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."

Comments

Alien Swarm for UT2004

[EvilXenu]

Alien Swarm came out for UT2004 on May 28. It's a class-based, overhead view mod that pits players against the Alien Swarm. This is a non-PvP mod -- cooperative play is a must! I gotta say, I can't believe I was able to download this for FREE, that's how good it is.

Find download links (including Bittorrent) here.

Re:Genre bending . . . a new trend?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this some sort of blatant karma whore?
Quake 1 had boardgame, car racing, side scrolling and many other modifications. It's nothing new.

Unreal 101

[MachDelta]

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).

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 ;)). 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. :)


-MD (Unreal fanboi for life)

Re:But UT2K4 remains not free

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Every since the first UT2004 patch you don't need the CD in your tray.

No CD required!

[antdude]

Just get the newest patch. No big deal! You still need a legit CD key to play online though.