Slashdot Mirror
Unreal Gets Annihilated, Community Bonus
heXXXen writes "The first release of Unreal Annihilation is out now - it's a total conversion for Unreal Tournament 2K3/4 that mimics classic PC RTS title Total Annihilation. However, the first release only supports UT2K3, with 2004 support coming June 6." Elsewhere, an anonymous reader writes "Part two of the Community Bonus Pack for UT2004 has been released, featuring a whole host of new maps, skins, and mutators for the game, with information and screenshots available at FPSCentral. Torrents can be found at PlanetUnreal (UMOD version and ZIP version.) The 'official' CBP2 channel can be found at #cbp on irc.enterthegame.com."
I'm also of the understanding that Unreal 2 is a new engine, whearas the engine used for UT2003/2004 is the same original engine, just modified.
With Natural Selection, Uskaarj, Unreal Annihilation, Warcraft III FPS mod, and Empires all blending or totally converting between game genres and/or engines, there seems to be an interesting trend of "breaking the rules" or using a game very differently than it was originally intended. Is this a gimmick, first notably commercialized by Savage or do you think it will keep its place on the game-store shelves?
Find download links (including Bittorrent) here.
Owiiiiiie! .
To quote the site. .
That being said, they are also running on a server, which they do pay for, and it has limits. Each hosted site is dished out a limited amount of bandwidth and disk space. Our limit is 5 gig per month.
When I chose to move the site here, I never imagined this site would require anywhere near 5 gig to operate. However, this month we have used a total of 5.5gb of traffic this month.
Let's play nice for a change?
Technically they're all different flavours of the same engine. They started out with the "Unreal Engine" (its official name) way back when to make, duh, Unreal. That was version 1 to 226. Then they made Unreal Tournament (which was kind of a Unreal Engine 1.5) that went up to v436. Allong the way lots of other games lisenced various versions of the engine and modified it for their own uses (eg: Wheel of Time, Rune, Tactical Ops, Deus Ex, etc).
;))
;)). Its an amazing little engine, and it changes so quickly and so easilly its hard to keep track of what version is where and who modified it. But thats why the developers (and community mod makers, if I may say so myself) love it so much. You can do damn near ANYTHING with Unreal. They really did pick a ringer of a name for it all those years ago. :)
Then they revamped the whole thing and came up with their "Unreal Engine 2" (sometimes called the "Unreal Warfare" engine, though the oft rumoured Unreal Warfare has yet to appear, and according to the developers, doesn't even exist). By the time that hit (UT2003), it was somewhere around the v2000 mark, with a short run up to v2225 (2227 in house). Then they have their "Unreal Engine 2.5", which powers UT2004. Same engine, only its up to v3204 as of now. That should give a good indication of just how many changes there are between UT2003 and UT2004, for those of you who doubt. As for licensees, there are a lot of them in this generation, and they're spread all over the place. Epic's UDN claims "Unreal 2.5" is the engine behind all their latest and licensees latest games, but in reality the whole mess spans over a thousand build numbers. Unreal 2, for example, uses a modified version of the UT2003 era engine. Of course, they made their own in house changes and improvements ("GOLEM" animation system, and a much improved particle system), but technically its UT2003 based. Other titles include *deep breath*: Splinter Cell, Deus Ex: Invisible War, XIII, Lineage 2, Postal 2, Devastation, Americas Army, Unreal Championship, and much more. (God only knows what kind of franken-unreal-engine the DNF team is working with now.
Now beyond that, you're looking at a bit of a fork. Namely "Unreal Engine 2X", their custom X-Box version of the engine (which will be powering Unreal Championship 2), and "Unreal Engine 3" which is the big bad kahuna daddy they flashed around at E3 this year. UE2X is a dead end build though, and UE3 won't be out until 2006 or later. Those are their known current to future plans at least.
So yeah, thats Unreal in a nutshell (my advance apologies to the few Epic employees reading this incase I screwwed something up
-MD (Unreal fanboi for life)
Someone who spent a lot of time making a mod still has to insert the CD in the drive just to please the copy-locking technology. I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time on a mod just so I can promote a game that is copylocked. The community should get together to make an entire game free, not just the mods.
-I am an elective eunuch.
Hanni and Nexus at TAUniverse aren't gunna like this month's bandwidth bill. Please be nice to these hosts, they've been funding the community's busiest site for many years now, and I'd hate to see it go in one crushing bill. Yeah I'm the same PLAG from TAU if you recognise the name.
Well, I've been an active member of Total Annihilation Universe for a while now, and have been keeping tabs on this project for quite some time. I'm very happy that it has come this far, and want to congratulate the UA team for making such a cool mod, and a job well done. (If partially) Make sure to drop by irc.gamesurge.net @ channel #UnrealAnnihilation on IRC and give some kudos to the UA team. And because we all know this is Slashdot, TAU is gonna have some big bills to pay at the end of the month. If you wouldn't mind, go to the ads page and click on a couple ads to help keep our server alive. Our admins: Nexus and Hanni don't have much money as it is, and any help would be nice.
Just get the newest patch. No big deal! You still need a legit CD key to play online though.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
that is one thing that makes the id Engines a lot more attractive. old engines getting gpld means
completely free games for total conversions.
also of note is that their free download enemy-territory is modable. Urban Terror among others gets ported to it.
I've not been a big FPS fan, but did enjoy Halo and decided to try UT2004 when it came out -- thinking of Machinima possibilities down the road. But WOW!
It's a killer game. Incredible graphics. (Run around in CTF MoonDragon sometime on a machine with a good graphics card and monitor.) All kinds of cool weapons, gametypes, vehicles, etc, and all wonderfully balanced without being symmetrical. Also Mutators which let you tweak games: force all weapons to be rocket launchers, modify gravity strength, etc.
Play with/against bots in any combination with/against human players. Let's you play those large maps with only two people, which you can't do in Halo.
Mods, mods, mods. Dozens of commercial-quality maps in the CBP's. Total mods, like Red Orchestra (WWII Russian front), Total Annihilation, etc. New gametypes such as Jailbreak. Etc. All free, from the user community.
And last, the game designers have a great sense of humor. For example, the Hellbender vehicle (think Humvee) has working break lights, backup lights, and horn. The license plate on the back displays the driver's character name on it. The horn lets humans know you want passengers, and actually causes bots to jump in. (The Flak rifle's grenade has a smiley face painted on the front. If you get a good look at it, you're in trouble.)