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The Next Unreal Tournament: Totally Free, Developed By Public

Posted by timothy on from the cool-model dept.

Nerval's Lobster (2598977) writes "Epic Games is rebooting Unreal Tournament, but not in a typical way. A small team of veteran developers will begin work on the next edition of the popular, multi-player shooter, in collaboration with pretty much anyone who wants to participate. "From the very first line of code, the very first art created and design decision made, development will happen in the open, as a collaboration between Epic, UT fans and UE4 developers. We'll be using forums for discussion, and Twitch streams for regular updates," reads a note on the company's blog. All code and content will appear on GitHub, and development will focus on Mac, Linux, and Windows. What's the catch? According to Epic, it'll take months to forge a playable game. "When the game is playable, it will be free. Not free to play, just free," the blog adds. "We'll eventually create a marketplace where developers, modders, artists and gamers can give away, buy and sell mods and content. Earnings from the marketplace will be split between the mod/content developer, and Epic. That's how we plan to pay for the game.""

6 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Re:so by gman003 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Ease of use? Installing mods in previous games (UT99, UT2004 and UT3), while not particularly difficult for the tech-savvy, isn't exactly user-friendly, and when you mess up there's little information on how to fix it.

    As for "why would you sell it on Epic's marketplace instead of on your own?", that's almost definitely going to be what most gamers will be using, so that's where all the customers are. I certainly wouldn't mind selling maps for a dollar a pop.

  2. Re:so by stewsters · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Some people want to make a profit, some don't. It gives the people who want to make a few dollars of their model get paid, and lets those who just want to make something offer theirs free. See https://www.assetstore.unity3d... for an example of this now. If you don't have all the skills to make a game, you can still make money off of selling assets.

    I have no idea how this will go, but it will be interesting.

  3. RealCTF by mfh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Former RealCTF level designer here.

    This is a really good idea, and I welcome this as great news! :-)

    If anyone needs some level design, hit me up!!

    --
    The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
    1. Re:RealCTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That UID.

    2. Re:RealCTF by mfh · · Score: 3, Interesting

      He bought / stole the account, and he's been spouting a lot of bullshit lately.

      And you're spouting a little right now! ;-)

      Suggesting this acct was stolen is just a patent falsehood. The original owner of this acct sold it for $100 in a very well publicized Ebay auction. I happened to win the auction and I felt at the time that a piece of Slashdot history (a beta account -- 2digit already) was well worth the money out of sheer novelty. A 3digit acct later sold for around $700 and another for $200-300, from what I could tell.

      Love or hate the low-uid, you have to admire any piece of Slashdot history. CmdrTaco is probably the only person posting with a lower UID than me and he's not posted here in a long time (2011). I donated quite a bit of time to helping CmdrTaco on a revamp of the moderation system over several emails back and forth, and he was appreciative of my feedback. I'm a programmer and system designer so he didn't just outright reject what was said. There was a small think-tank of us working on it. But shortly after that Slashdot was sold and the changes were never implemented.

      Come on man. I enjoy Slashdot. I've posted my wacky opinion here for quite a long time. My other acct was 6 digit. The one before that was a 4-digit low to mid 2000s uid. I've since lost access to both of those. A good friend was very involved with this site early on and tried to get us all into it back on the TWCTF mailing list back in the day.

      So you're not wrong... except you are wrong about the stealing thing.

      --
      The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
  4. just modernize UT2k4 by Lehk228 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    just upgrade UT2k4 with the things that have become standard in the last 10 years.....

    actually fuck that, FPS has only gotten worse over the last decade, re-release with only the most minor tweaks to take advantage of modern hardware and improve the map and mod cache a bit (really just upgrade so hash collisions can't happen and add a browser function to delete only specific cached data when the cache grows to over 9000)

    --
    Snowden and Manning are heroes.