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Unreal Tournament 2003, Now With More Ogg
Alizarin Erythrosin writes "Unreality is running an article today about a hands on preview of Unreal Tournament 2003. An interesting bit was on page 2, saying that Ogg Vorbis is being used to compress the audio for the game." A nice screenshot demonstrates some of the eye-candy.
Screenshot mirrored here if it gets 'dotted.
Also uses Ogg Vorbis - except you never saw that as a headline on slashdot.org
Well it already seems slashdotted just after 2 posts. Anyway Anandtech.com has a sub $200 video card shoot out and one of the benchmark test is using the Unreal 2003 engine. So if you are in the market for a new video card and plan on making Unreal 2003 a major game played on the card check out this site:l ?i=1608
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.htm
Nick
trust me of what I've seen of the game q3 can't compare. www.ign.com has better screen caps of UT2003 the ones in the article here are rather poor. also of what I've seen the animations are top notch(q3's seem rather poor compared to these) and it even includes dismemberment.
Because with a game like this, your graphics card will probably be choked up before your CPU is. And nowadays, everybody has hardware-accelerated sound cards, which helps as well.
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here
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Cool. If I'm not mistaken, my friend from Schloss Tegal did the soundtrack for some of the levels. You can check out some of his music here. He makes some dark, creepy stuff - perfect for Unreal.
Well there would be a slight I/O delay using uncompressed audio when a map is loaded, but then it's loaded in RAM. It's not like your hard drive is accessed for each sound every time it is played.
Hard drives are basically unused when it comes to most games of FPS nature, besides the inital loading of a map/sound effects/etc. The only exception I can think of is when you enter a place with high detail or triggered events.
Unreal Tournament 2003 will be a lot less CPU-limited than the original. They've moved a bunch of stuff from CPU instructions to GPU instructions.
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Hardware accelerated 3D positioning has no effect on the decoding time of compressed audio (like Ogg). Very few soundcards support accelerated mp3 decoding, very much ogg.
Why would you want to have any sort of audio compression taking up CPU cycles in a game that is so processesor depedent?
Media archive footprint?
There's lots of argument over when or if DVD will supplant the CD as a distribution mechanism for games, but regardless, in the near enough future CDs are probably still going to be it.
But, even 'older' shooters have already started pushing the space-limitations of the CD; for example, jpeg support was hacked into Quake 3 at the last minute because an entire archive of its textures uncompressed wouldn't have fit on a single CD.
Next year's games? Fatter hardware targets into which many more textures at much larger resolutions can be crammed, with less tolerance for ugly compression artifacts on those sharply-rendered images.
So, you've got to make some room somewhere, I guess. Given how large uncompressed audio is, it seems like a natural target.
foser wrote in to point out a little bit of information regarding the possibility of UT2003 being ported to Linux. The information came from an IRC interview in which Mark Rein from Epic participated:
From me:
It doesn't matter that Loki is out of business.
Epic did the original port. Not Loki. Loki just maintained it.
Yes, but unless you have a SCSI CD-ROM drive and a decent controller, your PC _will_ stall for a second as the track is changed. This was one of the gripes I had about CD audio in games from the very beginning.
UT2003 For Linux? - Wednesday Apr 17 18:53:54 2002 - Updated by AlKini
foser wrote in to point out a little bit of information regarding the possibility of UT2003 being ported to Linux. The information came from an IRC interview in which Mark Rein from Epic participated:
[19:35] DE/Epic: Will UT2003 make it to Linux? If so, server, client or both?
[19:35] Server for sure on Linux
[19:36] MarkRein[Epic]: any word on a client
[19:36] Irix--> Don't know yet about a client but it will probably happen eventually
[19:37] Irix--> We'd definitely like to see it and I know Dan Vogel is talking with some friends of his who would like to do it.
So, someone who could do it, wants to do it. I sure want him to do it ;-)
So, I take my previous comment back ;-)
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Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought the little wire that ran from the CD-Rom drive to the sound card shot out the raw audio to the sound card, which in turn, if instructed spits it out to your audio out.
This should compleatly bypass any system/disk I/O, should'nt it? The requests the game is making on the hardware is just a start, stop, or change track instruction.
I could see it being a problem if all of the audio was stored on the hard drive in wav (or simular format), but if your just looking at music, it just seems a good deal simpler to have that run off the CD.
The Internet is generally stupid
I like what they did w/ the first unreal. It was kind of like midi, except it had samples of the sounds used right there in the file.
That's called mod. It's commonly used on Game Boy Advance games too. The UMX files are actually renamed XM, S3M, and IT files, and you too can make those with Modplug Tracker.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Nope, you didn't miss it, Assault has officially been canned from the UT2003 release. Interestingly enough, the other gametypes available are all "double objective" gametypes;
-Capture the Flag,
-Domination 2 (control point on each end, hold both simultaneously for 5 seconds to score a point for your team),
-Bombing Run ("bomb" or "ball" in the middle, carry it to the opponent's base to score, kind of like football, and you can throw it to a teammate as well).
My guess is the multiple objective game of Assault had far too few players to justify the surely formidable task of creating new maps for it. Domination was pretty small too, but I'm sure it's not too hard to make a good DOM map now with the tweaks from the old style.
It's too bad though, with some work Assault could have been a much better gametype the second time around.