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?

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.

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

[Omicron32]

Or you could just let them play on the Linux version of UT2k4 and lock down the machine.

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)

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 [counter-strike.net] 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 [blackcatgames.com] 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 [bf1942files.com], Battlefield Pirates [bfpirates.com], Desert Combat [desertcombat.com], Galactic Conquest [galactic-conquest.net], 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:No

[HeLLFiRe1151]

You are an idiot, how the hell can you compare the Unreal 432 with Unreal 3236, do you have any idea what those numbers mean? . You are comparing a 2 year old engine with a 2 day old engine? The only reason you think the Doom 3 engine is all that is because of how pretty it is. Well, take another look. Your precious doom 3 engine is all indoors, id has never made a decent engine that can handle longer distances, the engines have always catered to close quarter combat. The Unreal engine is under constant redevelopment, handles long and short distance. Unreal sets the standard and others follow.

Re:It depends

[Mia'cova]

UnrealScript is hardly a "very basic" language. It's responsible for the entirety of the entire game code (with a few things written in c++ for performance). That means that the vehicles, weapons, networking, player movement, menus, HUD, console, bot AI, and pretty well everything is written with this language. If what you can do is "very limited" I'm thinking it might not be the language.

As a side-note to those who're curious, UnrealScript is a bit of a cross between Java and c++. It also has replication (networking), states, and time built right into the language. This, IMHO, makes it an extremely powerful language for game design.

(and yes, I have created server-side mods before :)

Yay, AirBuccaneers

[istewart]

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.

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.

mapping != modding, and ut is better for modding

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't like the ut2004 engine for very specific reasons, but I use it, and I may move to source instead of doom 3.

1) Unreals vehicles suck, but at least they exist. Where does doom stand here?
2) unreals outdoor environments are a pain to generate. But, where does doom stand?
3) Unreals scripting language is easy to use, but somewhat counter-intuitive/odd due to the way objects are passed/they do replication. I haven't coded with doomIII or source, but it would be hard to be more friendly to new modders. My problem with uscript is that it's too primitive for my taste.
4) Unreal's gametypes provide a great deal of AI and game development support. Onslaught, assault, domination, bombing run? The breadth of classes and functionality is outstanding, and makes variants of standard types and innovation much easier, instead of your basic FPS w bigger weapons mod.
5) Doom 3 isn't older-machine friendly, and that's a big deal considering many modders arent rich and many long-time players and mod supporters arent wealthy. the final doom III build doesn't run on gforce mx 440, despite what the reviews say. Hell, the intro screen wont run on my 440 and i can run ut2004 with max settings on most maps. I love carmack, but that's just poor coding/optimization/release [and no, i wont buy an nvidia card ever again].