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?

Comments

We made a Doom 3 mod already

[Real Troll Talk]

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.

It depends

[Myrmi]

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.

Re:It depends

[jeffskyrunner]

Well, someone said that all regular HL mods will work in HL2, because the engine is backwards compatible...But i would love to see NS2 on the HL2 engine :). Who knows, Maybe Flayra is working on it as we speak..or type...yea..

If it ever gets released...

[DesertJester]

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...

No

[wviperw]

"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.

Re:No

[wviperw]

I'm not speaking of trivial things like vehicles. There is nothing inherantly special in having vehicles, as both UT and Q3 did in fact support them through mods. I am speaking of the fundamental characteristics of the core game engine. Doom 3's revolutionary new light/shadow rendering system (yes, I believe it is revolutionary), in addition to D3's utilization of DX9 features and its complex scripting languge all contribute to making D3 a next generation engine. Similarly, HL2 also takes advantage of DX9, as well as having a very robust physics engine, making the HL2 engine next generation as well.

Re:No

[Mia'cova]

The difference between UT/Q3 and UT2003/2004 in vehicle support is that the latter has Karma physics built in. When you're modding, the physics engine is just one of those things that makes a huge impact on the end result. Physics is *NOT* trivial in the least.

For example, some friends and I built some big walking mechs as UT2004 vehicles. The coding, while tricky and a little finicky, is actually pretty simple to understand. We're able to subclass an existing vehicle to get all the player/vehicle interactions. Over-ride one or two things and change the DefaultProperties (part of the UnrealScript language) to get rid of the few aspects that didn't work. Then we'd just set things up with karma so that the feet "repulsed" the ground (no floating feet on hills). The repulsors are attached to the animation's bones. Time the animation to the speed and add in the weapons and you've got something very new without too much work. And in this case, you don't even have to worry about networking; it just works.

I'm really just trying to say that there's a big difference between possible and practical. Vehicles are not in the least bit trivial. I think with all the modders currently working away at UT2004, the question to ask might be what will be the big new modding draw offered by Doom 3 or Half-Life 2? I know UnrealScript and UnrealED.. what can Doom 3 or Half-Life do that I can't do in UT2004?

I'm not sure what you're talking about as far as Doom 3 goes. For a start, it doesn't use DX9. It uses OpenGL. While I completely agree that the lighting is revolutionary, I don't think we're going to see a revival of Dark Match (remember in Unreal 1, all those years back, the dark levels with flashlights? Yes, in Unreal 1. It has been done again and again in the Unreal engine but has never taken off.) The gameplay wasn't there then and I'm not sure how it'll pan out now that proper lighting is truly available. In any case, Doom 3's modding is crippled by a 4-player multiplayer limit and lack of vehicles (afaik). I'm not sure how that will evolve or if it's not applicable to interested modders but it has me worried.

Half-life 2 looks promising for modding. Valve is a strong supporter of modding, the engine seems solid (nVidia issues asside) and sufficiently advanced, and there's an existing mod community that's thriving. But perhaps most importantly, people love realistic mods. Why does that make a difference? Well, when you're starting off you can pull content from the game. It helps tremendously when you can just use an existing explosion effect with your own grenade model. Existing content is a HUGE draw to modders and perhaps one of the most important considerations. The only downside to half-life 2 is that we really don't know how it'll run on older hardware. Counter-strike, for example, is insanely popular because it combines attractive gameplay and low system requirements. I don't know about you, but I've seen a whole lot of LAN parties degenerate to counter-strike because it's the only (popular...) game that EVERYONE can play.

Anyways, that's just how I feel about it :)

Best Mod Ever: Make UT work as a Limited User

[gfecyk]

Windows game authors are the laziest when it comes to designing for security... ok, they're second only to travel software companies.

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.

Re:Best Mod Ever: Make UT work as a Limited User

[blowdart]

That's usually because they install into c:\program files and require write access. Lazy programmers won't use the profile directory, or (in the case of C&C generals, dump stuff into My Documents instead of the Application Settings directory)

Install them into c:\games and away you go.

Mod Makers Moving on

[frostbane]

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.

Re:How about best installer?

[Hi_2k]

Most UT mods come in the UMOD format, essentialy a zip file with some special instructions for the UT installer program. I dont know where you've been getting your mods without it.

ut2k4/linux

[symbolset]

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!

Mod mod mod

[JediDan]

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)

Red Orchestra??

[madatmetoo]

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.

Of course..

[sinner0423]

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.

Q3A, BF1942, BF:V, UT2004, DOOM 3, & HL2

[antdude]

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.

Re:Unreal engine physics.

[Mia'cova]

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.