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Top Secret pictures of the Navy Dolphins http://www.planetunreal.com/images.asp?/images/scr eens/uc_083105_2.jpg Looks scary

I'd like to see the industry place more emphasis on what happens over product's lifetime than on its initial launch.

As a former developer of Palm entertainment software, and current developer of Windows software, my perception is that the PDA market encouraged post-release support, whereas the desktop market strongly focuses on the initial "bang." The juciest press in desktop gaming are the previews and the initial review, (and in some cases, games are reviewed before they're released). By comparison, little mention of a game is made after it's released, even if substantial improvements are made.

Passage like, "...if they'd only spent more time polishing off this game, it'd have been fantastic!" should be a sign to a developer that they need to go and polish off the damn game. As an independent studio, we're able to do that; but I'm not sure we'd be rewarded for it. Even large companies making content available such as Unreal Tournament 2004's Community Bonus Pack receive minimal press. That free (community-produced, even) expansion made the game an even better purchase; I'd go so far as to suggest that the initial review should be upgraded as a result.

Traditionally, we 1) develop a game, 2) release it, and 3) add to it/improve it over its lifetime. Players love to see new content, especially if it's free. With our upcoming title, my perception is that we have to get it right on the first try, or we'll receive poor reviews. Developers are given incentive to move on to a new title, rather than improve an existing one, as it means another round of previews and another full review. I'd much rather listen to what the community says, tweak as needed, and be recognized for it.

This was posted AC (score 0) and within a few minutes modded down to -1 (overrated.)

Just what's overrated there? Even if it wasn't a particularly good post, at score 0 it was hardly 'overrated.'

When they made it impossible to play CS anymore without selling your soul for Steam,

From Planet Unreal,

MEMSTAT - Displays Windows memory usage
STAT ALL - Shows all stats
STAT AUDIO - Shows audio stats
STAT FPS - Displays your frames per second
STAT GAME - Displays game stats
STAT HARDWARE - Shows hardware stats
STAT NET - Shows network game play stats
STAT NONE - Turns off all stats
STAT RENDER - Displays rendering statistics

You probably want to use memstat. While in the game, hit the backquote key (often called the tilde key, ~) to bring down the console. Type in the command, hit enter.

I tend to avoid stat all because it just crowds the screen, but stat fps is useful for determining the effects of display settings as well (for performance)

Bingo! Stuff like ChaosUT and Unreal4Ever are the reasons I *love* the UT franchise. The crazier the weapons the better. My absolute favorites are the proxy mines that talk smack to you while they hunt you down & the Quantum Singularity Generator (i.e. the Black Hole Gun).

Jaysyn

PlanetUnreal has a message from icculus saying that the linux version will be out soon, but 'not tonight' because he's short on sleep and can't concentrate.
-ReK

(I haven't played UT in a few years, so I don't know what's what with the UT community as of late)

When I played UT, all of the best servers ran CSHP. There's a little more info here. (Sorry, I didn't have time to find better links -- the CSHP home page seems to have gone away.) CSHP stands for Client Side Hack Protection. This is a aimbot/cheat protection mod that makes sure that everybody is playing on a level field. All of the servers running is, advertised it.

I just don't get it. What's the point of playing an online game if you have to cheat to win? What a way to ruin a game for everyone. (eyeroll)

I'm actually quite happy with the results, t34m v0rt3x, the creators of Deathball, deserve it, I really liked their previous mod for UT (not 2k3), it was called Operation Na Pali, it felt like the original Unreal, and was better IMO than the official mission pack, later they released Deathball, another great mod for UT2k3 this time, and it added a lot of value to the game for me.
t34m v0rt3x, keep up the great work!

I'm actually quite happy with the results, t34m v0rt3x, the creators of Deathball, deserve it, I really liked their previous mod for UT (not 2k3), it was called Operation Na Pali, it felt like the original Unreal, and was better IMO than the official mission pack, later they released Deathball, another great mod for UT2k3 this time, and it added a lot of value to the game for me.
t34m v0rt3x, keep up the great work!

planetunreal.com

works for me at least.

PS. Checking to make sure the link was good found some UT2k3 porn. bonus.

UT2K3 was released last year, I got a copy back then, the game was fun to play for a while, then it became a bit boring, so I started to look for mods, and I found some interesting mods, but none kept me playing for a long time.
Later, when Epic started to promote the UT2K3 engine for mods (Something Unreal contest, releasing the engine for free ...) I noticed a increased number of mods, I also noticed that the quality got higher, actually, UT2K3 is back to life for me now, one of my favorite mods is FaceOff UT2003, it has nothing to do with UT2K3 fancy SiFi setting, it's a real world combat game, something like TacOps or CS.
Another great mod is Deathball (created by TeamVortex who made the greatest UT mod ever, Operation Napali), this mod improves UT2K3's Bombing Run mode.
So I guess that Epic's new strategy along with the fact that UT2K3 is pretty new (not like the aged HL engine) makes UT2K3 a heaven for modders.

Nowhere do I see any sort of official e-mail or letter from LucasArts Legal giving them permission to continue. If it's there and I'm missing it, please let me know!

Theres alot more to this

Theres quite a soap opera brewing away at UT200Troopers.com

The team members got into a big pissing match with the project lead and they ended booting his ass. He got all up tight about it and has been making his opinions known in the forums as well as on his website where he details his interactions with Lucas Arts.

His account did not include any VERY friendly negotiations. In fact, Lucas Arts threatened legal on his ass before anything else.

• Bright (download) is the best non-dithering quantiser in the whole world, and reasonably fast, too; based on dlquant
• pngrewrite sorts the palette
• pngcrush removes junk chunks, fixes Photoshop's gamma bug and tries many filters to find a smaller filesize
• OptiPNG is similar to pngcrush, but executes much faster
• pngout uses an alternative deflate, yields sometimes even smaller filesizes
• tweakpng manipulates chunks comfortably with a GUI
• pngquant quantises PNG24 with alpha transparency to PNG8 with transparent palettes, the result is alas mostly ugly

sleightplus demonstrates how to overcome IE's rendering bugs without polluting your markup or styles; no silly style inlining required, either. Use PNG images or backgrounds all the way they were intended.

Predecessors with only support for foreground images: Youngpup sleight, WebFX PNG behavior, mongus pngInfo, Bob Osola. PNGHack, a server side solution, is doomed to fail because of dysfunctional browser sniffing.

If that was useful for you, and you are a C hacker, I have a plea. Take the dlquant sourcecode (see above) and massage it so it works with PNG instead of the archaic PPM. I want a functional Bright clone for Linux that takes a true colour PNG and outputs a paletted PNG. Can you do that?

.... the previous winners are Here

Jaysyn

Do you mean the Redeemer?

Doesn`t Bombing Run sound more than a little like the UT mod Frag*Ball? Check it out if you haven`t already..

The bonus level on the rather nifty UT mod, Operation Na Pali (which works under Linux), has Mario and Lego World sections. And the rest of the mod isn't bad either.

Try this: UTron TRON total modification for Unreal Tournament. I just wish they would get the beta out. Light cycles, the discs, everything is there, even Yori, the little hottie solar sailer driver. Of course now that Tron 2.0 is coming out, I hope that they do not lose their momentum.

Unreal Tournament is a three year old game that is still very popular because of mods. Specifically in capture the flag mode (CTF), which was really an after thought for the game.

The player/developer community work together solving CTF problems (spawn killing mods), creating new ways to play the game (CTF relics that enhance your character abilities) and making it more fun (StrangeLove Rockets you can fly around a board).

Check out this site www.planetunreal.com. The bottom left side of the navigation has about 25 different sites dedicated to mods. Many of them CTF related.

Great independant CTF servers like www.unrealmafia.com and www.stealthdp.com contribute to the mod community. They give mods developers feedback and a place to test new ideas. Many of the mod developer s post regularly to the forums of these sites asking for feedback or ideas. Check out the mod forums of both CTF servers.

My current addictions are:

• Grand Theft Auto III for PS2
  Combining racing, shooting, dark humor and wonton viloence in one game. Plus, you get to be the bad guy for once :).
• Tekken Tag Tournament for PS2
  Practice at home to play Tekken 4 in arcades and provide maximum pain to my adversaries.
• Final Fantasy X for PS2
  Ooooo... pretty...
• Yahoo! Eucher
  No one else in my family plays, so I play with complete strangers.
• Unreal Tournament on PC
  Team Deathmatch and Domination with 3+ teams is good. Mods like Jailbreak and FragBall are also highly time-consuming.
• Diamond Mine
  Great little Shockwave game. I play this constantly at work :)

Wow, looking at the list, it's amazing that I'm bored all the time...

Whoops, that URL is wrong... should be:

www.planetunreal.com

I couldn't find the article either, perhaps someone else has a link to it...

Try Unreal 4 Ever it has something like 40 new weapons ranging from a quantum singularity generator to a pipe bomb and yes a shotgun is included.

The level editor that came with UT is the exact same one that Epic use to make the game. Any shortcomings of it, they had to deal with in the development process. So clearly, it is a very usable editor since the game was released and was also pretty popular!
It definately isn't one of the easiest editors to use though. I suggest checking here if you want to learn more about how to use UnrealEd efficiently.

This mod for UT rocks. I started playing this after I got bored with the chaos of playing UT. This is one of those realism mods that has you pick what weapons you will use before you enter the game. You can load up but beware: the more weapons/equipment you carry the slower your player will move. As mentioned earlier UT and the mod will let you play without the CD once it is installed, if you have the latest patch for UT. The mod is available at

http://www.planetunreal.com/infiltration

UT - as of the latest patch - doesn't require a CD. However, it does require you to use a CD to load the latest patch.

Note, there is a version of the 436 patch (the latest UT version) for Windows that doesn't require a CD.. go to http://www.planetunreal.com/files/ and look for the "436 nodelta" patch.

I'm mostly involved in the Half-Life mod scene, though I can reccomend a few I've played for UT. Planet Half-Life is the best place to go for information on mods for Half-Life. A few mods I would suggest for Half-Life would be Front Line Force, Team Fortress Classic (which comes free with Half-Life), or the most popular online game in the world (its very highly rated, though I don't care for the gameplay style, basically team death match) Counter-Strike.

For Unreal Tornament, check out Infiltration or Strike Force. For a list of mods and general Unreal news check out Planet Unreal.

I have heard many good things about various Q3 mods, but I have yet to play any of them so someone else would probably be better answering this one.

I'm mostly involved in the Half-Life mod scene, though I can reccomend a few I've played for UT. Planet Half-Life is the best place to go for information on mods for Half-Life. A few mods I would suggest for Half-Life would be Front Line Force, Team Fortress Classic (which comes free with Half-Life), or the most popular online game in the world (its very highly rated, though I don't care for the gameplay style, basically team death match) Counter-Strike.

For Unreal Tornament, check out Infiltration or Strike Force. For a list of mods and general Unreal news check out Planet Unreal.

I have heard many good things about various Q3 mods, but I have yet to play any of them so someone else would probably be better answering this one.

Uh, would you consider Marathon sorta ported to Unreal?

Infiltration (extensive "realism" mod of Unreal) is the best fps out there IMHO yet nobody has even heard of it. If you're sick of crosshairs and are man enough to use iron sights, if you're tired of bunnyhopping and other such sillyness, check out infiltration. it does have some problems (some unrealistic rushing is still possible without community-made mutators and it still lacks original mp modes) but it's the best thing out there. i'm also waiting for Hostile Intent which has the same objective ie.: as close as you can get to real with a mouse and a monitor.

Screenshot

Doesn't work, huh?

Mike

I would say the only problem is support the 20+ Mac users, but after you get a friendly demeanor going, they're easy to get along with and actually start to solve their own problems.

Now I'm working on projects that are fun for me, that eventually Stone & Ward will see benifits from. Like playing with different Linux distros for an in-house webserver (that doubles as an Infiltration server :) Or building a RAS to take advantage of our 24 phone lines and 6mbit connection that don't get used after hours. I also have a planned network backup solution that uses an ATA RAID controller and a bunch of big hard drives. It would give them four months of hourly incremental backups.

~LoudMusic

The map creator could be considered an artist if he attempts to make a map that conveys a message or has a certain ascetic. The mapper has to focus and use his knowledge of the tools to create his masterpiece. Or not.

Planetunreal has this story about the work by Digitalo Design on VRND: the real-time virtual reality reconstruction of the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral. (There's also this article in Newsday Online.) Digitalo has modeled other stuff with the Unreal engine, including twelve acres of the Everglades.

Slashdot user "Vito" mentioned this in a comment on a July story, and appears to be working on a virtual reality office building tour package called "Unrealty" (being used but no yet being distributed).

P.S.: UT starts shipping for the Playstation 2 this week (before the PS2 itself ships), according to this story.

Planetunreal has this story about the work by Digitalo Design on VRND: the real-time virtual reality reconstruction of the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral. (There's also this article in Newsday Online.) Digitalo has modeled other stuff with the Unreal engine, including twelve acres of the Everglades.

Slashdot user "Vito" mentioned this in a comment on a July story, and appears to be working on a virtual reality office building tour package called "Unrealty" (being used but no yet being distributed).

P.S.: UT starts shipping for the Playstation 2 this week (before the PS2 itself ships), according to this story.

The author of the article mentions how long it takes to create a fully immersive level. Take a look at the community that has sprung up around games like Half-Life, Quake, and Unreal Tournament. There are tons of people putting out high-quality maps (and a few shitty ones) and mods/add-ons. And it is all FREE. If the developers concentrate more on the engine, and less on the levels, we find ourselves moving toward a video game world like Snow Crash's Metaverse. You can create your own world if you are so inclined, or visit hundreds of others.

This step away from developer-created content means that games are no longer providing stories, and that means less fun to a lot of people. But what do you get in exchange? You get spaces where you can do just about anything. Leave it up to the community to develop stories and new gamestyles.

Maybe if we ever get a nice micropayment system developed, the cream of the crop of ametuer level designers could actually start to make a living off of all their hard work. I don't even play the levels that UT comes with anymore, just some great user made maps.

The eds and writers at Gamecenter.com aren't exactly the greatest source for true gaming information. The purist and hardcore gamers get their information from sites dedicated to their favorite type of gaming, even to the point of shunning the psuedo-targetted gaming sites like the GameSpy network (www.planetquake.com, www.planetunreal.com, etc).

The future of the gaming industry is my forte. Hell, it'll be my thesis when I hit the point where I want a doctorate. And believe me when I say that the biggest cause of any genre of game "dying off", as they put it, is due to corporate and VC pressure to stick to things that they know work. Gaming companies are less likely to go out on a limb and innovate in their games. The few that do don't end up with the funding for the mainstream marketting thats needed to compete with the big publishes. Its alot like the music industry right now - except no Napster.

Gaming is becomming more and more about making profits than it is about making games. Companies are producing things that are very much clones of things that sold well. Instead of trying to recreate a good engine, and possibly comming up with new interesting innovations, the companies opt to simply license the engine and make minor upgrades to it. Look at all the various commercial games (not player-made mods) that came out on the Quake2 engine. It was pathetic in my opinion. The only game using the Q2 engine which caught my attention was KingPin: Life of Crime, and still that was only a so-so game. It was only different in that it offered much more of a story than the others.

Its the large publishers like Interplay and Sierra who are just drowning the game market with these 2-bit titles based on other games. And its these clones that are tiring players out, and confusing them. Titles that are truly different from the pack get hidden behind the clones. FPS games like Rainbow Six and its sequel Rogue Spear that were very much different from the fragfests of Quake didn't get noticed. But games like Soldier of Fortune take the spotlight because they're using the hottest latest (licensed) engine, when all they're really doing is adding some new graphics and more blood and making the genre a little more stale.

What game design teams really need to do is stop producing clones of other peoples' work, and start working on their own innovations and interesting games. Licensing of engines is fine, when done to a degree and when signifigant changes to the original game are made. Quality games are becomming more and more difficult to find due to the flood of clones. Not all licensed engines turn into junk games, but the amount of them coming out is making it very difficult for gamers to choose which ones to own and which to ignore. If an avid RPG gamer who enjoyed Baldur's Gate decides she wants to play more of those games, does she purchase IceWind Dale or Planescape: Torment, or the Tales of Sword Coast? In my opinion, Planescape: Torment blows the others away, even the original Baldurs Gate. But reviewers can't tell you if you'll like a game or not, or if you'll like it better than another game (and this is only made worse by reviewers who sell out to game companies or to generate clicks).


More and more games are going online. As an AI designer I can understand this. Its very difficult to write an AI which gets close to simulating a real opponent without using too much cpu power. Also, online games provide the sense of community and friendly rivalry that is lacking in singleplayer games. But the online world still suffers from the same problems that the singleplayer world suffers from. Funding is not provided to game companies with a radically different idea.

The original NeverWinter Nights was a superb game. It had a large base of absolutely fanatical players. AOL made one of their biggest mistakes by shutting it down. With modern network technology the original NWN could become 10x's what it was limited to on AOL. But no game company now would be willing to do that, because it isn't "safe" for them to do so. The companies see that there aren't enough clones of the original NWN around to make it a surefire sale. Its ironic that NWN, something alot of people who've played it consider pivitol, was only created due to alot of GoldBox clones.. In other words, it takes a saturation of clones in order for a game to become worth of support by a publisher. But its the saturation of clones that confuses gamers and makes them bored of the genre.

More power to the Garage Developers. More power to Forgotten World, Shattered Galaxy, and all design teams that can create thier ideas from scratch.

Patch 425 (latest)

30139 downloads, Win32
601 downloads, Linux

Patch 413 (from March/April)

198767 downloads, Win32
1659 downloads, Linux

Demo 348 (last October)

193333 downloads, Win32
29923 downloads, Linux

To me, those figures confirm what we've known all along: Linux users love free software but aren't going to pay for the retail version. ;-) I wonder if Epic thinks the extra development cost and time were worth the extra sales, which probably amount to less than 3% of all copies sold. Maybe Cliffy B just wanted to appear l337 to the Linux community.

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

How about Tetris for UT.

As an aside, there's apparently a team working on an Unreal Tournament TC called "Marathon: Resurrection." Details are at Marathon: Resurrection, if anyone's interested.

At least I'd go crazy if I didn't have that calc during school.