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Games Entertainment

Virtual ISS Tournament 53

Posted by michael from the hold-your-breath dept.
Dahamma writes "I saw on Voodoo Extreme that NASA has modeled a "Virtual International Space Station" in Unrealty, an architectural modeling package using the Unreal engine. Download is already a little slow, though, and I can't imagine a /. post will help that..."
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Virtual ISS Tournament More

Virtual ISS Tournament

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  • Will the engine handle explosive decompression properly when you miss? Once good high velocity hit to the walls, and . . .
  • I believe it isn't ID which develops Wolfenstein, but the guys who made that crappy gangster game? Not that really care. What I'm looking forward to:

    * Clive Barker's Undying [ea.com]. Finally a new horror game with a really good plot? (Like System Shock 2)

    * Unreal Warfare. 200 times more polygons in levels and characters than UT had. Double the world size. T&L. Better AI. Better everything. *drool*

    * Thief 3 and Deus Ex 2. Yees!! Warren Specter! With UnrealEd2 they get all the tools, graphics, AI etc for free and can spend all time on making a good plot and a believable worlds.

    All use the Unreal engine, funnily enough. :-)

    ************************************************ ** *

  • I'm afraid I have to disagree with you at almost everything you have written so far on Q3 and UT.
    :-)
    I'll just put it all together here for simplicitys sake:

    >That's a laugh. You have to have a piece of Tim Sweeney's brain installed in your cranium just to do anything productive with Unrealed

    That is really not true. I am a really crappy programmer. No doubt about that. I suck about equally at C/C++ and Java. The Unreal editor is not hard at all. I could figure out how to do lots of stuff without reading anything. There are lots of tutorials around for UnrealEd. I have not found anything like that for Q3. Granted, I haven't exactly searched for it, so if you tell me there are tutorials around I'll take your word for it.

    >The Unreal Engine does very stupid things with decals

    Examples? I know that in Q3 marks do not appear on curved surfaces, it is quite noticable.

    >and sometimes entire brushes disappear from view at certain angles

    I have not noticed this. What graphics card do you have? Have you tried downloading the latest patch for UT?

    >From its 256x256x8bpp texture restriction (yes, I know the new rehash of the Unreal engine extended that to 2048x2048, but that's VAPORWARE!)

    It's not vaporware. It is included in a functioning version available to licensees. Calling everything that hasn't been released yet vaporware is making the term meaningless. But I guess it only applies to products you don't like?

    >to the lackluster collision detection (in every deathmatch, I see some weapon just sitting up in the air near a wall; obviously, the bounding boxes are too big and the weapon's bounding box is sitting on a T-junction or something

    Again, I must say I have not seen these things.

    >to the abysmally low quality of the levels and character models themselves (creating higher-polycount models/maps is near impossible due to numerous constraints)

    Oh give it a rest. They might not have as much eye candy as Q3, but artistically they are much better in my opinion. The higher polycount argument is just plain wrong. Anyone who download the tech demo (months old) can see that you are talking out of your ass. The latest release notes say the engine is now capable of 200 times the polygon count of the old levels, and twice the map size.

    >the Unreal engine is just too outdated

    Which was why it was ported without problem to the PS2? And the reson they won an award for best engine just a couple of days ago? It is being updated all the time. The glide problem has been fixed. They get new licensees all the time.

    >Furthermore, 3dfx is dead; Tim Sweeney saw that one coming, so he defected from them and started leeching from NVidia [...]Tim Sweeney was "pimpin' his mad skillz"

    So because you prefer a f*cking computer game before another one you are doing poisonous ad hominem attacks aginst the guy who made the other game? Someone who has done nothing against you? Maybe you should get a life? The reason the first Unreal engine was almost impossible to run on anything else than Glide was because when it was first released, 3DFX were the only 3D card makers in town? Have you already forgotten this? Just about the only competition was the S3 Virge graphics de-accelerator. And at the moment nVidia are the dominant PC graphics card makers, like it or not. So optimising your game for nVidia cards is not "leeching up", it is something called a "smart move".

    >Also, the netcode in UT still sucks (with a 300 ping, UT is absolutely unplayable, while Counter-Strike is decent to good, and Q3 is pretty good).

    It works just fine for me. Again, have you downloaded a recent patch?

    >He said, "Nah, get Half-Life. Unreal sucks."

    Oh good, I guess that settles all then. Good to see you tried to find out for yourself with an open mind.

    >How many prominent Unreal licensees are there in the near future? None that I've heard of.

    That doesn't really surprise me. Try: Deus Ex 2. Duke Nukem Forever. Hired Guns. New Legends. Seraphim. Shadows of Reality. Star Trek Deep Space Nine: The Fallen. Clive Barker's Undying. Unreal 2. Unreal Warfare. X-Com: Alliance.

    And the old ones: Rune. Deus Ex. Unrealty. Nerf: Arena Blast. Unreal 1. Unreal Tournament. Star Trek: Klingon Honor Guard. Wheel of Time.

    >How many future Id Software-engine titles? Two (including the next DOOM).

    Ooohhh. Impressive *sarcastic applause*

    >I didn't mention Deus Ex because I didn't know what engine that ran on. Unlike SOME people here, I don't like to assume anything.

    Sure....sure..... as we all could see.

    ************************************************ ** *

  • >Wow, and I thought my post was long.

    Thank you, thank you. *bows deeply* Here is another long boring rant. Hopefully less inflammatory. I'm in a better mood now. :-)

    >As for my detailed reasons, wait until I put up my categorized "Unreal Sucks" webpages. I've already sent most of my grudges against Unreal to Tim Sweeney himself. On some of them, he admitted to something that could've been fixed.

    Sure, I'm not saying UT, UnrealEngine or UnrealEd are perfect. There are lots of things that annoy me with them too (like the initially poor support for non-glide cards, and not-very-optimal OpenGL support still there for instance). I just got a bit peeved that you were slamming them for things that were patently untrue (like claiming Q3 came out first - UT was actually out in the shops around a month before). As for the Unreal sucks page...ok, sure, whatever makes you happy.

    >As for the upcoming Unreal licensees, how many of them will score above 75% on PC Gamer? I'm forecasting only 4 of them will garner any good reviews (DNF's delay is its Achilles' heel).

    I think you are unfairly biased again. Deus Ex 2 and Unreal Warfare have the great old teams, no known competition on the way, and should be almost guaranteed instant hits (~95%) unless they really screw up for some unforseen reason. I also have high hopes for Clive Barker's Undying and Unreal 2. Seraphim seems interesting. The rest are really too far away to comment on.

    >As for the upcoming Id licensees, they're all but guaranteed to be excellent.

    Lets hope so. I really don't care which engine they use, as long as the games are good. But I really think id have lost their creative spark. They are doing essentially the same one or two games again and again and again. No wonder American McGee and others left. What are the new amazing things currently in production? Doom. Wolfenstein. Whee... It feels like Carmack isn't interested in games anymore, just "mathematical masturbation". But, I shouldn't dismiss them until I get to try the games myself. Here is hoping they are good.

    >Daikatana was the only bad Id licensee, and we all know that it's John Romero's fault.

    Finally, we agree on something. ;-)

    Oh yeah, and it is obvious the Mother of All Fights is not fought on an alien space Arena, or transmitted by the Lliandri Mining Corporation. It is the eternal fan quarrel which is best - UT or Q3. Over a year later and people still get their blood preassure up over the issue. Amazing.

    Cheers,
    Lars

    ************************************************ ** *

  • it don't matter if it is good for a deathmatch, though it would help

    Er, what would it help with?

    Does anyone know of any sites dedicated to using 3D gaming engines for non-gaming purposes other than the article we saw a while back about a company using Q2 engine for an architectural walk-through? You know, maybe with resources that help take Autocad files and convert them to Quake maps?

    There are plenty of people who use the Unreal engine for these sort of things, like the before mentioned Unrealty and the Notre Dame virtual tour. The Unreal engine is so easy to extend and modify because of its modular and object oriented design. The engine actually recently won a price [stomped.com] for being so powerful and making development easier. Here is a list of recent improvements [epicgames.com] to the engine and the editor. Looks really sweet! DirectX 8 [cdmag.com] + GeForce [nvidia.com] + UnrealEngine [epicgames.com] looks like a good recipe for great upcoming games.

    ************************************************ ** *

  • Seen a lot of stuff done with Epic's Unreal game engine, including VRND (Virtual Reality Notre Dame).

    I see that they choose to use the Earth background skybox from Unreal Tournament for the station (as seen in some multiplayer maps). Fitting I guess.
  • Those are the same links given on the NASA site. D'oh!

    I wish they'd applied a mirror texture to the solar panels. Would have looked nice.

  • Mirrors (Score:3)

    by Barbarian ( 9467 ) on Wednesday January 24, 2001 @11:07PM (#482844)
    From the Voodoo Extreme site info:

    Unreality (needed): http://www.unrealty.net/ [unrealty.net]
    VISS ZIP here: http://www.unrealty.net/network/ [unrealty.net]
    (you need the first two as per the instructions on NASA's site)

    Screen shots: http://www.unrealty.net/network/screenshots.php3?i d=7&page=1 [unrealty.net]
  • Found a mirror of the Unrealty client on the unreal engine page: http://www.unrealengine.com/engine/unrealty/ [unrealengine.com].

    Haven't found a mirror for the VISS data, tho.

  • Unfortunately, that DemoNews page is out of synch with the "Storerunner" download site (or wherever); when you follow the DemoNews link it gives you a page for some kind of calculator software.
    ----

  • Textures? (Score:3)

    by Julius X ( 14690 ) on Thursday January 25, 2001 @07:13AM (#482847) Homepage
    Where have you been? The Unreal engine does NOT have a 256x256 texture restriction...in fact was one of the first--if not THE first--game to use S3TC to support higher resolution textures two and a half years ago, right after the original Unreal came out. I'm sure a few of us can remember---I know I do--looking at those shots and going WOW! that's incredible. Besides that, the textures have always been 16 or 32-bit, because I remember at the time, the competition, Quake 2, had the 8bit pallette restriction on textures, which is what caused the game to have the brownish tinge that it did...but Unreal definitely did not.

    The engine may have its difficulties (the older Glide issue is one of them, which some say has been solved)...but texture restrictions were NEVER one of them.

    Next time, you may want to check your history...

    -Julius X
  • wow... dood... lay off the crack [virtualcrack.com].

    really.
  • i've managed to mirror the engine and the viss
    file at planetmirror.com in australia

    ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/unrealty/
    http://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/unrealty/

    cheers,

    -jason

  • tried it (Score:3)

    by jilles ( 20976 ) on Wednesday January 24, 2001 @10:56PM (#482850) Homepage
    I though it was rather disappointing. The textures sucked, there was hardly any interactivity: no opening doors, moving robot arms or what so ever. Just these little question marks that when clicked pop up a text window.

    Nevertheless, you get a pretty good impression of how the ISS is organized.

  • wow (Score:2)

    by hugg ( 22953 )
    I think I saw this being demoed at KSC at the ISS exhibit. Too bad noone can download it right now. Is the server physically located on the planet?
  • Get the facts straight - how are you expecting people to take you seriously when you mention Nerf as a prominent Unreal license game, but fail to mention a big seller and excellent game like Deus Ex [deusex.com]?
    -
    sig sig sputnik
  • But how would gravity be handled? Would you merely "stick" to the outside of the ship? How would you get in the ship? Would you just float around?
  • It's a little small and simple for a good Deathmatch, isn't it?
  • You'd look a lot less uncool if you read up on the engine features Unreal Warfare adds. Warfare isn't "vaporware", by the way. In fact, a few shots of Warfare were released just the other day...

    http://www.voodooextreme.com/shot.taf?image=apac he /shots/uw/bg01.jpg

    http://www.voodooextreme.com/articles/latestunre al enginenotes.html

    Engine lisencees have access to Unreal Warfare code already, it's just a matter of them using what they have. I don't know why you think Unreal is the worst thing in the world.. it's a steal at around $400 thousand, and Epic treats their licensees like kings.
  • I don't know if it is just a caffine crash or what, but your sig had me laughing for quite a while. I had images of psycologists with o-scopes and multimeters probing to try and reenigne-esrever a brain.

  • um, what part of this post was "interesting"?

    the "deathmatch don't matter, though it would help" part?
    the "enough people and good performance" bit?
    the "3D sites dedicated to non-game 3D engines" idle question?
    the "Autocad file converted to Q map" query?

    to paraphrase DDS, they should just put it out as a DeerHunter level. it would make more sense that way.

    i feel dumber for having read this post.
  • you, sir, are an ignorant ass, with more words than things to say.
  • so how many /. accounts do you have, mr "talk_is_cheap@verizoneatspoop.com"?

    i'd like to see you be brave enough to identify yer own ignorant self.

    dude, seriously, shut up once in a while.
  • well spoken. i couldn't help but notice that ignorantboy has run out of steam.

    "Don't try to corner *me* with logic!" :)
  • are you trying to bullshit us by insinuating that you're a RESPONSIBLE slashdot citizen who doesn't like to speak about topics you know nothing about? that's the funniest thing i've heard all day. thanks for the laughs, ignorantboy :)

    pax out

  • Mirror for Unrealty Client (Score:3)

    by OakLEE ( 91103 ) on Wednesday January 24, 2001 @09:07PM (#482862)
    For the client we have DemoNews [demonews.com]. Windows only here, sorry.

    I haven't got anything for the VISS, but if I find it i'll reply back.

    __________________
  • Or what about recoil? One shot and you're sent flying in the opposite direction.
  • Oh it would be nice to have the Flak Cannon on this sim. Or then again maybe not. From what I've heard, it seems that the MIR has been hit quite often with it. :)

  • They should just put it out as a Q3A level (Score:3)

    by DeepDarkSky ( 111382 ) on Wednesday January 24, 2001 @09:20PM (#482865)
    it don't matter if it is good for a deathmatch, though it would help. Enough people have Q3A and the performance will certainly be good. Does anyone know of any sites dedicated to using 3D gaming engines for non-gaming purposes other than the article we saw a while back about a company using Q2 engine for an architectural walk-through? You know, maybe with resources that help take Autocad files and convert them to Quake maps?
  • The S3TC textures on the second CD can be used with the new beta drivers they just released. As long as your videocard supports texture compression.
    The reason Unreal Tournament is so great is the weapons and the AI handling. The maps are pretty good too and not to hard to create once you get the hang of it. I'm curious how many new games are coming out using the quake engine compared to the Unreal engine. Seems to me that Unreal has a lot more potential...
  • Found the "Window Observational Research Facility (WORF)" quite amusing...

    But then, that's just me I guess.

  • NASA has an older Virtual ISS tour. [nasa.gov] I wasn't able to get the new one.. slashdotted already I guess. The old one is kind of weak.. I'm not suprised they made a new one. But its worth a look if you can't get to the new one.

    -gerbik
  • from the disclaimer:

    GNU/Linux x86
    A GNU/Linux x86 version will be available in the first quarter of 2001. Please visit this VISS Web site for future updates

  • single shot kill? Re:Simple map mod (Score:3)

    by StandardDeviant ( 122674 ) on Wednesday January 24, 2001 @10:23PM (#482870) Homepage Journal

    The Assault mission sounds really cool! But then I'm addicted to Assault missions in UT. :-)

    Anyway, to make it slightly more realistic, would it be possible to have regiospecific single shot kill? I.e. if you're outside the station, a single shot would kill your character (by virtue of breaking seal on your space suit and death by explosive decompression/hard vacuum exposure). Just a thought...


    --
    Fuck Censorship.
  • I wonder how TO mod will use this model? Better still... what would the story line and objectives of each team?!?!

  • Simple map mod (Score:5)

    by Fervent ( 178271 ) on Wednesday January 24, 2001 @10:04PM (#482872)
    I'm a vet Unreal Tournament player, so this would be simple to mod to make a good map. Add low gravity on the outside of the ship. Place a flak on the solar panel and a rocket launcher near the airlock.

    If you want you could even set up a cool Assault mission. Be a third-party country and try to raid the station. Then be the ISS defense. You could put sniper rifles by the windows.

    Anyone up for a deathmatch? :)

  • Guys, if people keep blowing up the Solar Panel array, we'll never get good results on how hamsters deficate in a zero-G envornment!" Seriosuly guys, stop blowing all the equipment up! C'mon! I'm gonna tell NASA HQ!

  • Does it say "assimilate this"? before blowing to bit a major piece of space fungus infected equipment?
  • Sure, a bit of space debris just blew a hole in the Phantom Module. Sure.

    [ridiculopathy.com]

  • this is the unreal engine; hence unreality.
  • That's a laugh. You have to have a piece of Tim Sweeney's brain installed in your cranium just to do anything productive with Unrealed (not to mention that the first Unrealed was programmed in Visual Basic, and the current Visual C++ version STILL does stupid things when viewing meshes). The Unreal Engine does very stupid things with decals, and sometimes entire brushes disappear from view at certain angles (this can be seen in dm-morpheus when sniping from tower to tower, and in dm-conveyor with the catwalks above the lavapit).

    I still think that the british architects made a much better choice by using the Q2 engine, though I'd sure like to see that type of application on the Q3 engine. With the new terrain tools in Q3, you could photorealistically reproduce an entire neighborhood; just look at mpterra1 sometime.

  • You want to know about licensees? Let's consider the original one: Raven Software. They licensed the DOOM engine for Heretic, and then again for Hexen (that game took the DOOM engine as far as it could possibly go). Back then, Tim Sweeney was "pimpin' his mad skillz" with Epic Pinball, a totally 2d shareware title.

    Then the Quake engine came along. At first, there were no licensees for that, but then a largely unknown software company licensed it and started working on a totally different game. That company was Valve Software, and that game was Half-Life. Before they finished, though, Q2 was already released, and Raven put out Hexen II and later Heretic II. Unreal was released by then, but once Half-Life was released (with numerous optimizations from the Q2 engine), it became the best single-player FPS. Back then, I asked my friend if I should get Unreal, as my psychology teacher had suggested. He said, "Nah, get Half-Life. Unreal sucks." I'm glad that I did get Half-Life first and Unreal later, because I saw about a hundred things in Unreal that Half-Life did better.

    Unreal did have a few licensees (the most notable ones created "Wheel of Time" and "Aeon Flux"), but they all bombed. Meanwhile, work was being done on Quake3. Epic worked on Unreal Tournament as well. Quake3 came out first, then UT. The UT netcode, improved over Unreal's original netcode, was still laggy (basically, all they did was have the weapon models twitch without the server's acknowledgement; the weapon firing was still delayed). Quake 3 was much better when it came to its network code (it was decently playable on a 56K modem, while UT would balk in its 2 fps haze). Soon, other engine licensees were released. Soldier of Fortune was released by Raven; it used the Q2 engine augmented with a model engine of their own design (GHOUL). Daikatana was FINALLY released; the engine was okay (Q2 augmented with visual effects), but the content was not. Still no decent Unreal engine licensee games in sight (well, Nerf ArenaBlast, but that was child's play, literally!). Raven made and released Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force (Q3 engine with improved model system and MUCH improved AI engine [ICARUS]). Rune was released afterward, but it was an RPG, not an FPS, so it didn't do as well.

    Currently, Rogue/EA has Alice out; that's a Q3-engine RPG from American McGee, the former Id Software map designer of DOOM/Quake/Q2 fame. And another company (I don't remember which) is working on "Return to Castle Wolfenstein", which will use the Q3 engine. And Id Software is creating an entirely new engine for the next DOOM project; this engine will use real-time level lighting, which will eliminate the abominable lightmap-calculation process in mapmaking, and the lightmap-loading process that bogs down map loading for the client.

    How many prominent Unreal licensees are there in the near future? None that I've heard of. How many future Id Software-engine titles? Two (including the next DOOM). The game designers all know that Unreal sucks, and Id Software makes great game engines as a base to build their own games. Which is why they'd rather be associated with Carmack and not Sweeney.

  • I didn't mention Deus Ex because I didn't know what engine that ran on. Unlike SOME people here, I don't like to assume anything.
  • First off, that brownish tinge in Q2 (and original Quake, for that matter) was because of the colormap's bias toward brown and grey. Second of all, who's the blind one here? Take a look at all the textures in Unreal/Unreal Tournament. Of all the non-S3TC textures, are any of them better than 256x256x8bpp? NO! Furthermore, S3TC was a proprietary lossy (I repeat, LOSSY!) texture compression method that would only interface with the S3 MeTaL drivers, or the OpenGL extension GL_S3_S3TC (which, might I add, did not get released to the other companies' video chipset drivers until S3 dropped Diamond). Quake3 was the very first game to support textures larger than 256x256 in a standardized OpenGL setup. As for the Unreal engine, they remained in proprietary hell until 3dfx's financial troubles stirred them awake. However, I have yet to see the OpenGL renderer perform bug-free (even Tim Sweeney admits that the OpenGL renderer is just there for kicks; above all else, he loves Direct3D).
  • I'd like to see you be brave enough to identify yourself, anonymous coward.
  • Even though Team Arena is pretty much the same thing, but with 32-bit textures and true bezier patches?
  • Wow, and I thought my post was long. I'm not too surprised at your reaction; after all, Unreal's biggest fan base is in Europe (especially Sweden). Still, I did find out just why my friend said that Unreal sucks. As for my detailed reasons, wait until I put up my categorized "Unreal Sucks" webpages. I've already sent most of my grudges against Unreal to Tim Sweeney himself. On some of them, he admitted to something that could've been fixed.

    As for the upcoming Unreal licensees, how many of them will score above 75% on PC Gamer? I'm forecasting only 4 of them will garner any good reviews (DNF's delay is its Achilles' heel). As for the upcoming Id licensees, they're all but guaranteed to be excellent. Daikatana was the only bad Id licensee, and we all know that it's John Romero's fault.

  • so how many /. accounts do you have

    Just this one. I've had it ever since I was in the AFC Q3 clan (hence the AFC). I wouldn't get another /. account even if Rob Malda paid me to.

  • It's because the engine sucks. From its 256x256x8bpp texture restriction (yes, I know the new rehash of the Unreal engine extended that to 2048x2048, but that's VAPORWARE!), to the lackluster collision detection (in every deathmatch, I see some weapon just sitting up in the air near a wall; obviously, the bounding boxes are too big and the weapon's bounding box is sitting on a T-junction or something), to the problems with blast mark decals, to the problems of vanishing brushes, to the lack of a bezier patch system, to the abysmally low quality of the levels and character models themselves (creating higher-polycount models/maps is near impossible due to numerous constraints), the Unreal engine is just too outdated. In Q3TA, Id added tools for doing terrain; just look at the "mpterra?.bsp" maps sometime. Furthermore, 3dfx is dead; Tim Sweeney saw that one coming, so he defected from them and started leeching from NVidia (I'm surprised that OpenGL UT still sucks, though). Even worse, Unreal is barely cross-platform; even though Loki has stepped in with a Linux version of UT, it still pales in comparison to the Q3 client version of Q3 produced by Id themselves. Also, the netcode in UT still sucks (with a 300 ping, UT is absolutely unplayable, while Counter-Strike is decent to good, and Q3 is pretty good).

    Even with these grudges I have against UT, I still play it; it's a nice escape from Quake and Half-Life when I start to get sick of them. However, about five minutes into each UT session, I see one or more of these problems pop up, and I exit UT. At that point, I'm ready to play Quake and Half-Life again. In a way, UT keeps me playing Quake.

  • Can Unrealty model/simulate the growth of space fungus [slashdot.org]?

  • So. (Score:1)

    by Alatar ( 227876 )
    So, where's a server that I can join that's running this map? Or will it just get thrown in the rotation with the hundreds of other maps that look neat but are totally unsuitable for proper gaming.
  • Hell yes.

    The Unreal engine [unrealengine.com] and their tech demo (a few months old now) whips the pants off anything Quake3 can do. Lately i've been impressed by the data you can give bots. Even Croteam [serioussam.com] is better than Q3A - I hope ID gets it together for Wolfenstein.

    -- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!

  • Discovery.com [discovery.com] have their own interactive ISS model [discovery.com], which includes a construction timeline, amongst other things.

    It's designed for high-bandwidth connections, so 56k users will have to wait a while for download, but it's pretty much worth the wait.

    Since I haven't downloaded the NASA version (6MB+!) I can't compare the two directly, but the Discovery one's pretty good.


    Sean Ellis

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