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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."
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?
i disagree. I think with the added features, maps, and gametypes, as well as including the ut2003 content, UT2004 is what UT2003 should have been. it's like they took UT2003 and finished it.
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.
Good question. I wouldn't know officially, but if I had to guess i'd say no. There would probably be problems with relicensing an engine that 30 licensees have contributed too (how do you divvy up the cash?) :). ;)
;))
Maybe some under the table stuff goes on (especially between Epic and Digital Extremes, since they've codeveloped practically every major Unreal game in history), but I can imagine that Epic wouldn't want to deal with the headache of letting someone else tinker with their work before they sell it to others. If only the engine was open source, eh?
By the way, an interesting tidbit about Unreal 2 and engines: Some of you might have heard of the Unreal 2:XMP (eXpanded Multi Player) free 'expansion' that hit a while back. Its UT2003 based just like Unreal 2. Whats funny though, is that Unreal 2's engine and XMP's engine are actually seperately modified versions of UT2003. When Legend Entertainment (RIP) went back to make a multiplayer expansion for Unreal 2, they looked at their existing engine, said "screw it", took a fresh (and more up to date) copy of the UT2003 engine and then pasted in the nessecary changes from Unreal 2! So for example, XMP has Unreal 2's awesome particle system, but lacks the complicated GOLEM animation technology in favour of UTs simpler methods. Of course, after the fact the whole thing was tweaked on its own build path to get it all working right (up to build 7710, presumably from b1, though the earliest I can prove is b4321). So its kind of an interesting/weird hybrid of engines and modifications.
(It also makes me glad i'm more of an artist than a coder!