You are incorrect. You are looking at "skill" as a measurement of physical reaction time. MMOs require skills from different SKILL SETS.
Managing a raid force of 40 to 70 people does not require much physical skill, but it does require many skills that are difficult to develop. You need to be politic, patient, good at communication, good at punishment (dealing with boat rockers and trouble makers) and large scale coordination. All of that plus three or four hours of work for one or two powerful items. That takes an awaful lot of skill.
You may, perhaps, be comparing the WoW PvP game to the Q3 game and in that case physical reaction time is less important. You don't need as much "uber micro" in WoW. I think that's a poor comparison, given the issue at hand.
The highest levels of achievement in MMOs like EQ, EQ2, and WoW take more dedication, time, and broader skills than any FPS. Succeeding at a massive social effort is not easy and I've seen many people break down under the challenge. Being able to punish a player who is disruptive and shape them into an effective cohort is really, really hard.
It's great that you can rack up 80 something straight hits in Q3DM17. If it earned you recognition among your peers, more power to you. You achieved that by yourself or with the handful of people who make up your clan. Those skills aren't going to help you become recognized in the MMO community, however. You can't do it alone. You're going to need a very large group of teammates in order to take down the biggest, baddest mobs and make headlines that MMO enthusiasts will want to read.
Even if uber achievement isn't your goal, the MMO is a more trying experience. Just playing casually requires daily social interaction and people who have bad attitudes, unfriendly personalities, or an insular appraoch to play probably don't even realize how much of a disadvantage they are at.
Blaming the game is, to an extent, just as much a mistake as an alcoholic blaming their problems on the alcohol. Ultimately it was a collection of bad decisions that led the person down their path. Certainly in the case of drugs and alcohol there is a biological and psychological element.
There is a certain psychological element to games like EverQuest as well. The simple, repetitive behaviors of trade skills and combat can be habit forming. Nonetheless, such patterns are much less controlling than a biological addiction instigated by chemicals.
I recently canceled by own accounts under the observation that my time spent playing them is time better spent programming and studying. After all, I feel that I built myself and my career off of such late night sessions...and without them I wasn't really moving forward.
Granted, in my career I play a lot of games. But I could play a couple hundred other games in the same time I could get a few levels playing EverQuest. I could also read, program, paint minis, or otherwise diversify my time.
I suppose I see these games as relatively simple to break out of when compared to biological addiction. I think that people who play them to the exclusion of their families, school and other priorities suffer from a combination of lack of self-awareness as well as a need for escapism. School is hard. Families are hard. And playing a game lacks the same kind of responsibility.
I have absolutely no interest in trying to interdict on other people's gaming behavior or direct their interests. If someone else wants to burn their life away focusing on a single interest so be it. My own self-realization is, however, that my time is best spent elsewhere. That I enrich myself as a person by diversifying my interests and I enrich myself as a programmer by spending my weekends working on a project instead of camping Guk.
Even as a gamer, I feel that my time is better spent playing a diverse number of games on different platforms than playing one game to the exclusion of all others. After all, the argument that I'm gaining a unique social perspective or learning a particular kind of design technique sort of falls flat after a month or two of play.
Brandon Reinhart
3D Realms Entertainment
Programmer, Duke Nukem Forever
I see the self-imposed rating system that game developers use in America as only that: a break before the storm. Government regulation is, in my mind, going to be inevitable. At least as long as the tenuous (if even extant) link between social violence and violence in entertainment is perpetuated by media.
But would it really be such a bad thing? I'm not going to raise my hand in favor of censorship, but I have to wonder about what the results might be. Being controversial for the sake of increased visibility will never go away...and it isn't really too much a problem (as far as gamer's are concerned) if there is good gameplay to back it up. BUT...anyone remember "Postal?" It didn't have the gameplay and it was visible solely because it contained controversial content.
Ultimately good games sell because they are fun, not because they are offensive. Smart developers, like those guys at Konami, realize that you can have edgy, intelligent content without being needlessly offensive. To that end, Metal Gear Solid is a truly masterful work.
What is happening in British Columbia is nothing new. Germany, for example, has extremely restrictive content control. It doesn't really hurt developers too much because the majority of the market is in America and Japan (at least for Japanese developers, American developers have had difficulty entering the Japanese market).
Should developers be worried? Yes. We ARE worried. But there seems to be little we can do directly, other than to act responsibly and keep rehashing the arguments we've made time and again.
My own thoughts are that parents aren't going to magically start being responsible for their children. Kids are going to continue to get material their parents think they shouldn't and the government will act on it. They will act as they have in the past: instead of education or some true method of solvency they will seek to make the material more difficult to acquire. Instead of engendering the missing responsibility, they will release a patch for the problem.
Oh and...yes...the company I work for and the game I am helping program and design will have a lot of edgy semi-adult content, but the game is also full of gameplay. We won't be selling DNF on the merits of controversy, but on the merits of gameplay and fun.
Heh...somehow I don't think it is going to be possible to convince the geezers in DC what we, as gamers, find to be fun and acceptable.
But don't take my word for it. I listen to black metal and watch hentai. I'm probably not the best person to judge morality or defend the values of my industry.;)
Anything Epic releases to open source becomes free software. We won't "sell" the Linux port just as you are not allowed to "sell" a derivative.
Once I get everything together (tomorrow probably, Tim is here but I'm pretty tired) I'll upload a simple tarball release so people can start playing around. Then I'll work on learning rcs and get that set up.
I can foresee companies developing games entirely opensource, but still selling a game...the code is freely obtainable, but the content (maps, textures, models) must be purchased.
I think there is room for open source in commercial software development. I just think that its going to be a while before you see the games industry take up that particular mode of operation.
Finally, a clarification on what we will be releasing.
XDrv.so - This handles window creation, viewport creation, keyboard and mouse input, and all the X windows related stuff.
Audio.so - This is the simple audio library I wrote to mix the sound effects in Unreal Tournament for Linux.
XMesaGLDrv.so - This is the Mesa render device. It implements the engine's render calls and uses the Mesa graphics lib to draw the 3d world.
GlideDrv.so - Same as the XMesaGLDrv.so, but it uses glide.
XLaunch - This executable loads and inits the engine, then starts the main loop. You can actually do quite a lot with this.
--
The bottom line is this: I like to play kick ass games. The Linux port of UT is not kick ass. I don't have the time to make it better, so instead of having it languish on my harddrive I'll give it out to anyone who wants it. You don't have to do anything with it. You could take it and write cool stuff and if you want you could contribute it to me. Its all voluntary.
Yes, it'd be great to improve the Linux port of UT. It really needs work! At the same time, I've been working my ass off to support the mod community. Check unreal.epicgames.com for a fast growing new document on writing mods for Unreal Tournament. I've been working with mod authors and mod teams to get them understanding the Unreal Tournament scripting language. This is another facet of that support.
There is nothing ever wrong with giving people more stuff to play with. Most of these guys making mods aren't trying to make money! They don't want to sell their mods. They just want to make cool addons for people to play and maybe to get noticed. This gives another way for a programmer to do that.
Tim responded to an email discussion between Corinne Yu and me. He says that he likes open source because of the power it gives the community to do new things with the engine. He does not, however, like the idea of merging other peoples code back into the engine. I don't mind the latter as long as its on a small scale.
Yup, you are right. Christians love slaughter. They slaughter people who believe differently, they slaughter people who don't believe anything at all, and they even slaughter each other.
Some of the slowdowns can be fixed. My first priority is stability. I have a catch-all way to fix unprotected segmentation faults which will be in the next update. (Which will help me fix the faults in question.)
After that I can move on to located slow elements and speeding them up.
The Linux gaming community really needs to start approaching hardware vendors about better driver support. Specifically NVidia. Even with that said, I doubt Linux games will really hit their prime until XFree86 4.0.
The best thing you guys can do is email your thoughts and bug reports to utlinuxbugs@epicgames.com.
Hello Anonymous Coward, I'm Brandon Reinhart. I wrote the linux client. Your right, I have no idea of the "standards" of Linux software. I'm new to Linux and I'm writing this damn port to learn more about the OS. There are issues that still need to be worked out, but they will be worked out. Let me ask you a question: Why the HELL are you running a fullscreen game like UT on your SERVER. UT requires a load of CPU time that most likely your SERVER wouldn't be able to share. You'd probably get poor performance as a result. Make no mistake: UT is meant for people using Linux as a desktop (client) environment. You shouldn't be running games on your server no matter if its Linux, NT, or whatever. I'm more than happy to work with people who offer constructive criticism, but critiqing the README which I supply in an attempt to help people find problems, fix them, or supply me with the information to fix them is just bullshit. Not to mention this bullshit about Glide over Mesa. Maybe if the Linux drivers coming from vendors didn't SUCK I'd be able to put together a fun game using them. The NVidia linux driver documentation more or less says "These drivers are slow, wait for XFree86 4.0." Give me a break! You can't go around yelling that 3dfx is no good when its the fastest accelerator on the platform. Feel free to email me constructive criticism but not this poorly thought out flamebait.
- I was unaware I wasn't supposed to refer to Mesa as "MesaGL." Frankly, I think its a little silly, as the GL suffix is not a copyrighted symbol, but I will accord with the authors wishes. Anonymous Coward says "its not politically correct" but I don't really care much about politically correctness.
- The Unreal Tournament Linux Client will be a client to the full game. UT is a large game and requires 2 CDs to ship on. When I said "it will be on the second CD" I was meaning that it would be on that CD because there would be additional space.
- Some people here are not clear on exactly what Unreal Tournament is. It is not Unreal. It is a new game that has not yet been released. It is a first person 3D action game focusing on multiplayer combat. The single player mode is a series of deathmatches against increasingly difficult aliens and humans. It contains variations on deathmatch like Capture the Flag, Domination and Assault. For more information check out www.unrealtournament.net.
- I (Brandon Reinhart) made the Tech Page update not Tim. And my pimping KDE isn't to say that it is better than GNOME. Rather, its what I installed when I started and I haven't seen any reason to try other window managers. I don't have the luxury of time to try all the various window managers, nor would I want to. I use what gets the job done and right now I'm getting the job done just fine in KDE.
- One use commented that Unreal isn't new, so the news isn't really that great. Unreal Tournament is, in fact, quite new. It hasn't been released. Its a new style of game and it has new engine technology. If everything goes well with the remainder of the port, you should be able to go into your local software store on the UT release date and pick up a copy of UT off of the shelf to run under Linux.
- Once again, the KDE being better than GNOME thing is lame. Tim Sweeney doesn't even use Linux.:-)
- RelliK asks "how does it work." The answer is that it uses a graphics library to access your hardware 3D accelerator to render the game's scenes. UT will require X because: * glX is good. * Input under X is easy. * I can easily do windowed rendering under X. * Making windows is X is easy. * X is good.
- Unreal Tournament can render inside a window if you have a good non-3DFX accelerator. Unreal Tournament will not support software rendering under Linux. (It does under Win32.) If you have a 3DFX card, then you have to use fullscreen mode. If you use the Mesa renderer and a 3DFX card then you can play in a window, but you will get a terrible framerate (less than 1 frame a second). This is because Glide does not support rendering in a window and Mesa emulates it by doing a frame buffer copy into the X Drawable. Yuck!
- Posting information about this port has opened up a lot of questions from people who don't know alot about Epic, Unreal Tournament, or games in general. I will try to keep my updates on the Tech Page (unreal.epicgames.com) as free from gaming slang as possible. I suggest that if you are not familiar with 3D games and modern gaming (because it has been a very Win32 PC issue) you educate yourself. Check out: * www.bluesnews.com for 3D gaming news. * www.tomshardware.com for information about 3D accelerators and what they do. * www.unrealtournament.net for what UT is about.
- Finally, give me a little leeway with the Linux advocacy political-correctness stuff. My personal interests do not lie in the realm of operating system advocacy. I am persuing this port because: * We need to make the Unreal Engine support multiple platforms. * People like to run servers on Linux. * People want to play games on Linux. I am not a regular Linux user and I don't follow the Linux scene. As such, I am not necessarily aware of the correct usage of terms and so forth (just as you may not be aware of gaming lingo and the current state of 3d gaming).
- I have enjoyed working with Linux. I have enjoyed working with X windows. Epic will continue to produce new games for Linux.
- Epic uses their own installer application. I may port this installer for the purposes of installing the new games we make. I prefer this over making distribution specific install files. (.rpm,.deb, etc) In fact, I think the concept of distribution specific install methods is a bit silly.
- There might be a port of UT to LinuxPPC.
- It is unlikely there will be a BeOS port. I will get BeOS and evaluate whether or not a port would be worth my time. (Frankly, I'm ready to start developing new tech for our next game, as UT is almost ready to ship.)
I hope this clarifies things. I can be reached at brandon@epicgames.com.
Unreal Tournament is a completely different game. It is a deathmatch oriented game and has not yet been released.
The focus in "Unreal" was adventuring on an alien world. The focus in "Unreal Tournament" is multiplayer combat. It has all new content (weapons, models, maps, textures) and new technology (mesh LOD, texture LOD, misc engine improvements).
Slashdot Mirror
It would be funny if they discovered the appendix in fact housed the soul. "And all this time we thought it was relatively useless!"
You are incorrect. You are looking at "skill" as a measurement of physical reaction time. MMOs require skills from different SKILL SETS.
Managing a raid force of 40 to 70 people does not require much physical skill, but it does require many skills that are difficult to develop. You need to be politic, patient, good at communication, good at punishment (dealing with boat rockers and trouble makers) and large scale coordination. All of that plus three or four hours of work for one or two powerful items. That takes an awaful lot of skill.
You may, perhaps, be comparing the WoW PvP game to the Q3 game and in that case physical reaction time is less important. You don't need as much "uber micro" in WoW. I think that's a poor comparison, given the issue at hand.
The highest levels of achievement in MMOs like EQ, EQ2, and WoW take more dedication, time, and broader skills than any FPS. Succeeding at a massive social effort is not easy and I've seen many people break down under the challenge. Being able to punish a player who is disruptive and shape them into an effective cohort is really, really hard.
It's great that you can rack up 80 something straight hits in Q3DM17. If it earned you recognition among your peers, more power to you. You achieved that by yourself or with the handful of people who make up your clan. Those skills aren't going to help you become recognized in the MMO community, however. You can't do it alone. You're going to need a very large group of teammates in order to take down the biggest, baddest mobs and make headlines that MMO enthusiasts will want to read.
Even if uber achievement isn't your goal, the MMO is a more trying experience. Just playing casually requires daily social interaction and people who have bad attitudes, unfriendly personalities, or an insular appraoch to play probably don't even realize how much of a disadvantage they are at.
Now I see where all those level 60 Hunters came from!
Hail Satan! Er...I mean...uh...
Blaming the game is, to an extent, just as much a mistake as an alcoholic blaming their problems on the alcohol. Ultimately it was a collection of bad decisions that led the person down their path. Certainly in the case of drugs and alcohol there is a biological and psychological element.
There is a certain psychological element to games like EverQuest as well. The simple, repetitive behaviors of trade skills and combat can be habit forming. Nonetheless, such patterns are much less controlling than a biological addiction instigated by chemicals.
I recently canceled by own accounts under the observation that my time spent playing them is time better spent programming and studying. After all, I feel that I built myself and my career off of such late night sessions...and without them I wasn't really moving forward.
Granted, in my career I play a lot of games. But I could play a couple hundred other games in the same time I could get a few levels playing EverQuest. I could also read, program, paint minis, or otherwise diversify my time.
I suppose I see these games as relatively simple to break out of when compared to biological addiction. I think that people who play them to the exclusion of their families, school and other priorities suffer from a combination of lack of self-awareness as well as a need for escapism. School is hard. Families are hard. And playing a game lacks the same kind of responsibility.
I have absolutely no interest in trying to interdict on other people's gaming behavior or direct their interests. If someone else wants to burn their life away focusing on a single interest so be it. My own self-realization is, however, that my time is best spent elsewhere. That I enrich myself as a person by diversifying my interests and I enrich myself as a programmer by spending my weekends working on a project instead of camping Guk.
Even as a gamer, I feel that my time is better spent playing a diverse number of games on different platforms than playing one game to the exclusion of all others. After all, the argument that I'm gaining a unique social perspective or learning a particular kind of design technique sort of falls flat after a month or two of play.
Brandon Reinhart
3D Realms Entertainment
Programmer, Duke Nukem Forever
I see the self-imposed rating system that game developers use in America as only that: a break before the storm. Government regulation is, in my mind, going to be inevitable. At least as long as the tenuous (if even extant) link between social violence and violence in entertainment is perpetuated by media.
But would it really be such a bad thing? I'm not going to raise my hand in favor of censorship, but I have to wonder about what the results might be. Being controversial for the sake of increased visibility will never go away...and it isn't really too much a problem (as far as gamer's are concerned) if there is good gameplay to back it up. BUT...anyone remember "Postal?" It didn't have the gameplay and it was visible solely because it contained controversial content.
Ultimately good games sell because they are fun, not because they are offensive. Smart developers, like those guys at Konami, realize that you can have edgy, intelligent content without being needlessly offensive. To that end, Metal Gear Solid is a truly masterful work.
What is happening in British Columbia is nothing new. Germany, for example, has extremely restrictive content control. It doesn't really hurt developers too much because the majority of the market is in America and Japan (at least for Japanese developers, American developers have had difficulty entering the Japanese market).
Should developers be worried? Yes. We ARE worried. But there seems to be little we can do directly, other than to act responsibly and keep rehashing the arguments we've made time and again.
My own thoughts are that parents aren't going to magically start being responsible for their children. Kids are going to continue to get material their parents think they shouldn't and the government will act on it. They will act as they have in the past: instead of education or some true method of solvency they will seek to make the material more difficult to acquire. Instead of engendering the missing responsibility, they will release a patch for the problem.
Oh and...yes...the company I work for and the game I am helping program and design will have a lot of edgy semi-adult content, but the game is also full of gameplay. We won't be selling DNF on the merits of controversy, but on the merits of gameplay and fun.
Heh...somehow I don't think it is going to be possible to convince the geezers in DC what we, as gamers, find to be fun and acceptable.
But don't take my word for it. I listen to black metal and watch hentai. I'm probably not the best person to judge morality or defend the values of my industry. ;)
Here's my sig that doesn't have carriage returns:
Anything Epic releases to open source becomes free software. We won't "sell" the Linux port just as you are not allowed to "sell" a derivative.
Once I get everything together (tomorrow probably, Tim is here but I'm pretty tired) I'll upload a simple tarball release so people can start playing around. Then I'll work on learning rcs and get that set up.
I can foresee companies developing games entirely opensource, but still selling a game...the code is freely obtainable, but the content (maps, textures, models) must be purchased.
I think there is room for open source in commercial software development. I just think that its going to be a while before you see the games industry take up that particular mode of operation.
Finally, a clarification on what we will be releasing.
XDrv.so - This handles window creation, viewport creation, keyboard and mouse input, and all the X windows related stuff.
Audio.so - This is the simple audio library I wrote to mix the sound effects in Unreal Tournament for Linux.
XMesaGLDrv.so - This is the Mesa render device. It implements the engine's render calls and uses the Mesa graphics lib to draw the 3d world.
GlideDrv.so - Same as the XMesaGLDrv.so, but it uses glide.
XLaunch - This executable loads and inits the engine, then starts the main loop. You can actually do quite a lot with this.
--
The bottom line is this: I like to play kick ass games. The Linux port of UT is not kick ass. I don't have the time to make it better, so instead of having it languish on my harddrive I'll give it out to anyone who wants it. You don't have to do anything with it. You could take it and write cool stuff and if you want you could contribute it to me. Its all voluntary.
Yes, it'd be great to improve the Linux port of UT. It really needs work! At the same time, I've been working my ass off to support the mod community. Check unreal.epicgames.com for a fast growing new document on writing mods for Unreal Tournament. I've been working with mod authors and mod teams to get them understanding the Unreal Tournament scripting language. This is another facet of that support.
There is nothing ever wrong with giving people more stuff to play with. Most of these guys making mods aren't trying to make money! They don't want to sell their mods. They just want to make cool addons for people to play and maybe to get noticed. This gives another way for a programmer to do that.
Tim responded to an email discussion between Corinne Yu and me. He says that he likes open source because of the power it gives the community to do new things with the engine. He does not, however, like the idea of merging other peoples code back into the engine. I don't mind the latter as long as its on a small scale.
Yup, you are right. Christians love slaughter. They slaughter people who believe differently, they slaughter people who don't believe anything at all, and they even slaughter each other.
After that I can move on to located slow elements and speeding them up.
The Linux gaming community really needs to start approaching hardware vendors about better driver support. Specifically NVidia. Even with that said, I doubt Linux games will really hit their prime until XFree86 4.0.
The best thing you guys can do is email your thoughts and bug reports to utlinuxbugs@epicgames.com.
Huh?
UT was developed on NT dude.
Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart
brandon@epicgames.com
Hello Anonymous Coward, I'm Brandon Reinhart. I wrote the linux client. Your right, I have no idea of the "standards" of Linux software. I'm new to Linux and I'm writing this damn port to learn more about the OS. There are issues that still need to be worked out, but they will be worked out. Let me ask you a question: Why the HELL are you running a fullscreen game like UT on your SERVER. UT requires a load of CPU time that most likely your SERVER wouldn't be able to share. You'd probably get poor performance as a result. Make no mistake: UT is meant for people using Linux as a desktop (client) environment. You shouldn't be running games on your server no matter if its Linux, NT, or whatever. I'm more than happy to work with people who offer constructive criticism, but critiqing the README which I supply in an attempt to help people find problems, fix them, or supply me with the information to fix them is just bullshit. Not to mention this bullshit about Glide over Mesa. Maybe if the Linux drivers coming from vendors didn't SUCK I'd be able to put together a fun game using them. The NVidia linux driver documentation more or less says "These drivers are slow, wait for XFree86 4.0." Give me a break! You can't go around yelling that 3dfx is no good when its the fastest accelerator on the platform. Feel free to email me constructive criticism but not this poorly thought out flamebait.
A few clarifications:
:-)
.deb, etc) In fact, I think the concept of distribution specific install methods is a bit silly.
- I was unaware I wasn't supposed to refer to Mesa as "MesaGL." Frankly, I think its a little silly, as the GL suffix is not a copyrighted symbol, but I will accord with the authors wishes. Anonymous Coward says "its not politically correct" but I don't really care much about politically correctness.
- The Unreal Tournament Linux Client will be a client to the full game. UT is a large game and requires 2 CDs to ship on. When I said "it will be on the second CD" I was meaning that it would be on that CD because there would be additional space.
- Some people here are not clear on exactly what Unreal Tournament is. It is not Unreal. It is a new game that has not yet been released. It is a first person 3D action game focusing on multiplayer combat. The single player mode is a series of deathmatches against increasingly difficult aliens and humans. It contains variations on deathmatch like Capture the Flag, Domination and Assault. For more information check out www.unrealtournament.net.
- I (Brandon Reinhart) made the Tech Page update not Tim. And my pimping KDE isn't to say that it is better than GNOME. Rather, its what I installed when I started and I haven't seen any reason to try other window managers. I don't have the luxury of time to try all the various window managers, nor would I want to. I use what gets the job done and right now I'm getting the job done just fine in KDE.
- One use commented that Unreal isn't new, so the news isn't really that great. Unreal Tournament is, in fact, quite new. It hasn't been released. Its a new style of game and it has new engine technology. If everything goes well with the remainder of the port, you should be able to go into your local software store on the UT release date and pick up a copy of UT off of the shelf to run under Linux.
- Once again, the KDE being better than GNOME thing is lame. Tim Sweeney doesn't even use Linux.
- RelliK asks "how does it work." The answer is that it uses a graphics library to access your hardware 3D accelerator to render the game's scenes. UT will require X because:
* glX is good.
* Input under X is easy.
* I can easily do windowed rendering under X.
* Making windows is X is easy.
* X is good.
- Unreal Tournament can render inside a window if you have a good non-3DFX accelerator. Unreal Tournament will not support software rendering under Linux. (It does under Win32.) If you have a 3DFX card, then you have to use fullscreen mode. If you use the Mesa renderer and a 3DFX card then you can play in a window, but you will get a terrible framerate (less than 1 frame a second). This is because Glide does not support rendering in a window and Mesa emulates it by doing a frame buffer copy into the X Drawable. Yuck!
- Posting information about this port has opened up a lot of questions from people who don't know alot about Epic, Unreal Tournament, or games in general. I will try to keep my updates on the Tech Page (unreal.epicgames.com) as free from gaming slang as possible. I suggest that if you are not familiar with 3D games and modern gaming (because it has been a very Win32 PC issue) you educate yourself. Check out:
* www.bluesnews.com for 3D gaming news.
* www.tomshardware.com for information about 3D accelerators and what they do.
* www.unrealtournament.net for what UT is about.
- Finally, give me a little leeway with the Linux advocacy political-correctness stuff. My personal interests do not lie in the realm of operating system advocacy. I am persuing this port because:
* We need to make the Unreal Engine support multiple platforms.
* People like to run servers on Linux.
* People want to play games on Linux.
I am not a regular Linux user and I don't follow the Linux scene. As such, I am not necessarily aware of the correct usage of terms and so forth (just as you may not be aware of gaming lingo and the current state of 3d gaming).
- I have enjoyed working with Linux. I have enjoyed working with X windows. Epic will continue to produce new games for Linux.
- Epic uses their own installer application. I may port this installer for the purposes of installing the new games we make. I prefer this over making distribution specific install files. (.rpm,
- There might be a port of UT to LinuxPPC.
- It is unlikely there will be a BeOS port. I will get BeOS and evaluate whether or not a port would be worth my time. (Frankly, I'm ready to start developing new tech for our next game, as UT is almost ready to ship.)
I hope this clarifies things. I can be reached at brandon@epicgames.com.
Unreal Tournament has not yet been released.
Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart
Epic Games, Inc.
Unreal Tournament is a completely different game. It is a deathmatch oriented game and has not yet been released.
The focus in "Unreal" was adventuring on an alien world. The focus in "Unreal Tournament" is multiplayer combat. It has all new content (weapons, models, maps, textures) and new technology (mesh LOD, texture LOD, misc engine improvements).
Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart
Epic Games, Inc.
Tim doesn't run Linux. I'm doing the port, I run the RedHat 6 distribution with KDE.
I wouldn't say that argues that KDE is superior. I haven't tried GNOME and haven't had a reason to. I am now comfortable using KDE.
- Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart