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Make Something Unreal Gets Next Phase Winners
AskedRelic writes "The winners in Phase 3 of the previously mentioned 'Make Something Unreal' mod contest have been released. Big winners in this $1,000,000 prize pool Unreal modding contest include Red Orchestra for Best FPS Mod and Alien Swarm for Best Non-FPS Mod, as well as Clone Bandits for Best Vehicular Mod. Phase 4 entries close on August 20th, and the grand final entries, awarding $50,000 for the best overall mod, close October 1st." Do you think Unreal will continue to nurture the best/most modding talent, now that Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 mods are looming on the horizon?
The multiplayer issues with Doom 3 were disappointing, so myself and some friends put together this mod that allows up to 32 players in a multiplayer networked game.
See here for info and download kits.
If you liked my post,
The Ut2k4 engine is very versatile and easy to mod - as can be seen from the sheer quality and abundance of the mods that have been entered. With so many people who already have experience with the UT2k4 system, they may well stick to it if the Half Life 2 / Doom 3 engines are much more difficult to mod. The lower system requirements might be attractive, too.
That said, I'd love to see Natural Selection on Half Life 2.
"I think everyone is an agnostic but just doesn't know" - Frazz
If HL2 ever gets released it spawn some very intresting mods. As for Doom3, we have seen the first of what I hope will be the next gen. of mods...things that help the game. But for the time being keep working on Unreal...
Everyone has a photographic memory, some just don't have film.
I remember wanting to try one popular ut2004 mod, but installation involved somewhat vague instructions to copy over a bunch of files(with subdirs) into your ut directory.
I didn't even bother, not wanting to screw up my pristine ut2004 install for some mod.
"Do you think Unreal will continue to nurture the best/most modding talent, now that Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 mods are looming on the horizon?"
Absolutely not. We have moved on to a new generation of engines, opening up vast new opportunities, and the UT2K4 engine is, for all intents and purposes, still back with the Q3 and original UT engines, IMO.
Nothing disturbs me more than blind loyalism towards some unrealistic and over-idealistic notion of one's nationality.
I bought this game sometime ago when I still have a Windows machine at home. However I haven't played it since ridding myself of the windows machine. Is it possible to get it working on Linux? Any good howtos?
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My vote for Best Mod would be the one that lets me play UT without requiring Power User or Administrator access on XP or Win2K. That way I could set up an internet cafe / LAN party place without having to worry if the customers wreck the machines.
I mean come on. If I can fix Quake II, then the makers of UT can fix UT. Or a talented mod author can.
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
Actually Far cry has some excellent mod tools (especially their sandbox editor is great). With the SDK available at www.crymod.com I expect their will be some excellent mods coming from this game. Far Cry seemed to be quite ahead of Half-life 2 and Doom 3 at the moment of release.
Do you think Unreal will continue to nurture the best/most modding talent, now that Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 mods are looming on the horizon? Its up for grabs, Epic was able to attract lots of modders with their contest and because they had the newest engine at the time. Now they no long have the 'sexiest' engine and people are moving on. Some of the devs from Red Orchestra are now working on a HL2 mod Insurgency.
UT2k4 works better on Linux. On identical hardware I get about 30% more FPS. If you have the CD version, run the shell script on CD1. Some caveats:
- The installer only works in X
- You'll need the driver installed for your video card first
- Some distros use an obnoxious method for automounting CD's that conflict with the installer. Open another window to unmount and mount the CD's in this case
- The installer writes to a number of directories including
/usr/local/games/ut2004, /usr/share/applications, /usr/share/applnk/Games and /usr/local/bin. You'll need write access to these, so the installer may need to run as root. Once installed you can run as a normal user.
- Some Mods are not available for the linux version
- There is no linux version of the editor
Happy fragging!Help stamp out iliturcy.
Modders will mod just about anything for the sake of modding. The fact that it's easy will attract some while repel others, and vice versa. The fact there is money tied to this particular competition puts it in the headlines but doesn't necessarily draw out anything that hasn't been seen elsewhere.
Viva la Mod!
(posted with a ten-foot bamboo pole in a treehouse made from legos)
- Dan
How is Red Orchestra above and beyond any other UT FPS Mod? In the opinion of many UT gamers, Air Buccaneers is the best FPS mod created for UT.
It will be half life 2, which mod makers will embrace. UT2k3 is great, the dev tools they offer are completely up to par. Developers are doing crazy things with the unreal engine, and I give them full credit for their endeavors.
However.. there is a certain modification for HL1 which was so good, it was the first game mod to garner extreme commercial success. I have yet to see a mod for a game which has had the attention & the impact that CS did.
Gooseman & the CS dev team did this without the incentive of a million dollars, too. It was out of sheer enjoyment of one of the best PC games, in my opinion, that has ever been created. Perhaps Valve will learn from Epic, and decide to offer some cash prizes to mod developers. This would, in my mind, push the community even farther than it's already gone.
Someone put me out of my misery!
The icon does in fact represent the perfect tool for this.
I bought UT2004 recently on DVD because of Alien Swarm and Red Orchestra mods. I didn't care about its regular UT2004 game. The playable demo didn't impressed me except the pretty graphics. The mods were the big stars for me.
I bought BF1942 for its game mostly, but I was surprised to see mods coming out like Forgotten Hope, Battlefield Pirates, Desert Combat, Galactic Conquest, etc.
I hope the same is for DOOM 3 for mod support. I would love to see Aliens-type of game with DOOM 3 engine and with co-operative play. How about System Shock 2 type of game? I loved that game! It was scary.
I sold Quake 3 Arena a few days ago and uninstalled Half-Life a few months ago because it was time to leave their engines and their mods.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I'm glad to see that mod still in the running, even if it is in second place. It still needs a little bit of polish, but I think it could make it as a standalone game. It's basically a pirate mod with balloons instead of ships. Sadly, the number of players and servers has been decreasing since their last release. A lot of people also didn't seem to understand that the game pretty much forces teamwork. Really, really good players can sometimes handle all 3 stations (steering, cannon aiming, cannon loading/lighting) on a balloon at once, but oftentimes people would take off with only a 1- or 2-person crew. However, when you have a full crew complement, it becomes one of the most fun games i've ever come across.
But the rope used to get on board a balloon in the air is a bitch, especially when your ping is through the roof like mine usually is.
I've got to disagree with you on a few points here. While I'm a huge fan of the Q2/3 physics (rocket-jumping, strafe-jumping, plasma climbing...), that's not to say the feel to your movement in the Unreal camp is lacking its own advantages (dodging, lift-jumping, higher air-control). There's a vastly different feel and strong players in one camp really have a tough time jumping back and forth between the two. I think I'm one of the rare people (honestly) who's used to both sets of physics. I can strafe-jump my way around a huge RA3 map and then happily move to 2003/4 and lift jump from the bottom to top of DM-compressed without even thinking about it.
:)
I mention air control as a plus for the Unreal camp. I say that because there's more air control for Unreal games. Unreal 1 had air control. I'm not entirely sure but I doubt that Q3 was the first id game to have air control. I thought Q2 and maybe even Q1 had air control. Maybe someone could clarify this for me. U1 came out (slightly) before Quake 2 though so Q3 was certainly not the first game with air control.
The feel of the weapons is more in the hands of the artists and designers than the engine coders. There's some interaction with the physics but if they say to add this much momentum in some direction, it doesn't really have anything to do with the physics engine. Maybe because you slide more in Quake you prefer that feel. Everyone loves the railgun though. It'd be hard not to
As for poor netcode. Sorry but it's just not true. There is a slightly different feel to the two games' netcode, eg I find leading more helpful in Quake though I might just be insane. But when you say the good UT players can't use a hit-trace weapon consistently, you're just wrong. Drop by Cached.net and download some recordings of pro players. I think you'll find that if they're playing Q3 or UT, they're making their shots with deadly accuracy.
And one last point about the mouse... UT seems just as configurable to me. Finding UT too sensitive for small movements would seem to imply mouse acceleration in Quake, not UT. But that aside, UT has a bunch of options for you too. Pitch, yaw, and master sensitivities, obviously those are there. There are a bunch of options to configure the mouse smoothing as well. You can set it to whatever level of sensitivity you want. There's also some mouse accel, separate menu-only settings, and force-feedback you can toy with if you're interested.
I really believe that these days it comes down to knowing your game, rather than who does what better. Differences exist for good reason. Maps in Quake are designed to accommodate their physics. They know you can strafe-jump and rocket-jump. In UT, they know you can lift-jump and dodge-jump. I think these differences make for different games and add to the variety we all get to enjoy. I'd hate to lose any of that because people start believing that one physics implementation becomes considered the best.
You do realize that Doom 3 is limited to 4 players only in the Doom "mod" itself, right? It can be changed to however many players to mod creator likes (within the limits of the engine). As for Half-Life 2, Valve announced they will be releasing mod tools before the game was released.