Virtual ISS Tournament

Dahamma writes "I saw on Voodoo Extreme that NASA has modeled a "Virtual International Space Station" in Unrealty, an architectural modeling package using the Unreal engine. Download is already a little slow, though, and I can't imagine a /. post will help that..."

Comments

Ahh, but . . .

[hawk]

Will the engine handle explosive decompression properly when you miss? Once good high velocity hit to the walls, and . . .

Re:They should just put it out as a Q3A level

[LarsWestergren]

it don't matter if it is good for a deathmatch, though it would help

Er, what would it help with?

Does anyone know of any sites dedicated to using 3D gaming engines for non-gaming purposes other than the article we saw a while back about a company using Q2 engine for an architectural walk-through? You know, maybe with resources that help take Autocad files and convert them to Quake maps?

There are plenty of people who use the Unreal engine for these sort of things, like the before mentioned Unrealty and the Notre Dame virtual tour. The Unreal engine is so easy to extend and modify because of its modular and object oriented design. The engine actually recently won a price for being so powerful and making development easier. Here is a list of recent improvements to the engine and the editor. Looks really sweet! DirectX 8 + GeForce + UnrealEngine looks like a good recipe for great upcoming games.

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pretty cool

[Barbarian]

Seen a lot of stuff done with Epic's Unreal game engine, including VRND (Virtual Reality Notre Dame).

I see that they choose to use the Earth background skybox from Unreal Tournament for the station (as seen in some multiplayer maps). Fitting I guess.

me = stupid

[Barbarian]

Those are the same links given on the NASA site. D'oh!

I wish they'd applied a mirror texture to the solar panels. Would have looked nice.

Mirrors

[Barbarian]

From the Voodoo Extreme site info:

Unreality (needed): http://www.unrealty.net/
VISS ZIP here: http://www.unrealty.net/network/
(you need the first two as per the instructions on NASA's site)

Screen shots: http://www.unrealty.net/network/screenshots.php3?i d=7&page=1

(un)Real Mirror of Unrealty Client

[dschuetz]

Found a mirror of the Unrealty client on the unreal engine page: http://www.unrealengine.com/engine/unrealty/.

Haven't found a mirror for the VISS data, tho.

DemoNews points to a calculator.

[DHartung]

Unfortunately, that DemoNews page is out of synch with the "Storerunner" download site (or wherever); when you follow the DemoNews link it gives you a page for some kind of calculator software.
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Textures?

[Julius X]

Where have you been? The Unreal engine does NOT have a 256x256 texture restriction...in fact was one of the first--if not THE first--game to use S3TC to support higher resolution textures two and a half years ago, right after the original Unreal came out. I'm sure a few of us can remember---I know I do--looking at those shots and going WOW! that's incredible. Besides that, the textures have always been 16 or 32-bit, because I remember at the time, the competition, Quake 2, had the 8bit pallette restriction on textures, which is what caused the game to have the brownish tinge that it did...but Unreal definitely did not.

The engine may have its difficulties (the older Glide issue is one of them, which some say has been solved)...but texture restrictions were NEVER one of them.

Next time, you may want to check your history...

-Julius X

tried it

[jilles]

I though it was rather disappointing. The textures sucked, there was hardly any interactivity: no opening doors, moving robot arms or what so ever. Just these little question marks that when clicked pop up a text window.

Nevertheless, you get a pretty good impression of how the ISS is organized.

wow

[hugg]

I think I saw this being demoed at KSC at the ISS exhibit. Too bad noone can download it right now. Is the server physically located on the planet?

Mirror for Unrealty Client

[OakLEE]

For the client we have DemoNews. Windows only here, sorry.

I haven't got anything for the VISS, but if I find it i'll reply back.

__________________

The NASA Flak Cannon

[Cheshire Cat]

Oh it would be nice to have the Flak Cannon on this sim. Or then again maybe not. From what I've heard, it seems that the MIR has been hit quite often with it. :)

They should just put it out as a Q3A level

[DeepDarkSky]

it don't matter if it is good for a deathmatch, though it would help. Enough people have Q3A and the performance will certainly be good. Does anyone know of any sites dedicated to using 3D gaming engines for non-gaming purposes other than the article we saw a while back about a company using Q2 engine for an architectural walk-through? You know, maybe with resources that help take Autocad files and convert them to Quake maps?

Different NASA Virtual ISS tour.

[mr_gerbik]

NASA has an older Virtual ISS tour. I wasn't able to get the new one.. slashdotted already I guess. The old one is kind of weak.. I'm not suprised they made a new one. But its worth a look if you can't get to the new one.

-gerbik

not slashdot friendly

[mr_gerbik]

from the disclaimer:

GNU/Linux x86
A GNU/Linux x86 version will be available in the first quarter of 2001. Please visit this VISS Web site for future updates

single shot kill? Re:Simple map mod

[StandardDeviant]

The Assault mission sounds really cool! But then I'm addicted to Assault missions in UT. :-)

Anyway, to make it slightly more realistic, would it be possible to have regiospecific single shot kill? I.e. if you're outside the station, a single shot would kill your character (by virtue of breaking seal on your space suit and death by explosive decompression/hard vacuum exposure). Just a thought...

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Fuck Censorship.

Simple map mod

[Fervent]

I'm a vet Unreal Tournament player, so this would be simple to mod to make a good map. Add low gravity on the outside of the ship. Place a flak on the solar panel and a rocket launcher near the airlock.

If you want you could even set up a cool Assault mission. Be a third-party country and try to raid the station. Then be the ISS defense. You could put sniper rifles by the windows.

Anyone up for a deathmatch? :)

Poor Space Nerds...

[glowingspleen]

Guys, if people keep blowing up the Solar Panel array, we'll never get good results on how hamsters deficate in a zero-G envornment!" Seriosuly guys, stop blowing all the equipment up! C'mon! I'm gonna tell NASA HQ!

Re:The Unreal engine sucks.

[AFCArchvile]

It's because the engine sucks. From its 256x256x8bpp texture restriction (yes, I know the new rehash of the Unreal engine extended that to 2048x2048, but that's VAPORWARE!), to the lackluster collision detection (in every deathmatch, I see some weapon just sitting up in the air near a wall; obviously, the bounding boxes are too big and the weapon's bounding box is sitting on a T-junction or something), to the problems with blast mark decals, to the problems of vanishing brushes, to the lack of a bezier patch system, to the abysmally low quality of the levels and character models themselves (creating higher-polycount models/maps is near impossible due to numerous constraints), the Unreal engine is just too outdated. In Q3TA, Id added tools for doing terrain; just look at the "mpterra?.bsp" maps sometime. Furthermore, 3dfx is dead; Tim Sweeney saw that one coming, so he defected from them and started leeching from NVidia (I'm surprised that OpenGL UT still sucks, though). Even worse, Unreal is barely cross-platform; even though Loki has stepped in with a Linux version of UT, it still pales in comparison to the Q3 client version of Q3 produced by Id themselves. Also, the netcode in UT still sucks (with a 300 ping, UT is absolutely unplayable, while Counter-Strike is decent to good, and Q3 is pretty good).

Even with these grudges I have against UT, I still play it; it's a nice escape from Quake and Half-Life when I start to get sick of them. However, about five minutes into each UT session, I see one or more of these problems pop up, and I exit UT. At that point, I'm ready to play Quake and Half-Life again. In a way, UT keeps me playing Quake.

Fungus

[xueexueg]

Can Unrealty model/simulate the growth of space fungus?

Another ISS Model Available at Discovery.com

[seanellis]

Discovery.com have their own interactive ISS model, which includes a construction timeline, amongst other things.

It's designed for high-bandwidth connections, so 56k users will have to wait a while for download, but it's pretty much worth the wait.

Since I haven't downloaded the NASA version (6MB+!) I can't compare the two directly, but the Discovery one's pretty good.

Sean Ellis