Red Orchestra, UT2003 Mod, Released

Neophytus writes "The first public edition of the long awaited Red Orchestra mod for Unreal Tournament 2003 has been released. 'Red Orchestra brings you in-depth infantry combat on the Eastern Front of WWII. With the emphasis on realism and authenticity, the Soviet Red Army meets the German Army on the ground across battlefields from Kiev through Stalingrad and on to the Reichstag in Berlin. Real weapons. Real battles. Real soldiers.' Download from FilePlanet (free reg. req.), FasterFiles, more."

Comments

Uhmm right..

[Hott of the World]

While I can respect a free Unreal Tourney mod set in the WW2 universe, I must ask this:

Doesnt this add to an already overblown selection of World War 2 based FPS's?

Heck the best thing about the Desert Combat mod for 1942 is that its NOT about WW2!

Re:Uhmm right..

[Locmar]

There are quite a few WWII FPSs out there, true, but most of them are pretty Quakey and unrealistic, and none that I know of have treated the Eastern Front with due respect.

Re:Uhmm right..

[randyest]

Doesnt this add to an already overblown selection of World War 2 based FPS's?

No, not at all. In order to add, it would first have to meet, then somehow exceed the current offerings. Or at least bring something significantly different to the table.

Note that this mod include no vehicles. It says it will include vehicles for ut2k4, but that's not out yet, so with this, you get no vehicles. So what we have here is a WWII mod for an FPS, without vehicles, introduced into genre ruled by Battlefield 1942, which has planes, tanks, jeeps, ships, and every other kind of vehicle you'd expect. That you can really drive (and ride in while someone else drives).

So, this doesn't even meet the current standard (bf1942). Maybe before bf1942 this would have been interesting competition for MOHAA or RtCW, but now it's just one more of the same old. And how is this News for Nerds or Stuff That Matters?

Is /. now going to turn into planetslashdot.com? I can't wait for the ourly announcements such as "]00l dude wants you all to know that they just managed to get a new model to compile for their upcoming uber-l337 killemall mod. Here's a screenshot of the new model with a plain grey skin. Kewl, eh? Oh, and they need coders and artists, so check 'em out!!!!!!"

Re:Uhmm right..

[Minna Kirai]

In order to add, it would first have to meet, then somehow exceed the current offerings.

That sentence makes no sense at all. I guess it's just a weird reach for some clever rhetorical hook. If I join a football squad, but can't beat the current striker, I'm still an addition to the team.

Maybe if the squad was already at full capacity, adding me doesn't supply anything new, but that's exactly what the poster was suggesting.

And when there's a question of if a new contender is good enough to be considered, it should be held up not against the best of the others, but the worst- for that's the one who'd be displaced first.

introduced into genre ruled by Battlefield 1942

BF1942 currently has 9000 players online, a huge chunk of them in the non-WWII Desert Combat scenario*. Meanwhile, the Activision's Quake-engine games (forked throughout several variants) have 16000 players total.

*It's really funny how the success of Desert Combat has undercut EA's future plans for the "Battlefield" franchise. They were plainly intending to step through 20th century wars in a commercial series, starting with Vietnam, and now a free mod to their own game is becoming suffocating competition to their new releases.

I'll be downloading this one!

[MysticGlyph]

The single biggest complaint I hear about Unreal II is the unbelievable weapons and non-traditional sci-fi style maps. Now with this mod maybe people will give the Unreal engine another chance. .

Link

[evilmuffins]

That Faster Files link, won't have faster files anymore...

Re:My opinion...

[Bingo Foo]

My opinion is that Quake 3 engine does a better job of being used in a WWII game such as Return To Castle Wolfenstein and Wolf: E.T.
May I ask why?

Re:UT2k3 or UT2k4

[Vaevictis666]

Mods for UT2k3 will be binary compatable with 2k4. Mods for UT2k4 that don't involve any of the fun new stuff (like vehicles) will likely be compatable with 2k3.

UT2k4 is the same old engine, same old content, _plus_ some fun new stuff like more than double the maps, more character models, a few new (and some almost-old) gametypes, and more than cursory vehicle support. Oh yeah, and further graphics/networking optimizations.

Off-Topic Rant: Fscking Huge Downloads

[ewhac]

I just checked the filesize on this mod: 277 mebibytes. WTF?? I have a fairly fat pipe going to my house, but since when did it become a good idea to create demos and/or mods regularly exceeding 100 megs?

I recently downloaded the demo for Tron 2.0, weighing in at about 200 megs. Now, I might almost think this reasonable if it weren't for a few crucial facts:

• The demo only included three maps,
• There were only three or four enemy models,
• Tron, if you'll recall, is a flat shaded universe. The textures, such as they are, are dead simple, and should compress down to nothing.

Yet, despite this, the download was 200 megs. It should have been no more than half that.

There has to be more efficient ways to handle this stuff.

Schwab

I Just Have To Say...

[mongoks]

In Soviet Russia...FilePlanet still sucks!

Re:I Just Have To Say...

[QuantumSpritz]

For once, the 'Soviet Russia' comment is almost funny.

Almost

No - wait. It's not.

Realistic?

[Mithrandur]

You can't call it realistic until you spend the majority of your time waiting in the cold, hoping not to die.

You can't call it realistic if you can play after you've died once.

You can't call it realistic until the credit for every action you take is given to your superior officer.

WWII was a terrible event. I have no problem with FPS, but to make a mockery of WWII while the survivors are still alive seems disrespectful to me. Play all you want in a Sci-fi setting. Make mods "simulating" the america civil war. But I think it would be nice to show some respect for the still-living vets of WWII.

Re:Realistic?

[randyest]

How, exactly, is it disrespectful to WWII vets to make a mod based on WWII battles?

I've heard a lot of complaints from vets that people forget about their sacrifice, which I think is somewhat true, but I've never heard any complaints about wargames set in WWII (remember the old SSI games? I know vets that loved playing those themselves).

Are you a WWII vet and are offended by this? If so, please tell me about how it makes you feel. Or, do you just know some vets and assume they'd be offended? Or are you just trolling? (DING DING DING - we have a winner!)

Re:Realistic?

[MalachiConstant]

This is exactly the same thing that my uncle said when I told him about some of these games (he served during Viet Nam, but never in combat).

I can certainly understand that sentiment, but I think it's understood that any kind of game like this doesn't "make you feel like you were there". Take the Half-Life mod "Day of Defeat". The weapon characterisics are realistic, the sounds the guns make, the environment, etc, but I don't think anyone says, "No, I didn't fight in WWII, but I played DoD, so I know what it was like for those guys.".

Is it disrespectful? Perhaps. Making a game out of a tragedy seems rather crass, but for the people making and playing it it was so long ago that it seems like the ancient past, even though there are still vets living today. But I don't think anyone playing it believes it simulates what the vets went through.

Good History Book for background

[davejenkins]

Stalingrad
Enemy At the Gates came close, maybe in it's first 10 minutes. After that, Hollywood falls far short of the horror and what really happened (as much as I can tell from reading this fascinating retelling of the battle for Stalingrad)...

There's been an ongoing debate among us about which is the better history. On the one side Dave, Rick, and others favor the dry academic 'cause and effect' of macroeconomics and political philosophy that lead to the World War 1914-1945. Others among us push for the 'real story', the oral tradition of the grunt soldier's pains and trials from the trench in the actual battle-- it doesn't matter how the forces got there, the drama of the day comes from a baker holding a rifle.

Stalingrad mixes both, but in an acceptable fashion: Beevor rightly frames his story around the causes and impetus behind Hitler's folly and Stalin's incompetence, but then follows those mishaps all the way down to how they drew 500,000 men in the German 6th army to starvation and death in the steppes of the Volga.

This is not an easy read. Do not try it if you have a fear of lice, rot, cold, or desparate hopelessness-- you will feel them as you read.

Beevor's foreshadowing was sometimes distracting, but then, as the reader, I had to tell myself that it was only foreshadowing because I didn't know the details of the battle-- this is history, not fiction. The author draws us to seminal mistakes in judgement, crucial firefights that end up dooming thousands later on, the chaos of war that brings entropy-- and death-- to millions.

I highly recommend this book.

(review originally appeared here

Re:Good History Book for background

[Lobo93]

Read it. Loved it. And to be honest, some of those stories made me horrified and saddened. At one point I had to put down the book and just shake my head in utter disbelief; I'm referring to the part where the maimed german soldier was left behind in the gutter next to the airfield. That was extremely painful to read, especially since the author swayed from his ordinary, clinical penning to a more personalized composition.

As a former professional soldier myself, I can vividly picture the scenarios described in relation to military stratagems and political decisions, but I'm at a loss when it comes to the soldiers and their experiences and suffering. But "Stalingrad" excel at portraying both sides of the story, albeit a bit academic, as aforementioned by parent post.

As davejenkins states: "This is not an easy read." - I most defenitely agree. But on the other hand, if you want to know anything about WWII and it's implications and horrors, pick up a copy and behold the black, writhing chaos that is war...

Re:Good History Book for background

[C_nemo]

"Enemy At the Gates came close, maybe in it's first 10 minutes."

If you want a decent film about stalingrad you should try this one: Stalingrad, it's a german film about german soilders. Germans never have to put in some happy ending or try to cover up that they where bastards. To put is short: its cold and hopeless.

Re:Good History Book for background

[voodoo1man]

I think a much better one on the subject is Valentin Pikul's Barbarossa. (ISBN 5-7838-0230-1 for the new printing, but I have not seen it translated to any language from Russian yet). It has a much deeper account of the political and military machinations leading up to the actual battle, recounting them mostly from the perspective of (as well as dealing with him as a man), Friedrich Paulus, and his contrast with Rommel. Despite being written in a rather informal style, it is very meticulously researched (I think Pikul claims close to 3,000 sources total, some of them first-hand), and some of his statistics really put the Russian front in perspective (something that seems to have been totally ignored by the current wave of rah-rah USA jingoism) - once he cites that just over 1% of the Wermacht forces were involved on the North African "front" in the years 1941-1942; the rest being almost entirely used in the Russian advance, underscoring Rommel's genius. The contrast he brings up in Rommel's inventiveness despite critical lack of reinforcements vs. the difficulties of the Eastern front (and the two conflict's political and strategic dependence on each other) is pretty unique.

What really sets his book apart is his meticulous reading into declassified Russian archives.* The blunders by Stalin and his henchmen turn out to be monumentally stupid at almost every strategic decision, and even worse the deliberate repressions they bring about, justified by party doctrine. Stalin's "incompetence" as described in Stalingrad pales in comparison to the actual events.

* Pikul's motivation for writing Barbarossa came after a series of Soviet documents were released that finally revealed the details of the fate of his father, who died defending Stalingrad.

OT: good use for BitTorrent

[EvilStein]

FilePlanet absolutely sucks. It's one of the most cluttered websites I've ever seen. More banner ads & crap than most porn sites.

BitTorrent/p2p is an *excellent* way (and legitimate way) to get game demos out.
Why don't more companies announce "Hey, we've thrown this up on Kazaa too! Go get it!" instead?

INstead, we get ad-laden crap like FilePlanet/etc.

Re:Getting UT2003 working with kernel 2.6.0

[ThreeFarthingStone]

The nonobvious but simple fix is to modify your 'ut2003-demo' or 'ut2003' startup script by adding "unset LD_ASSUME_KERNEL" at the beginning, and adding it "export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5" back at the end (so RPM will work again).

You probably don't need to set LD_ASSUME_KERNEL at the end of the script. Each program has a separate environment, initially inherited from the program that launched it. So "export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5" (in sh and bash scripts) only applies to programs launched by the ut2003 startup script after that line. Since its at the end of the script, it does nothing. In fact, the script would not need that line at all unless it wanted to run RPM.

To demonstrate (on OpenBSD, where LD_ASSUME_KERNEL probably has no meaning):

$ export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5
$ printenv LD_ASSUME_KERNEL
2.2.5
$ cat > sampletfsh
#!/bin/sh
# a script

checkcondition() {
if [ -z "$LD_ASSUME_KERNEL" ]; then
echo ut2003 works, rpm does not
else
echo rpm works, ut2003 does not
fi
}

echo starting...
checkcondition
echo unsetting LD_ASSUME_KERNEL...
unset LD_ASSUME_KERNEL
echo pretending to run ut2003...
checkcondition
$ chmod 700 sampletfsh
$ ./sampletfsh
starting...
rpm works, ut2003 does not
unsetting LD_ASSUME_KERNEL...
pretending to run ut2003...
ut2003 works, rpm does not
$ printenv LD_ASSUME_KERNEL
2.2.5
$

First I set LD_ASSUME_KERNEL pretending I had RPM on a Linux 2.6 system. Then I wrote and executed a script. The script unset LD_ASSUME_KERNEL so that ut2003 would start working (but rpm would not). However, even though I did not redefine LD_ASSUME_KERNEL at the bottom of the script, the shell from which I called the script still kept the old 2.2.5 value. The script could have been a ut2003 startup script.

One only needs to add the first "unset LD_ASSUME_KERNEL" line.

Bit Torrent download link

[AIX-Hood]

There's a bit torrent download link for this at Filerush.com: Red Orchestra Beta 1 BT link

Here's a bit torrent for it:

[AIX-Hood]

There's a bit torrent download link for this at Filerush.com: Red Orchestra Beta 1 BT link