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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.
Last weekend I got an invite to come to London for a game or 50 of Unreal Tournament 2003. Mark Rein sent me a mail sunday, saying I could come by monday for the test. Not only did I break a toe last week, but it woulda been impossible for me to go with such short notice anyway, so I did the second best thing. I decided to ask an english guy if he wanted the job. Luckily eVOLVE was at hand in our chatroom (#unreality on EnterTheGame), and he was more than happy to have a go at the game. (Lucky bastid)
I sent him off with orders to wear something sassy, plus wink a lot to Jay Wilbur and Mark Rein, oh, and to get a lot of info.
This is what he delivered to me earlier today: (Mark Rein promised us he would send along a shot or two from the game, and we will be posting them as soon as they arrive)
Unreal Tournament 2003 - Hands-on Preview
I never really enjoyed the previous Unreal games... Well actually I did, but I felt that Unreal Tournament 2003 is so shockingly great that you needed a smaller shock to soften the blow. Yes, that's true, on behalf of Unreality I was invited to a private room in a cybercafe somewhere near London to view and play UT2003. And you better believe it was worth it.
For those of you who don't already know, UT2003 is the next planned release in the Unreal game series, intended as a kind of sequel to Unreal Tournament, and providing the multiplayer aspect to the series. Where UT had 5 player models to choose from out of the box, UT2003 will have almost ten times as many. Where UT had a pretty liberal poly limit, UT2003 has on average 100 times as high a limit. How is this possible using what is basically an enhanced version of the engine? Well, we'll get onto that later... Lets start with what really matters, the gameplay.
Video Game cheats, hints a
Last weekend I got an invite to come to London for a game or 50 of Unreal Tournament 2003. Mark Rein sent me a mail sunday, saying I could come by monday for the test. Not only did I break a toe last week, but it woulda been impossible for me to go with such short notice anyway, so I did the second best thing. I decided to ask an english guy if he wanted the job. Luckily eVOLVE was at hand in our chatroom (#unreality on EnterTheGame), and he was more than happy to have a go at the game. (Lucky bastid)
.umx file format (made by using digital music creation using 'tracking programs') is now no longer supported, and in it's place is the mp3 style format 'Ogg Vorbis'. These files, for those who don't know, are very easy to convert to from any other format, and have better compression than mp3 (and no horrific license fee to use it). This obviously means that previous compatibility with music is unfortunately unsupported. I didn't get much of a chance to hear the music, although I don't doubt it's excellence. Most map files will be forwards compatible, which means that even if the Unreal/UT map you loved isn't updated by the team, you will be able to do it yourself, although quite a bit of work will need to be done to avoid them remaining so low poly. It has been confirmed that some maps from the previous games will be updated in some form or another, although exactly which levels haven't been decided.
I sent him off with orders to wear something sassy, plus wink a lot to Jay Wilbur and Mark Rein, oh, and to get a lot of info.
This is what he delivered to me earlier today:
(Mark Rein promised us he would send along a shot or two from the game, and we will be posting them as soon as they arrive)
Unreal Tournament 2003 - Hands-on Preview
I never really enjoyed the previous Unreal games... Well actually I did, but I felt that Unreal Tournament 2003 is so shockingly great that you needed a smaller shock to soften the blow. Yes, that's true, on behalf of Unreality I was invited to a private room in a cybercafe somewhere near London to view and play UT2003. And you better believe it was worth it.
For those of you who don't already know, UT2003 is the next planned release in the Unreal game series, intended as a kind of sequel to Unreal Tournament, and providing the multiplayer aspect to the series. Where UT had 5 player models to choose from out of the box, UT2003 will have almost ten times as many. Where UT had a pretty liberal poly limit, UT2003 has on average 100 times as high a limit. How is this possible using what is basically an enhanced version of the engine? Well, we'll get onto that later... Lets start with what really matters, the gameplay.
Gameplay
As far as playing the game, it hasn't changed much from Unreal Tournament, the style of play will not surprise most UT players, but it has been tweaked, enhanced and generally evened out. The movement speed does seem lower than people are used to in UT, although once in the middle of a firefight, the speed of everything was spot on. Other more obvious changes include a double jump feature, whereby if you jump while you are in mid jump, you will gain an extra foot or so of clearance, and some new/tweaked game modes. Yes, Instagib will be back as well as DM, Team DM and CTF, and a variation of the Domination gametype from UT called 'Double Domination', where there are just two control points, and your team only scores points while you control both of them. A variation of CTF was created quite by accident where the flag colours were placed in the wrong bases, i.e. the red team's flag starts where the blue team spawns and vice versa... This means that you can immediately grab the opponent's flag, but to capture, you need to break into the very heart of the enemy base, while your team reclaims your own flag. It makes capture a lot more challenging, although the flow of gameplay is much faster, with returns, captures and players grabbing the flags happening every few seconds. It is currently undecided if this lucky accident will simply be an alternative map style to the regular CTF maps or if it is too close to the only completely new gametype (so far), Bombing Run.
The premise of Bombing Run is quite simple, to be honest... Pick up a bomb and get it into your enemy's base. The version I played still needed some tweaking as the ball wasn't visible enough, but the general workings of the gametype were working superbly. You pick up the bomb, or 'ball' as it is normally referred to in the centre of the map, although when in possession of the ball, you cannot fire or defend yourself in any way, leaving the only evasive control you are left with, i.e. to use an ingenious method of teamwork: passing the ball. Yes, you actually can shoot the ball out of your translocator gun, and have a friend catch it. Of course the enemy will probably be blasting you and your teammates to somewhere south of hell while you attempt this manoeuvre, but after a bit of practice, it seems like it will become second nature if you are to succeed. Clans will lap this element of teamwork, as long as there aren't any ball hogs on their teams. Anyway, you must bring the ball to a specified area of your opponent's base, run it in and score a point for your team. Currently after each point scored the players all respawn in their base, although it has not been decided for certain whether or not this will remain the case, as although it means that you can't leave one player in the ball respawn location to snap up the ball on success, it does cause a bit of frustration when unbeknown to you, your teammates have scored, and you're whisked back to the start location.
Teams work very nicely in UT2003, as you can see a small arrow over the head of your teammates, so that you avoid friendly fire, and if you're close enough, the name of the players in view will be shown above their arrow. Your team colour is shown by the HUD colour in a similar way to UT, basically the Red team will have a red HUD, the Blue team have a light blue HUD, and any game that doesn't use teams will give you a dark blue HUD.
The HUD doesn't yet have a list of weapons you've picked up, so it was a bit of a chore to search through other weapons for one that hasn't run out of ammo, since ammo was very sparsely placed. This may become no issue when you are able to see a list of your available weapons, and just inspire a better and more skilful use of your weapons.
Team communication is made much easier with better communication and the menu items for the voice chat in UT2003 are already within the game (although whether it is actually working or not is beyond me, the important thing is that it will be in the final version). Part of the voice communication is down to the sound engine being completely rewritten, as apparently the old Galaxy system was a resource hog and quite unstable. This means that the old
Background Story
My best guess as to the level locations is that they each take place on one of six planets where the various races live. The Homo Sapiens Taratis, a kind of genetic mix of human and alien (possibly intended to be Skaarj) live on a planet called 'Purgatory', a firey volcanic looking red planet, whereas the race known as 'Artificial Life' (i.e. robots such as Xan) live on a cyber world which seems to borrow it's look from Star Wars's Coruscant, called Premaka, other races include Humans, Genetically enhanced Humans, and the Gen Mo' Kai, living in Sanctuary, Arboria and Alleria. Of course we can't forget the Humans who seem to enjoy dressing up as Egyptians, and live on 'Anubis'. I saw about 12 different levels very briefly, although the three I played thoroughly were a CTF map called Maul, a DM map named Antalus and a Bombing Run level named Kalendra Icefields.
Maps
Maul looks incredible. High poly terrain, with areas of high quality long grass that you can use to conceal yourself in, with two small bases, one either side of the map. Towards the centre of the map is a large hill that you must climb over to reach the enemy base, and along the centre of the map, at the top of the hill is a wall, with two large sections that are broken for you to pass through to reach the other side. Scattered around the map are various brilliantly modelled trees and general furnishings to make the area look totally realistic. A large spherical water tower blesses each side with some cover, along with some large rocks blocking and aiding the general layout, with an incredible looking particle based waterfall just out of reach, but visible throughout the level. It's large enough for 12 players, but keeps the bases relatively close to retain the constant fast pace of action. Naturally there are still bugs, such as certain areas where you can become stuck, or fall through the terrain entirely, but nothing that really spoilt our enjoyment of the level until the end, when one of the flags actually fell out of the level, and didn't ever respawn, locking the score in place for us to just massacre each other.
The Antalus deathmatch level was apparently not meant to be played, since it is still very much under construction, although it certainly didn't seem that way to us. Seemingly set on the surface of one of the many alien planets, Antalus is very heavily terrain intensive with strange lifts made out of what seem to be large bones and spinal cords. A gorgeously lit, varied and complex layout really helps the realism, while it manages to keep a great level flow. The level itself is nice and large compared to most UT maps, but doesn't feel unmanageable and after a while I was running around like I owned the place, picking off people from all around. (Yeah right, hehe -Preacher)
The Kalandra Icefields is awash with atmosphere and environmental effects. This bombing run map has a lot of weaving terrain, and rocky valleys amazingly created. The bases are hugely detailed with variety and originality not often seen within a single map, with multiple independent sections to each base, while the exterior really shows off the new capabilities of the engine. Snow covered arches of rock protrude from the rocky walls, forming a structure that wouldn't be out of place in a Lord Of The Rings movie... Snow falls from the sky like... well... snow, which is why it looks so great... windy sound effects are accompanied by subtle smoky dusty snow being blown around, and off the edges of certain ledges. The distance fog creates a thickness to the snow that should impress even the most hardened engine fanatic, whereby you can only see a certain distance in front of you before the background fades into a blur and can be controlled by the level designer within the editor down to the slightest accuracy. Terrain and clipping bugs seemed to be very few and far between in this map unless you went over the top with your translocator and teleported to the ledges on the very top of the cliffs, although this will of course be fixed before release. Above all, this map is great fun and creates a massive and yet still realistic play area, but what use is an amazing fighting arena without anything to shoot with?
Weapons
The weapon list is currently incomplete as new guns are still in the process of being added, such as the Redeemer, although I was able to use the following:
Translocator - OK, so it's hardly the most dangerous weapon around, especially since I can't even confirm whether telefragging is possible (I did try, yes), but it seems much more like a gun with a barrel. Primary fire mode shoots out the beacon, or retracts it if it has already been shot out, while alternate fire (hereby referred to as alt fire) teleports you to the location in a sphere of blue energy. The translocator is limited much more in UT2003 because of the need for recharging. The translocator now has an energy level which is expended when you shoot or retract the beacon, with a lot more energy loss whenever the teleportation is instigated. I believe it starts charged to about 25 energy 'points' and recharges about 1 point a second. Each teleportation takes about 10 energy points.
The Impact Hammer replacement - This gun works in a similar way to the impact hammer in primary fire mode, with the difference that you can no longer hold the weapon at maximum power. Once the charge (a little bar underneath the ammo counter) reaches the peak it discharges, to simply start filling up again and repeat the cycle. It's a change that makes the weapon a lot more tactical, and less down to building up your strength for a one off attack. The alternate fire, however, brings another new element to the game. Once holding down the alternate fire button, a section of a spherical shield appears in front of you, which can protect you from various weapon attacks, although it wasn't apparent whether it absorbs a percentage of the damage dealt to you, or everything below a certain amount of damage. The shield drains an energy point total (possibly the same total that is used by the translocator) when it is in use, although it is well worth using, even if you simply run in front of the vulnerable bomb carrying player in the Bombing Run gametype, protecting them in some ways from assault from the front.
The Default Weapon (Replacing the enforcer) - Starting with this weapon may remind many of you of Quake 3 Arena, as the weapon is very similar, infact a machine gun (with not much ammo), but it has a twist... The alt fire shoots out a grenade similar to Unreal's eightball, but it normally has a chance to come to rest before exploding, as it doesn't bounce very much. The grenades use a separate ammo type that is shown with a visible representation of each grenade (you start with 5). In a large gunfight it can be useful to take people off guard, if they don't pay constant attention to where the grenade lands, although can be avoided if spotted in time.
Link Gun - Getting a lot of publicity, I have to admit that I feel this gun is a great idea, but I don't think it will work very well in a multiplayer environment (of course bots should make it very useful). Generally people will not want to relinquish their firing abilities to help another teammate make a kill where they could probably just target the enemy at the same time and potentially gain the kill. The primary fire shoots out what seem like green glowing huge pillow size marshmallows, which don't seem very powerful on their own, but if a teammate uses the alternate fire (a pulse rifle style green beam, only a little thicker and with a more random erratic movement) on another teammate using the link gun, the marshmallows will glow yellow and become more powerful. This can be repeated with up to 4 players to create an extra powerful weapon, of course the other 4 are out of action while this is going on, so it may not be popular with human players. Of course in a simple teamless deathmatch, or against an enemy, the link beam causes some nice damage.
ASMD - Working identically to the previous two ASMD incarnations, this version simply looks more interesting. The primary fire is a still smooth purple pulse of glowing energy, looking professional and above all, painful. The alt fire mode shoots a glowing, relatively circular blob of purple energy, which when shot with the primary fire mode (known as the ASMD combo) explodes like an amazing mini black hole, with purple arcs shooting around inside it. The closest thing it resembles is a magic attack from many Final Fantasy games called 'demi'. Aside from the cosmetic changes, apparently, the combo has been made harder to pull off, probably by making the collision of the alt fire 'blob' smaller, although perhaps because it was moving slightly slower, I didn't seem to find it a problem. Incidentally, a little known fact about the ASMD is how it got its title, and in reality it does stand for the second half of a phrase (originally the other half was printed on the other side), of course the insult that ASMD stands for I'll leave to your imagination.
Rocket Launcher - One of the favourites of any FPS game, the UT2003 version has a few new surprises that may disappoint fans to begin with. Firstly, you can clearly see that it has become a 3 barrelled spinning gun, suggesting the sad fact that you can only load 3 rockets into it at a time. To add to this, you cannot store these rockets, and similarly to the impact hammer replacement, the rockets are immediately discharged after being loaded, creating much more of a need for tactical gameplay, and evening out the weapons useage (to good effect in my opinion). The alternate fire mode is a simple single firing rocket, which allows you to hold down the button to fire a stream of single rockets. As of yet, there is no grouping of the three rockets as in previous games, and the spread is quite substantial, although in a frantic battle, the spread is just wide enough to catch a large area with the explosion. The smoke trail left by the rockets is intensely beautiful, and I absolutely adore the effect. It looks natural and non repetitive, unlike the previous games in the serious which can obviously be seen to repeat the same sprite animation over and over again along the path. Similarly to this smoke path is the quality of the explosion. The central sprite basically simply expands and fades in and out, but it is this combined with an amazing particle smoke effect that gives it such a pleasing and stunning visual ardour.
Flak Cannon - Very similar to the UT weapon of the same name, the changes seem to be a brightening up of the flak shards, and the adding of a glowing trail, which serves to enhance the meaty feeling of the gun, which was unfortunately diminished because of the slight lack of a powerful enough sound effect (most likely still in production). The shards bounce nicely, and more realistically, with a much greater fall off due to gravity, although the alt fire seemed to suffer because of this and doesn't seem to have the same reach as the UT variant. (And I didn't notice a smiley face on the front).
Sniper Rifle - Perhaps the biggest shock of all of the returning weapons, because it looks so different, and acts so similar. The sniper rifle shoots an electric bolt that can kill in two clear hits, or one headshot, although it is hard to see where you've hit you opponent due to the lens flare on shooting. The spark looks fantastic and seems to arc out of control (and yet hitting your target), and even slightly bounces off certain surfaces provided the conditions and angle is correct. The alternate fire is again a zoom function, but changing the HUD greatly. The player view becomes a crackling TV noise scan line style blur, which obscures a lot of the whole screen aside from a clear aiming circle in the centre. The contrast of the picture goes up too, amplifying lens flares and the distance fog brightness in a realism that can only be described as meticulous. Ultimately, this new sniper rifle serves to provide camping snipers with a warning that unless they pick their targets wisely, someone will be able to track the root of the spark and flush out the sniper.
All of the weapons seem to have been either given extra strengths or weaknesses to try and balance them out more, and it is no longer a case of running straight through a level to grab the best one, as more often than not, any weapon will serve as the best weapon for a situation, depending only on the player's skill and ingenuity. Personally I feel the weapons balance to be a great step in bringing skill to the forefront of the gaming, and dampening the weapon's ability to dominate a match. Obviously excluding the redeemer, which I'm told will be returning in all of it's glory.
Editing
Although a game may have all of the features to make it fun to play and great to look at, its increased lastability is very much down to the community support it receives and inspires. The better the editing facilities, and the easier it is to bring new features/maps/mods to the game, the more likely it is to succeed as a game people play forever. The Unreal games have always been at the forefront of the game editing community and have always distributed the map editor with the game cds to entice creative minds to pursue their lifelong dreams of building their own world, or rules for the world, and fortunately UT2003 is no different... A heavily enhanced version of Ued2, (even with a new loading logo) is being distributed with the game. New features include a completely new terrain building feature, a new way of populating maps with high poly prefabricated objects, and the ability to move around prefabs, and remould terrain etc. without doing a time consuming geometrical rebuild. These prefabs are called StaticMeshes, and are part of the reason UT2003 can render so many more polygons per second. Hardware rendered, which means it's only a tiny hit on the cpu, and depends on the graphics card instead, simple elements of the level can be repeated multiple times with practically no performance loss. Single sections of (highly detailed) wall, or even sections of barbed wire to place upon the wall are included in the list, although most of what you see will be created like this (with the exception of terrain).
Using StaticMeshes means that the actual map size is very small... One of the maps I played, which was larger than Lavagiant and much more detailed was only 2MB large, as the StaticMeshes are stored in separate packages in a StaticMeshes folder.
StaticMeshes can be created either within the UT2003 editor, or using a program such as 3DSMax (used mostly for character and item modelling for UT). The terrain system looks incredibly powerful and easy to use in the sense that it is as simple as painting on features by raising, lowering, flattening, or smoothing terrain. This was demonstrated to me in real time and a complex terrain revamp took a few seconds to perform. The brilliant grass (which you can even conceal yourself within) looks detailed enough that someone could have gone in and painstakingly placed each clump of grass using something like staticmeshes, but in reality, adding grass to terrain is merely a case of layering the grass on the terrain, taking seconds. The ease of use, and the complex looking results are going to make an incredible impact on the way fans make maps, speeding things up while drastically improving the look of everything. Originally when I heard of the prefab staticmesh system, I was worried that we'd get user made maps comprised of a few reused StaticMeshes, with a bit of reworked terrain thrown in there for good luck, but the basis for each StaticMesh seems to be small enough to not dominate the map's setting, but yet detailed enough to make a difference. New staticmeshes are so easy to create, even for someone just using UnrealEd that it won't be a problem, especially since the incredible terrain system seems so simple and easy to customise, or create what you want with.
Now confirmed for inclusion with the UT2003 editor is the Unreal Engine's new and powerful cinematics creation tool, Matinee. This will allow a user to make a movie within the game engine (known as Machinima) without any 3rd party modifications to the game. This GUI based system really shows off the specifics of what can be done with the engine, and allows you complete control over camera movements, actor control, and pretty much anything else you require.
In Conclusion
The version of UT2003 that I played certainly seemed of a much higher quality than anything I'd seen before. Admittedly the decals seemed to disappear from sight pretty quickly (although not in view), which did seem to leave the interactivity of the levels a little on the low and unsatisfying side (although never unnaturally), but with lines of blood shooting out of a player when hit, weapon stations that can be set to random and a level of graphical excellence making each map a masterpiece that would put Myst to shame, I could excuse the flaws in this alpha version. There were bugs whereby when you were killed the screen would flick to a close up shot of the ground and it would take a second to see your dying body (and the outdated Unreal Tournament 2 logo was still present).The deaths did look very varied, but not very spectacular, which is soon to change with the inclusion of the new Karma Physics engine which IS to be used in UT2003. I cannot comment on how it looks ingame, but the technical demonstrations I've seen are unbelievable. Smaller features such as variable friendly fire (we used 30% which seemed perfectly natural) were already included but as of yet, the maps/features to be included in the demo, we hope to have by the end of May, haven't been decided yet. An Unreal Tournament style introduction flyby will be included in the game, as well as a database menu option, where you can explore the background of the residents of each of the six planets.
I can say for sure, however, that the 1.1GB of data making up the current version of UT2003 is well spent, and you would be wise to look out for this one, when it reaches the shops. (Did you expect anything less?)
James 'eVOLVE' Hamer-Morton