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Massive Unreal 2K3 Mod Contest Launched
code-e255 writes "Epic Games, the developers of Unreal Tournament 2003, and nVidia have announced a huge UT2K3 modification contest called 'Make Something Unreal'. This competition will reward the truly great modders out there, and will hopefully encourage more people to mod for UT2K3." Word is that "..entries can be made in 13 categories, including 'Best Mod,' 'Best Character,' 'Best Use of 3D Sound,' 'Best Real-Time Non-Interactive Movie (also known as Machinima),' and more", and prizes include over $1,000,000 in total, with first prize $50,000 and a $350,000-value commercial Unreal Engine license.
Yes I know it's for the original unreal tournament, but I bet an interested soul could start a project to port it to UT2k3. ;)
Carmack and ID have been supporting moders for a long time, including adding a C like language to Quake 3 for modding. Then there's the fact that they release the code for older games, you can't get much more mod friendly than that "here have our code and do with it as you wish".
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I bought a new FX5200 128MB card to replace my aging Radeon 7500 which overheated and failed when the fan motor quit and my avg FPS in UT2k3 fell from 55-60 down to 30-40 with all details turned up high. Kept the FX 5200 only a week and got a Radeon 9500, now my FPS is back up to 75-78 will high details. I wish I'd never bought the FX 5200, and I would've have enough money to have gotten an R9700 instead of just the R9500. Oh well, live and learn.
PS: Anybody want a very slightly used FX 5200 real cheap?
Epic is really a great company. This is just another one of the great things that Epic does for the community. They've done a contest like this before for their last game, for example.
:)
:) Everyone I met there was awesome, friendly, helpful, talented and extremely knowledgable. I have the utmost respect for Epic as a company, and they have my undying loyalty and admiration for being such awesome and generous people.
Another great example of how much the support the mod community occurred a year ago this month. Last June, they flew in 35 modders and amateur game developers (including myself) from all over the world to visit their offices in Raleigh, North Carolina, to see the new game engine. They paid for everyone's airfare from places as far as Germany and Canada, paid all of our travel expenses, put us in a hotel, drove us to and fro, paid us back for the cab ride from the airport, etc etc etc. The only money of my own that I spent the entire time was for food at the connecting flight's airport.
They brought us all in to look at the then-unreleased Unreal Warfare engine. They gave us a huge lunch, catered from a local deli with all fresh deli meats and cheeses and everything, and TONS of soft drinks in a refrigerator, and let us eat and chill out in their break room where they have every console known to man on a giant wide-screen TV. We played that for a while, and then we all got to wander around the office and meet everyone that worked there and see where the games we modified were made, and the people that made them. For someone that's been playing their games ever since Jill of the Jungle and Brix, it was a really amazing experience.
After that, we got down to business, to the real purpose for our being there. They gave us a day-long seminar showing us everything the engine can do and how the tools work to do it, answered questions, gave great examples, and impressed us heavily the entire day. They covered every single aspect of the engine, explained everything in full and showed us everything that the public hadn't yet seen. We were all astounded.
After a while, we all go to try out the latest build of UT2K3 over the LAN. I got to play for probably half an hour and had a blast. I'm pretty sure everyone got a chance.
At the end of it, everyone walked away with a free GeForce 4 Ti 42/44/4600, an ATI Radeon 8500 (the best on the market at the time), or an Audigy. Once they handed all of that out, they took us all to see Minority Report.
The next day, we all flew back home. The day UT2K3 was released, we all had a copy in the mail FedExed (where available) to us at our doorstep, waiting for each of us in the morning.
That whole trip still ranks as one of the coolest and most exciting things that has ever happened to me.
Digital Extremes have been quietly working on an offical Stargate game for about a year now. As far as your walk through a door and join another server idea, they are called Portals and have been around sine.. uh.. Quake 3(?). It's just that not many (any?) games make use of it.
Also, it was quiet interesting Americas Army came out before UT2K3 using the UT2K3 engine. So the engine does look good on other non-bouncy fps games. (Any other U2K3 engine based games out?)
...and of course itself, and any others I have forgotten.
From the Unreal Wiki, released UT2k3 engine games:
America's Army
Devastation
Raven Shield
Splinter Cell
Unreal 2
Unreal Championship
Postal 2
Notable upcoming Unreal Engine games include:
Deus Ex 2
Thief 3
XIII
Unreal Warfare, Epic's worst-kept secret, is next-generation (from UT2003's engine) and is said to rival Doom 3s and Half Life 2s. Speculation I have heard is that is seems to be a large scale combat game (either that or i'm getting this confuesd with Digital Extreme's Stargate game), perhaps in the style of BF1942 or PlanetSide (yes, there are games in development (unannounced) that are using the Unreal Engine as a platform for a MMORPG, so it is a possibilty).
...described here. They can be used as gates to different parts of the level(like the common-or-garden usage), or to another server(using the unreal:// url pattern).
In contrary to the other posts in the thread, the functionality is in both UT and UT2k3. It's just that nobody really goes to the trouble of setting them up.
Incidentally, there is an SG1-flavored UT2k3 mod in development, Atlantis.
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Epic has told me personally that they have no interest in porting their editing tools to the mac. Since it looks like Halo will be actively supporting a modding community, and is more likely to have cross-platform tools, I personally will probably spend my future modding efforts there.
woof