) to their official message board. This formed the foundation for a community that was sometimes compared to that enjoyed by Bioware's Neverwinter Nights. Yet as development wore on, the flow of information dried up. Rumors started flying about cuts that might be happening in the feature list. Taken in conjunction with the removal of several highly visible staff members, what happened next was no surprise.

Deprived of the information flow that kept everyone on the same page, the community fragmented. "Fanboys" versus "trolls". "N00bs" versus veteran forum members. Certainly, this is par for the course in many forums; however, the sudden loss of a certain camaraderie struck me as significant. The problem was compounded as people turned back to past posts by various staff members, trying to divine the current condition of the project by piecing these posts together into a coherent account.

The end result was a lot of bad feelings all around. Although discussion was quite civilized when there was plenty of information to worwith, a paucity of information led to abandonment issues.

In a post-mortem interview with GameSpy, Rantz Hosely--art director for MOO3 and frequent presence on the boards--acknowledged that the information flow could have been better managed, specifically in terms of making sure that fans knew they weren't simply being ignored.

Personally, I doubt anyone will be (intentionally) trying the MOO3 experiment again any time soon. Why have the actual developer manage the information flow when you can have a marketer spit out full-color glossies on demand?

Unreal Tournament 2003 runs fine under Linux. You have to watch out for the installer bug and the supermount bugs but those problems and their work-arounds are well documented

The Greyhawk Inn - Unofficial Offical Board

Atari ToEE forums - Official Board

Troika are doing their absolute best to stay true to the module. Notable changes include the elemental nodes being somewhat smaller and more densely populated (anyone knowing the module will know just how large those elemental nodes were).

Other deviations include expansions of many minor characters in the module - for example one of the NPCs (a trader IIRC) is mentioned as not having being eligible for the militia because he's too short. This has been expanded such that there are quests revolving around this point.

One interesting - and to my mind much needed- feature is the concept of "party alignment". This is basically the "there's no way a paladin would work with a bunch of evil bastards" bit. Members of the party must be near the party alignment - for example, if your party is "Neutral Good" then all members must be Lawful Good, Neutral Good or Chaotic Good. This allows for a much more coherent game as characters you meet, etc respond accordingly. Previous Troika-member games (Fallout 1&2, Arcanum) have had the concept of developing your alignment/karma as the game progressed, but that doesn't carry over well to a party-based game.

... doesn't inspire confidence in me with their past track record of problems. Given my past experience with the Asus AV7266, I steer clear of all products using their chips.

Not very many recent comments. I think I probably have a more seasoned outlook on this game at this point.

First, the game has bugs all over the place. For example, the enemy AI hardly, if ever, attacks (with a few exceptions). Playing on Impossible (difficulty level) can actually be incredibly easy! Many users report doing quite a lot for the first part of the game, then sitting back and hitting [NEXT TURN] 200 or so times and eventually winning the game. The brain-dead AI is a lot of it (attack strategy, and also negotiations where you have a constant war-peace-war-peace 3 turn cycle with your computerized opponents).

This isn't a joke. With a rare exception (being next to the Ithkul or something), it doesn't put up anything approaching a real fight.

The user interface is described by many as substandard. Both in terms of being a navigational hazard that has to be figured out, to being akward to do regular things, to not providing simple right-click information. Most users have to work to try to figure out how to do the most basic tasks, like colonize a planet. Back to the informational thing, you'll find that other races will chastise you for your actions. Of course, you have no idea what the action was that provoked them. Perhaps you just met them? Or they'll angrily threaten you to say that they're warming up to you.

The crowning achievement of all of this is the macromanagement concept. If the macromanagement AI doesn't work well, you're going to be micromanaging bits and pieces as you find them wrong. Worse, if the macromanagement AI works well, here are your following duties:

1. Move ships around for exploration and combat. (This _is_ micromanagement, but it is enjoyable. Glad the AI didn't take this over, and they still left it in the game.)
2. Perform diplomatic functions.
3. Perform HR functions (hire/fire leaders and spies)
4. Perform rare macromanagement functions with 2 screens of sliders and tables.
5. Hit the NEXT TURN button. Again. And Again.

Macromanagement was a horrible double-edge sword that QuickSilver cannot win with. Right now, people aren't complaining too badly about the concept. But then again, they're not really even being attacked. Wait until the pressure is on to develop better ships quickly and efficiently (defend the empire... attack others) and watch the MacroAI bust at the seams with inefficiency that the players are going to have to go and mop up.

This is a historic moment in strategy games, much like the Titanic was an historic moment in sea travel. The best good that can come of this is not to repeat it. Sometimes the purpose of your labor is to serve as a warning to others.

Too bad. I really wanted to play a MOO game.

Check out their their forum for a more up-to-date view.

Thanks Slashdot for killing the site :) But you can still get to the communities to hear from the dev's themselves...

Anyways, I saw an incredulous comment above that the system requirements are Pentium II @ 300 MHz... the game has been in development for so long, that the game engine is not based on modern 3D-accellerated engines. Instead, the engine is voxel-based, which has angered some in the past because the game's "smoothness" is software speed based, not add-on hardware or slickness of video card.

The game supports 8 human players, with up to a total of 16 (assuming the other 8 are computer AIs). Human players can drop connections and re-connect without reloading from a saved state (like Moo2 makes you do). Battles between players are executed in real-time, and multiple battles between two exclusive sets of players will happen simultaneously. Between turns, when battles are resolved, non-battling players are forced to wait.

• IRC logs from the developers
• Apolyton
• OrionSector
• Infogrames MOO3 forums

The demo was a little late, so while they
were waiting some for the fan on the UT2003 forums, made some really funny "late demo"
posters, enjoy.

Release the demo, fan art

UT demo is coming to play the Penguin...
There are talks of support on linux... way to go epic! The relevent link is here.
This post talks about unofficial support to Linux.... :)

In a follow up from Mark Rein he says that they should be shipping the Linux client on the CD with the Windows one.. And the Linux client should also be released for the demo!!! Very exciting stuff!

more clarification from Mark Rein here.

Firstly, a correction of the initial post, this is not just "a recent build of the Unreal Engine," it's a build specifically designed and packaged to stress rendering hardware to their limits. The 2 games nearing release using the Unreal Engine (Unreal Tournament 2 and Unreal 2)will be using a dramatically different codeset than this "UPT 2002" does, and those games will be better optimized for more efficient utilization of system resources than this thing is, while still using a number of cutting edge features that this thing doesn't (like custom particle engines, vertex/pixel shaders, and nifty stuff like that).

Quoting Mark Rein, who works for Epic:

The Unreal Performance Test 2002 (UPT) has nothing to do with any of the games using our engine and should not be used to draw conclusions about game performance. I'll contact Anand and make sure he knows to highlight this. The benchmark is designed specifically to push the latest and greatest graphics cards as hard as we can. UPT is about the future, not the present. All of this will become clearer over the next few months. We will also be adding more features and content to UPT2002 to push things even harder. "Influence, Educate and Improve" will be our motto for the Unreal Performance Test. A lot of cool things are planned. In popular game development lingo what you're seeing now are some preliminary results from what equates to an early alpha version. Stay tuned! Afterthought: I guess I shouldn't say "as hard as we can" because I'm sure we could push things even harder if we weren't so busy making our game. The Unreal Engine is no longer CPU bound so if you want to make a game that pushes the absolute upper limits of xxx [i.e. insert the name of some imaginary future card that has massively higher fillrate and poly throughput and might be announced the week after next] you certainly could but then, of course, nothing earlier than that could run it. This test is very much about making something to test today's high end cards and the cards of the future. Putting the lower-end cards in the test wasn't really fair because the content wasn't designed to support those levels of performance. Certainly the games using the engine this year wouldn't want to be so aggressive with the content and detail settings. To borrow a phrase from Spinal Tap, the UPT detail settings are set at "11". Unreal2 and Unreal Tournament 2, for example, certainly won't be set at "11" because we want EVERYONE to be able to enjoy them. I suppose Unreal Championship could be dialed up to "11" because it's on Xbox, maybe even "11.5". One more thing (this will be corrected in the article shortly): Dan Vogel said the flyby had "as many as 100,000 triangles." - to clarify that it should say as many as "100,000 triangles in view." There are certainly a LOT more than 100,000 triangles in the demo.

This is all being discussed extensively in Infogrames' Unreal 2 forum.

Oh, and one more thing: Unreal 2 will be D3D only, and I wouldn't be surprised if UT2 is the same (although I don't follow it as closely). You may commence your moaning and bitching.