:)

Cool.

The engine isn't great but it looks nice and more companies doing this is good.

The engine is good. Its the different studios thats been using it that didn't create decent games with it.

I'm hoping some people will pickup the engine and create maybe a decent wolfenstein game? a new CS? a new tribes? Maybe a new quake game with best from all quake games?

The possibilities would be endless.

a wolfenstein without strafe jumping?

no thanks.

wut? You can change whatever the fuck you want. If that means you want strafejumping, you make it happen.

UT3 engine = Not the UT3 game.

it it were so easy to put good strafejumping into every engine why did id fail with their own?

I have no idea. Because they didn't want it? Because they wanted to change the movement from previous releases?

Once u got an engine, you can change ANYTHING you want when it comes to movement. Only limitation is the limits set by the engine (polygons, megatextures(lol), etc...

well, me neither.

but seeing that not one of the idtech4 games had comparable movement (well maybe q4 later on) to idtech3, despite being made by different teams tells me it's highly likely that there were some internal restrictions.

Maybe it could be done with ut3 engine, maybe not. But tbh after initial ET, ET:QW and the new Wolfenstein I'd rather not risk rtcw being butchered again :(

Someone make rtcwlive instead \o/

q4 had the exact same movement q3 had when it was released + the sliding
(the reason it felt/looked slower/different was only because of viewheight and general height differences compared to q3)

didn't feel like that to me :/

it did in the mod (don't remember who made it) which lowered the viewheight to how it was in q3, the levels obviously looked over sized then but the movement felt like in q3

Na, the viewheight isn't the main reason (although it has a small part to play). IMO the main reason is that Q4 implicitly fixed the same FPS dependence bug in Q3 that makes people like OSP more than CPMA. Q4 ofc didnt have the FPS dependence, and neither did they adjust the accelleration values to make it feel more like Q3. That is why the tweaked accelleration in 1.3 and later that makes Q4 feel more "right".

When i said q3, i was talking about cpma vq3, so that pretty much had no influence at all. The main difference for why the movement felt different / slow was the viewheight and the whole games scaling.

I also hated q4 after 1.2 cause the strafejump speed just didn't feel right to me anymore.

so they ended up with similar q3's 85fps physics ?

Yep.

They just copied the physics code pretty much directly from Q3 on the assumption that Q3 was what people wanted, but they don't round the velocity to an integer every frame, hence no accumulating rounding error (and if they had done that, the 62.5fps framerate cap would probably have made it feel bad anyway).

The acceleration function is the same line by line. Only for the MP, tho.

Im quite possitive that in case of both ETs, developers didnt think much about implementing any movement, most likely it was just left to the engine. They even play Q3 like CS.

i remember reading somewhere that strafejumping was a bug in the q1 engine but people found it really cool so they kept it around

What's wrong with initial ET?

actually, I can't remember all the details, it was after all quite a few years ago.

However, I do remember disliking the voerall feel so much that I uninstalled after a few hours.
Endless spam (mines, endless airstrikes, rifle grenades), slow rate of fire which made spam even more effective, movement felt differently, fucking prone, couldn't drop pf anymore (I just disliked that). maps that were unfit for clan matches, xp in clan matches

overall is just felt dull and static compared to rtcw.


/e

the only thing I did enjoy was having countless new players on pubs who fell victim to med plus akimbo colts so easily plus being able to pick up enemy ammunition.
So it was ok for careless pubbing, but for anything competitive it just sucked. big times.

Laughs,

11,000 + posts on a hardcore FPS forum a phd in maths and physics and you still display the understanding of a 12 yr old child on a my "first modding forum".

who has a phd in maths and physics?


and you were missing my point, which I explained later. Just like you missed my point in you last reply to me.

So he's a third one, try not to miss it:

oh, look! it's the sun! ^__^

... on a hardcore FPS forum ...

Thank you for helping me to find better description for ESR. Previous one was "a place where retards of all sorts can be met".

In fact, strafejumping is a function of current view angle, position, speed and acceleration, so literally, it could be implemented in ANY game engine. Including UT3 engine.

I know the function, but I do not know how much the UE3 lets you change the movement and if their are restrictions on the movement from other parts of the engine. Can you say for certain, that that isn't so?

I think there even was a game with some sort of strafejumping on one of the older unreal engines, but that the movement scked compared to the quakes.

But, yeah, I guess I should have written "with maybe no, or possibly sucky strafejumping".

If we will look at game from perspective of layers, then movement code lays in the layer which is directly above UE3 engine layer. In engine itself, there is no such thing as "movement" code.

So basically, it is possible to add to UE3 engine based game not only strafe-jumping, but also bunnyhopping and wall jumping. And the quality of this movement will be determined by formulas used to calculate it, not by engine itself.

ok

And as far as I can see there is nothing which can prevent from making Quake 3 clone based on UE3 engine (with regard to movement of course), taking into account that Q3 sources is open.

Q3 source and the Tech3 engine has been open source since 05 afaik.

the artwork etc, too?

http://www.shacknews.com/docs/press/081905_quake3.x

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/38305

Looks like it.

Those licences only cover the source-code.

The pak*.pk3 files aren't distributed with the GPL source code release, and aren't covered by those licences and so are still only covered by the games EULA you agreed to when you installed the game (ie, no redistribution!).

No, I think that content itself isnt free.
Warsow developers had to remove some of Q3 sounds they used, and it may be the reason why the Alien Arena, or how it was called, is trying to recreate Q3 without using any of its content.

We never used any Q3 (nor any other game) sound, afaik. And I've been there since the start. That apart, ye, you're right, it isn't free.

I thought there was issue with either hitsounds or jumpsounds around 0.11, but if you say there wasnt any then it is my mistake. I think Ultrono Arena used Q3 sounds so maybe it was something about it.

Anyway my first contact with Warsow was with something like 0.067 or similiar number, I became regular with 0.1, but dropped it with 0.5 which I cant stand :P

I think you mean xbattle, they used some sounds from Q3.

with the small mention that if the other part of the code in the engine is kinda crap, final result, including movement may feel different still -bad code giving fps drops and stuf like this

Yesterday I downloaded the whole UDK and looked into its organization (including source code) - and now I tend to agree with such opinion. ;)

worse than the messy stuff from raven? :P

i think becks is right. UDK does not give you full access to U3 engine. it just permit you to release stand alone games without need to buy UT3. But it's still UnrealScript language which gives you access to engine more like .def files+scripting in q4 than q4SDK

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_E...l_Engine_3

There were some succesful titles, but I would certainly like to see shooter version of Mirrors Edge, new Infiltration and some other ideas put into this engine.
Also I think Epic released some sidescrolled game on Xbox live (or PSN?), and it seems like a great game. Basicaly recently there were few old style sidescrolled games, and they all turned to be fun, so maybe this news will give us more of them on PC.

I think the game you meant is called Shadow Complex.

and there were indeed quite nice titles based on UE3. Like BioShock for example

What you can really expect is not a lot of games being made now with this source, but the most important UT3 mods being released at standalone games (which is great enough already), some of them maybe even as comercial games.

"some of them maybe even as comercial games"
if they are polished enough they could try to ask for steam distribution, which got a huge advertisement power

I'm hoping people will choose cryengine 2 for their future games, even if they have to pay for it, this engine got unfair treatment from game companies, all chosing the already old ut3 engine =\

I don't know. It has a lot of fame, and the videos are impresive, but I liked more how looked and felt then engine of CoD4, tbh.

when you said this it kinda reminded me the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bInZ7_y4Lw

we're still waiting for a demo/game using CE2 which would run on a mid rig at a min 40 fps rate without looking meh

UT3 engine sucks

No anti aliasing, no win.. look at borderlands

C ya

There is AA in the UT3 engine as of DirectX 10.1.

The game UT3 does not have it in options, but you can force it via control panel or create an option in whatever game you develop.

Before saying that something sucks you should learn the basics first.

before making an apple pie from scratch, you first need to create the universe!

isn't the netcode and the hitboxes a bit off in UE3 ?
anyway that's cool

better than QL anyway

Haha, this pretty much kills the Unity engine.

Very strong and strategic move from Epic. Looks like they are creating an ecosystem for their future engines. Interesting, how well it will work.

Well I think that Unreal Engines may already be the best selling engines ever, and their previous free for noncommercial usage engine has it years, so it is good move for further securing market.
This is also very interesing policy if we include Make Something Unreal Contest, story of Rune (initialy a mod) or how are they adding new teams (UT3 team and PCF). They are much more open and active than lets say id, and seem like it works well for them.

It seems to me they saw the business Valve is making by promoting the best HL2 mods to full games and getting money from it. Sounds like a great deal to me, Epic makes money and helps the creation of new studios which will use their future technollogy.

Well they already released their previous engines in the past. Also they gave commercial licence to Make Something Unreal Contest winner. I think that Red Orchestra was commercialy released that way (first on steam, then boxed). They had also something to do with founding Gathering which released Rune, another game that started as UT mod.

Interesing is also that some schools and universities obtained Unreal Engines 3 licences for educational purposes. It is easy to predict that someone who was taught on it, will chose and support it in future.

Its too bad that in this case free != open source.

Open source is garbage.

This is FREE uptil $40,000.

See #40 though. At first I read #31 as a "this isn't GPL!" type whine, but I now see it wasn't. /o\

Correct, my comment had nothing to do with licensing. I typically do not contribute to 'teh whine' around here. =)

The title of the thread caught my attention so I thought maybe we'd be able to get our hands on some source code and make some meaningful changes, but no such luck.

Your #40 post says it all.

True..
here you find out more about the conditions of commercial licensing.

Just finished downloading it - a look at it still won't cost me anything :)

oh my fucking god ))
I've been waiting for this for soooo long!
And I agree with #16...

Damn, that was a wasted 500Mb download.

When they say it's free, they don't mean that they've given the engine source-code away under some restrictive license, it just means they're giving away the ability to write shitty unreal-script stuff and the mapping tools, to people who don't own UT3.

Yes, you could make something from this if you worked hard, but it seems like there is nothing you couldn't do with a UT3 mod, except you're also starting without much media.

From my quick look, it seems that the only benefit of this is that your game could be played by people who don't own UT3 (which given how badly it failed is maybe a good benefit, but still....). This maybe makes it useful for any UT3 mod teams who would like to go stand-alone I guess. If anyone has put that much effort into UT3 modding.

use the Unity engine then.... They are throwing shit at us at the moment lol

http://unity3d.com/

I suspected so. Started the download while reading the contents list and saw no mention of the source code. I'd consider the source a item worth of being mentioned in the list. :P
It was too good to be true.

That's pretty much what I thought.

I don't see anyone doing anything with this.

If Epic only sold about 200k of Ut3 when it came out, its asking a lot for anyone to achieve something with an engine which is so asset hungry and a bunch of non paid, amateurs (mostly).

Its just not going to happen. I might use it for Arch Viz though as it handles static meshes rather well.

The bottom line is, if you're capable of being good enough to make something of this, you might aswell get paid for it professionally.

I thought that titles like Vegas, BioShock, Mirrors Edge, Gears or Mass Effect did archive something. I dont think that any other modern engine sold more games.

Yes but they're professional game dev studios.

Granted someone could do something like mirrors edge, but that's been done already, it gets harder and harder to come up with something more original which is what a mod team needs to get an edge because they won't be able to compete on the art side of things for the most part.

UT3 sold more than a million copies. Quake 3, Quake 4, ET:QW, and the new Wolfenstein have not even sold 1 million.

UT3 Engine also sold more copies than Quake 3 Engine / Quake 4.

UT3 is also buddies with Steam - You can use your CD Key from retail and a number of other Steam things. Quake 4 isn't even on Steam. Quake 1/2 lack music...

Well last time I heard it was a lot more dire...

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/50410

Anyway, where I come from 1 million sales is pretty shit, its only when game dev switched to xbox etc did people start talking like 1 million sales meant something.

Yes, they sold moderate at release, but they have managed a lot over time. 1 million sales is still a selling milestone, and UT3 did manage it. UT3 also scales well enough to be roughly playable on a wide range of systems. I had it running on a Geforce 6600, and while it wasn't the most smooth experience, it was playable.

Also, UT3 isn't asset hungry.

They managed "a lot" over time because it was discounted heavily soon after the initial selling window. I have seen it for 9.99 for ages. Somewhere along that sales line the Epic/Publisher/Retailer has lost money on the original sales forcast based against the initial prodcution run vs the RRP.

They probably just did whatever they could to get rid of the initial production run. I doubt it sold more than 250k in full price sales.

Also any next gen game is asset heavy, because it takes a long time to make the art good enough to justify using that engine.

You show me any game on that engine which is considered next gen and I'll show you a multi million dollar budget or an even longer development time. Or pre-made assets from the orignal game.

Epic are giving this away for a reason, few if any will come to commerical fruition and the rest will likely just promote the engine to potential (paying) developers.

UT3 was still retail at $20 about 3 months ago, and hit the million sales milestone about 4 months after it's release.

http://www.udk.com/showcase.html for independent uses of the engine, no million dollar budget, and reasonable development time.

Epic are likely giving this away in order to get the most life out of it before a new wave of DX11 engines roll out. Case in point, Unigine engine:


Bask in the sweet glory of tessellation.

Tessellation may be a nice thing, but not for the price of massive fps loss and flickering shadows :x

You need a DX11 card just to do tessellation, and any card capable will be more than powerful enough. I haven't seen the shadow flickering issues you were speaking of. Regardless, it's going to be hyped as the new "next gen" craze.

1. If you can't see the flickering, I really can't help you.
-----------------------------------
2.

You're worried about performance on current generation cards for a technology that won't be put to use in a game for a good 1-2 years.

sorry for living in the present :)

I'm not so sure.

The way you would create levels with this tech would be a lot different to how you create them without tech.

Most devs are going to be creating games for consoles first and foremost, if it this does not work on them then they already have to make the 3D assets in two radically different ways, unless they make them with this tech in mind and can export the level geometry out at a fixed rate for consoles that do not support it.

When you factor in that you don't need that degree of density to make something look good anymore then you might find that this is something that most will not see the benefits off vs the potential headaches it brings.

This could actually become the biggest flop in years.

Consoles are developers most important market.

Well, the new Alien VS Predator game is already going to be using tessellation. Hardware is advancing much faster than software, and marketing companies need a new "next-gen" buzzword like tessellation. Advances in graphics are suffering diminishing returns, and I suspect that the next round of consoles will be the last that is really able to milk the "next-gen" crowd.

http://www.aliensvspredator.net/forum/topic/1...nd-screen/

Gonna have to keep an eye on this one and the tech, love AVP.

It only draws the extra detail based on how close you are to it, so its a lot more optimised than you think. Some form of Frustrum culling.

The irony is, because more of the geometric data will be defined in the bitmaps it means that the average actual polycount of level will probably be lower because they'll be able to substitute geomeric data for textures and polycvount in the distance will be very basic.

It will possibly makes things quicker to develop too, but it could easily have the doom 3 effect to it, in other words you might well see games being defined around the tech/art side of things even more.

I actually rate fluids as the next big thing in videogames.

This tech could possibly bring true background damage to the table too. Again, new rules will be made for making games which could hinder them as "games".

I must admit at the moment I don't know how this works.

I think I know how it works (roughly) as I said above, I don't see how an engine can accuractely define geometric info (concave/convex) without storing the data in the texture map itself because how could it possibly know what texture map is on the surface?

So I still think this is nothing more than real-time displacement mapping (at least in principle), but its hard for me to believe that this sort of mesh detail is going to be a reality anytime soon because whenever I use displacement maps it has a mad effect on rendering time.

its seems a bit over the top and unless DX11 is the best thing ever, I have doubts over this tech actually working in anything but a tech demo. At least for several years. And maybe not then as most game devs will be developing for the consoles not pc's.

This is one of the few times I hope I'm wrong. Someone ask Carmack.

PCPER: Is AMD’s tessellation engine that they put in the R600 chips anywhere close to what you are looking for?

CARMACK: No, tessellation has been one of those things up there with procedural content generation where it’s been five generations that we’ve been having people tell us it’s going to be the next big thing and it never does turn out to be the case. I can go into long expositions about why that type of data amplification is not nearly as good as general data compression that gives you the data that you really want. But I don’t think that’s the world beater; I mean certainly you can do interesting things with displacement maps on top of conventional geometry with the tessellation engine, but you have lots of seaming problems and the editing architecture for it isn’t nearly as obvious. What we want is something that you can carve up the world as continuously as you want without any respect to underlying geometry

I'm not convinced about those sales until I see a link. I'm not gonna be a dick about it because where I come from 1 million sales is nothing to be that proud of (on a team that big for that long it might net you about $20,000 for tons of unpaid overtime-trust me you would be pissed off), but you might be confusing it with this. You gave me a link for everything else, but not that?

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/51722

States..

Midway has revealed that Epic Games' Unreal Tournament 3 (PC, PS3) and Midway Chicago's Stranglehold (PC, PS3, X360) have sold over a million copies worldwide.

You must be pulling your numbers from somewhere, so this is when I ask for a source if you want to convince me.

Lastly...

None of those games are anywhere near close to next gen.
notice that both of them have SPHERICAL characters too.
That's the dev team trying to make the game around limited resources.

If someone asked you to pay retail for that fish game and that ball game I'm pretty sure there would be complaints.

The ball game is just using the native physics engine to create the core gameplay, along with the weapons and a few triggers.
graphics look pretty poor too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfU7aisV6NE&am...playnext=1

It looks like a poor version of portal to me and why do you think they released Orange Box? None of those games were full price retail games on their own abnd that second rate portal game isn't either.

its really simple and if that thing won the Intel "make something unreal" competiton it just goes to show how hard it is to make something "UNREAL" for modders because both their show case games are hugely amateurish.

As for the fishing game, come on, that's something you might pay 1200 points for on Xboxlive at best if you were feeling nostalgic.

The tess stuff is nice, but its going to put added pressure on modders to yet again work on the art side of things if they're going to use original content.

Those textures are pretty basic too, so what they might make up with that tech they might limit by having to use more simplified textures which might not offer the gains it appears.
Why do you think IDsoftware are venturing to the great outdoors all of a sudden? Next gen tech works much better outdoors.

It is nice, but it looks like some form of real-time displacement mapping, which Crysis has had for a longtime, or to that effect.
On the first level of crysis as you go up the hill just before you get to the main cut scene. There are tons of pebbles and it almost looked real.
http://www.seithcg.com/pictures/maya/diagrams...es_005.jpg

it might be something technically totally different with more bells, whistles because of the available tech, but the end result is the same, it turns flat bitmaps into a tempoary form of geometry based on focal length.

(edited because the linked sites blocked them)

What source do you need now, when you already have one? I didn't go looking for them, as I didn't think you were trying to turn it into a debate.

The "ball game" is just a UT3 mod, as anything made with UDK will be. The only difference is that you can make it stand-alone with UDK.

All Quake 1, Quake 2, Quake 3, and other more basic engines produce just as amateurish mods. It's not the engines at fault, it's the users. Just look at what terrible things have come from the same situations in Linux.

"Next gen" is a buzzword, not a technical term. Both of those games are making full use of the features of the engine. You shouldn't expect $50 quality games from modding to begin with, but, as it stands, you can't even really expect that from the million dollar budget companies, either.

Tessellation will be better for physics and lighting, and allow for higher quality displacement maps. It's also supposed to help with memory usage on higher detailed objects due to the great ability to scale the actual physical property of these surfaces based on viewpoint.

Unless I have missed something I want the source that says...

UT3 on the PC (not some variation of it across several platforms) has sold a million copies.

Secondly, you've kinda backtracked on those games.

Both those games would get ripped to bits if they were released by a professional dev team.

I said orignally that no MOD team is going to be able to actually produce a game with this engine (that resembles a pro game) and sell it at retail like the PR implies. You can make your own game!
Yeah and I can invent a timemachine if I want to and travel the world, it does not mean I have the brains to do so.

Both those games were HUGELY designed around my original claim that the engine is too asset heavy for mods to actually do something good with.
To which you claimed was untrue, yet the only two examples you provided me with (and these were the best) quite clearly showed that they were designed to get around my very claim. is it really any co-incidence they both turned out to be so hugely in tune with being technically simple? I think not.

one is virtually 2D and the other is physic based (in other words they did virtually nothing to make the ball game work) and don't get me started on that fish game which you could probably come close to doing in flash with a couple of good people and I could make better looking ball game on the halflife 2 engine.

So you've not really done a very good job of countering my orignal claim regarding sales and technical aptitude.

If a mod team cannot make a game which cannot pass for a game dev then I can't see the point in talking about releasing your own game on such a next gen engine.

Whoppi shit its standalone, it means nothing.

it says if the game makes over 5k or something then epic get %25 which I think puts the emphais on making money for people, but most people just won't make anything and the market will be awash with even more shitty "games".

You're saying that the source you found DOES say that UT3 PC alone sold over a million copies. What else do you want sources for?

Can you show me an example of a team who has done well in modding on another platform, who has done poorly with UT3? It's like judging the merits of the Q3 engine based on some "SUPER FAST ULTRA MEGA WEAPONS OF DEATH" mod. How many quality Youtube videos are there, compared to the submissions? How many linux applications serve no purpose other than "TO FULFILL SOME POTENTIAL PREFERENCE THAT SOMEONE MAY HAVE AT SOME POINT IN TIME, REGARDLESS OF CURRENT DEMAND"? The UT modding community has always been rather small compared to the likes of Quake, so it's no wonder that UT3 didn't have a big turnout, and that the ones that did weren't amazing.

The examples I gave you were of people who DID use the assets of the engine, are exploiting all of it's potential abilities, and were able to develop as such in reasonable time. Producing something uninspiring (to you, anyway) is possible with any engine, developer, or budget. This is an argument against bad games, not against an engine.

Could you make a game worth $50 with the tools they gave you? I'm sure you could, with some talent and effort. In fact, I'd probably pay a good $20 for the Black Mesa Source mod for HL2, if it's even half as good as it looks.

For those who enjoy player physics, here's some quick variables you can setup. I got the full tutorial on UDK.com/Forums - Unreal Script

Src/EoW/Classes/EoWxPawn.uc

// /* *** *** ***                 *** *** *** */ //
// /* *** *** *** Elements of War *** *** *** */ //
// /* *** *** ***                 *** *** *** */ //

class EoWxPawn extends UTPawn
 config(Game)
 dependson(UTWeaponAttachment)
 dependson(UTEmitter)
 dependson(UTFamilyInfo)
 native
 nativereplication
 notplaceable;

defaultproperties
{
   // ViewPitchMin=0   // -18000.000000
   // ViewPitchMax=0   // 18000.000000

   bFixedView=True

   SuperHealthMax=199

   CameraScale=9.000000
   CurrentCameraScale=1.000000
   CameraScaleMin=1.000000       // Was 3
   CameraScaleMax=40.000000

   HeroCameraScale=6.000000
   HeroCameraPitch=6000

   TeamBeaconMaxDist=3000.000000
   TeamBeaconPlayerInfoMaxDist=3000.000000

   DefaultAirControl=0.350000

   bStopOnDoubleLanding=True
   bCanDoubleJump=True
   DodgeSpeed=600.000000
   DodgeSpeedZ=295.000000
   MultiJumpRemaining=1
   MaxMultiJump=1
   MultiJumpBoost=-45
   MaxDoubleJumpHeight=87.000000

   CustomGravityScaling=1.000000

   bCanCrouch=True
   bCanSwim=True
   bCanClimbLadders=True
   bCanStrafe=True
   bCanPickupInventory=True

   Buoyancy=0.990000
   MeleeRange=20.000000
   GroundSpeed=440.000000
   WaterSpeed=220.000000
   AirSpeed=440.000000
   JumpZ=322.000000
   AirControl=0.350000
   WalkingPct=0.400000
   CrouchedPct=0.400000
   MaxFallSpeed=1250.000000
   AIMaxFallSpeedFactor=1.100000

   UnderWaterTime=20.000000
}


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

That's quite a list already...

strafejumping would probaly take a hour or so to add to quake 4, just need 2 new anims for left nd right strafe