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First Person Shooters (Games) PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Unreal Gets Annihilated, Community Bonus 29

Posted by simoniker from the free-things-good dept.
heXXXen writes "The first release of Unreal Annihilation is out now - it's a total conversion for Unreal Tournament 2K3/4 that mimics classic PC RTS title Total Annihilation. However, the first release only supports UT2K3, with 2004 support coming June 6." Elsewhere, an anonymous reader writes "Part two of the Community Bonus Pack for UT2004 has been released, featuring a whole host of new maps, skins, and mutators for the game, with information and screenshots available at FPSCentral. Torrents can be found at PlanetUnreal (UMOD version and ZIP version.) The 'official' CBP2 channel can be found at #cbp on irc.enterthegame.com."
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Unreal Gets Annihilated, Community Bonus More

Unreal Gets Annihilated, Community Bonus

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  • Technically, are there many graphical differences? I have played both but have a hard time seeing them.

    I'm also of the understanding that Unreal 2 is a new engine, whearas the engine used for UT2003/2004 is the same original engine, just modified.

    • Unreal 101 (Score:5, Informative)

      by MachDelta ( 704883 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @03:58PM (#9298317)
      Technically they're all different flavours of the same engine. They started out with the "Unreal Engine" (its official name) way back when to make, duh, Unreal. That was version 1 to 226. Then they made Unreal Tournament (which was kind of a Unreal Engine 1.5) that went up to v436. Allong the way lots of other games lisenced various versions of the engine and modified it for their own uses (eg: Wheel of Time, Rune, Tactical Ops, Deus Ex, etc [epicgames.com]).

      Then they revamped the whole thing and came up with their "Unreal Engine 2" (sometimes called the "Unreal Warfare" engine, though the oft rumoured Unreal Warfare has yet to appear, and according to the developers, doesn't even exist). By the time that hit (UT2003), it was somewhere around the v2000 mark, with a short run up to v2225 (2227 in house). Then they have their "Unreal Engine 2.5", which powers UT2004. Same engine, only its up to v3204 as of now. That should give a good indication of just how many changes there are between UT2003 and UT2004, for those of you who doubt. As for licensees, there are a lot of them in this generation, and they're spread all over the place. Epic's UDN [epicgames.com] claims "Unreal 2.5" is the engine behind all their latest and licensees latest games, but in reality the whole mess spans over a thousand build numbers. Unreal 2, for example, uses a modified version of the UT2003 era engine. Of course, they made their own in house changes and improvements ("GOLEM" animation system, and a much improved particle system), but technically its UT2003 based. Other titles include *deep breath*: Splinter Cell, Deus Ex: Invisible War, XIII, Lineage 2, Postal 2, Devastation, Americas Army, Unreal Championship, and much more [epicgames.com]. (God only knows what kind of franken-unreal-engine the DNF team is working with now. ;))

      Now beyond that, you're looking at a bit of a fork. Namely "Unreal Engine 2X", their custom X-Box version of the engine (which will be powering Unreal Championship 2), and "Unreal Engine 3" which is the big bad kahuna daddy they flashed around at E3 this year. UE2X is a dead end build though, and UE3 won't be out until 2006 or later. Those are their known current to future plans at least.


      So yeah, thats Unreal in a nutshell (my advance apologies to the few Epic employees reading this incase I screwwed something up ;)). Its an amazing little engine, and it changes so quickly and so easilly its hard to keep track of what version is where and who modified it. But thats why the developers (and community mod makers, if I may say so myself) love it so much. You can do damn near ANYTHING with Unreal. They really did pick a ringer of a name for it all those years ago. :)


      -MD (Unreal fanboi for life)
      • Holy smokes. Not at the evolution of the engine, but of your knowledge of it. Maybe they should hire you.

        BTW - I think the Deep Space 9 game, The Fallen, was an excellent and incredible use of the Unreal engine.

        • Holy smokes. Not at the evolution of the engine, but of your knowledge of it. Maybe they should hire you.

          I'm working on that! ;)
          Seriously though, im just a big fan of Epic's work on Unreal. I was absolutely hooked by UT, fell into the mod scene, was zombified for two years by Tactical Ops, and later had a little fling with U2:XMP. Now I spend my days chasing my tail around in circles with UT2004, a couple lisenced games (will be playing Thief 3 later tonight), and about half a dozen excellent UT2004 mods

      • Of course, they made their own in house changes and improvements ("GOLEM" animation system, and a much improved particle system), but technically its UT2003 based.
        Do these changes (and ones from other developers) ever get folded back into the main engine?

        • Re:Unreal 101 (Score:3, Interesting)

          by MachDelta ( 704883 )
          Good question. I wouldn't know officially, but if I had to guess i'd say no. There would probably be problems with relicensing an engine that 30 licensees have contributed too (how do you divvy up the cash?) :).
          Maybe some under the table stuff goes on (especially between Epic and Digital Extremes [digitalextremes.com], since they've codeveloped practically every major Unreal game in history), but I can imagine that Epic wouldn't want to deal with the headache of letting someone else tinker with their work before they sell it to

  • Genre bending . . . a new trend? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nomihn0 ( 739701 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @01:46PM (#9297565)
    With Natural Selection [natural-selection.org], Uskaarj [beyondunreal.com], Unreal Annihilation [tauniverse.com], Warcraft III FPS mod [wc3campaigns.com], and Empires [empiresmod.com] all blending or totally converting between game genres and/or engines, there seems to be an interesting trend of "breaking the rules" or using a game very differently than it was originally intended. Is this a gimmick, first notably commercialized by Savage [s2games.com] or do you think it will keep its place on the game-store shelves?
    • I think its a sign that genres other than FPS games need to get off of their pathetic asses and start producing decent developers tools with their engines. 99% of mods are made on FPS engines, and the rest of the game types just don't really support it well.

      What the hell does Savage have to do with anything? The BattleZone games mixed FPS and RTS games back in the '90s, and did it better imho (well, if you wanted one army per player, at least).
      • Bioware is excellent about this. The Unreal developers are a great example and I hope the rest of the industry follows too, but you're absolutely right, other genres need to get on the ball.

        The Neverwinter Nights toolset is really good if that stuff is your thing, not sure they do this with their other games, but I imagine they will with similar titles in the future. The better the toolsets are, the longer the game will remain popular and the longer it'll be profitable for them. I'm glad Epic and Biowa

    • Re:Genre bending . . . a new trend? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Is this some sort of blatant karma whore?
      Quake 1 had boardgame, car racing, side scrolling and many other modifications. It's nothing new.

  • Alien Swarm for UT2004 (Score:5, Informative)

    by EvilXenu ( 706326 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @02:31PM (#9297788)
    Alien Swarm came out for UT2004 on May 28. It's a class-based, overhead view mod that pits players against the Alien Swarm. This is a non-PvP mod -- cooperative play is a must! I gotta say, I can't believe I was able to download this for FREE, that's how good it is.

    Find download links (including Bittorrent) here [blackcatgames.com].

  • Ouch! (Score:1)

    by rylin ( 688457 )
    Owiiiiiie!
    To quote the site. . .

    That being said, they are also running on a server, which they do pay for, and it has limits. Each hosted site is dished out a limited amount of bandwidth and disk space. Our limit is 5 gig per month.
    When I chose to move the site here, I never imagined this site would require anywhere near 5 gig to operate. However, this month we have used a total of 5.5gb of traffic this month.

    Let's play nice for a change?
  • Someone who spent a lot of time making a mod still has to insert the CD in the drive just to please the copy-locking technology. I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time on a mod just so I can promote a game that is copylocked. The community should get together to make an entire game free, not just the mods.
  • Hanni and Nexus at TAUniverse aren't gunna like this month's bandwidth bill. Please be nice to these hosts, they've been funding the community's busiest site for many years now, and I'd hate to see it go in one crushing bill. Yeah I'm the same PLAG from TAU if you recognise the name.
    • Dare i show my face :)

      nice to see you Proud, i should add you as a freind...

      As he said though, please be easy on the server if you can, UA has put quite a demand on it already.

      -Recoil
  • Well, I've been an active member of Total Annihilation Universe [tauniverse.com] for a while now, and have been keeping tabs on this project for quite some time. I'm very happy that it has come this far, and want to congratulate the UA team for making such a cool mod, and a job well done. (If partially) Make sure to drop by irc.gamesurge.net @ channel #UnrealAnnihilation on IRC and give some kudos to the UA team. And because we all know this is Slashdot, TAU is gonna have some big bills to pay at the end of the month. If yo
  • I've not been a big FPS fan, but did enjoy Halo and decided to try UT2004 when it came out -- thinking of Machinima possibilities down the road. But WOW!

    It's a killer game. Incredible graphics. (Run around in CTF MoonDragon sometime on a machine with a good graphics card and monitor.) All kinds of cool weapons, gametypes, vehicles, etc, and all wonderfully balanced without being symmetrical. Also Mutators which let you tweak games: force all weapons to be rocket launchers, modify gravity strength, etc.

    Pla

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