Total Unreal

By the early 21st century the first-person shooter genre was taking huge leaps forward. With games such as Halo: Combat Evolved stretching out to meet both console and PC gamers and the birth of the new Battlefield series, it was hard to imagine a way to make things any better. As was their fashion, Epic decided that since the market was such a challenge it would be the best time to create something remarkable.

Released on October 1st 2002, Unreal Tournament 2003 served as the sequel to Unreal Tournament. While not having the same type of impact on the community as the original, it was very well received. Introducing a few new game types such as Bombing Run, Invasion, and Mutant, it gave the community some fresh new modes to play with.

Released on February 3rd 2003, nearly five years after it's predeccesor, Unreal II: The Awakening was released. Over the course of these five years Epic had remained busy with other titles but this was the first time they had returned to the original story. But was it the original story?

Set in a new part of the Unreal universe, the story follows ex-marine John Dalton as he patrols seemingly boring areas of space. He is called back to service to help retrieve seven pieces of an ancient artifact thought to create a powerful weapon.

Like Unreal, the game is shown from the first-person and is similar in it's playstyle. The player travels to different planets, blasting through enemies and solving puzzles along the way. One highly praised aspect of this is the diversification of the planets and their inhabitants.

With Call of Duty 4 largely humiliating Halo in the Xbox Live popularity contest, and Frontlines (if it hasn't surrendered already) imminently preparing to hoist the white flag in preparation for Battlefield: Bad Company, you can't help but feel Unreal Tournament 3 has arrived late to a party already at full capacity. And yet... when something turns up in this kind of shape, it's always going to be welcome.

Stack this up against the glut of mutiplayer shooters on 360 and we'll award you no prizes whatsoever for guessing which is the offspring of a company that's been making arena shooters for almost a decade. Epic really know their stuff and it's never been more evident than on the killing fields of Unreal Tournament 3. Everything just feels so tight, so slick, so-self assured. Yes, it might take you five minutes to get used to the lightning quick, almost slippery feel to the controls, but when those controls 'grip', you start to realise you're being guided by one of the best.

Let's go down memory lane to the late 1990's. Console gaming was booming with the Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation. PC gaming was beginning to pick up pace and was finally heading towards online play. With big titles like Half-Life and Starcraft being released, the pressure was on Epic Megagames to deliver something spectacular. They didn't disappoint.

Tim Sweeney had been working on his project for three years and fans couldn't wait to see what was behind the shiny packaging. Could it possibly stand up to the years best title, Quake II? Released on May 22nd 1998, Unreal was bound to be legendary. Its brand new, state of the art Unreal Engine was seen as revolutionary. You can't read anything about this game without finding praise for attention to detail. Whether it was a touch of lighting effects in a dark corner, or a harmless critter roaming around Na Pali, the critics loved every bit of it.

Today, Midway Games announced that Unreal Tournament 3 for the Xbox 360 will have several new features, including split screen, five exclusive maps and two new characters. Additionally, the game will feature an exclusive video preview of Gears of War 2, with to-date unseen footage of the game's multiplayer modes. Design director Cliff Bleszinski and producer Rod Fergusson will narrate the video.

"We're very excited to be shipping Unreal Tournament 3 for Xbox 360," said Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games, Inc. "This is a great title and, with two-player split screen support and some very cool new content, Xbox 360 players should be thrilled with this fantastic version of the game."

We have been feeling lately that the Unreal mod community is not quite as big as it used to be back in the days of Unreal and Unreal Tournament. There just doesn't seem to be as much excitement or involvement in Unreal modding as a whole, and we think it's high time that we did something about it.

So we are launching a new contest that will hopefully give the mod community a much-needed boost! We're going to give 3 people the chance to earn some pretty sweet prizes, and one person the chance to have their level reviewed by none other than Cliff Bleszinski himself!

Now, we know what most of you are probably thinking. "There's no way I could enter a contest like that! I don't even know how to create a million-polygon normal map!"

WRONG! This is an old school contest in which contestants are ONLY allowed to use the assets that ship along with Unreal Tournament 3. NO custom content whatsoever is allowed. No textures, no meshes, no animations, NOTHING that isn't included and ready to use from a basic UT3 installation! All you need to know is how to make a fun-to-play map!

1st and 2nd runners-up will receive the following:
• A copy of Unreal Tournament 3 signed by the Epic Games development team!
• A PlayStation 3 game console (or $500 cash)
• An up to 30-minute screen captured gameplay review of your level by 3D Buzz's own Unreal gaming fanatics, Logan and Terry!

The contest winner will receive the following:
• $1,000 cash prize!
• A copy of Unreal Tournament 3 signed by the Epic Games development team!
• A PlayStation 3 game console (or $500 cash)
• An up to 30-minute screen captured gameplay review of your level by 3D Buzz's own Unreal gaming fanatics, Logan and Terry!
• An up to 30-minute screen captured review of your level by Epic Games Design Director Cliff Bleszinski!

Gameplay:
- Fixed overlay mesh showing up on hidden sniper rifle when un-zoomed.
- UTGame.bNoCustomCharacters is now globalconfig.
- Now hear own auto-taunts.
- Fix for Liandri bots riding high in vehicles.
- Fixed mutators disappearing between matches.
- Fixed up PC DLC screenshots and player counts.
- Vipers can no longer be driven around underwater if entered while underwater - they pop up out of the water, even if deep in it.
- Fixed announcements not playing properly in WAR-MarketDistrict during the campaign.
- Fixed manta crouch exploit.
- Fixed loaded RL switching away before releasing load on net clients.
- Fixed occasionally getting stuck when getting up from ragdoll.
- Fixed ending zoom when go into feign death.

Complete List Of Changes Gameplay: - Fixed overlay mesh showing up on hidden sniper rifle when un-zoomed. - UTGame.bNoCustomCharacters is now globalconfig. - Now hear own auto-taunts. - Fix for Liandri bots riding high in vehicles. - Fixed mutators disappearing between matches. - Fixed up PC DLC screenshots and player counts. - Vipers can no longer be driven around underwater if entered while underwater - they pop up out of the water, even if deep in it. - Fixed announcements not playing properly in WAR-MarketDistrict during the campaign. - Fixed manta crouch exploit. - Fixed loaded RL switching away before releasing load on net clients. - Fixed occasionally getting stuck when getting up from ragdoll. - Fixed ending zoom when go into feign death. - Fixed giving proper stats credit for translocator telefrags. - Fixed giving proper suicide stat credit for certain environmental suicides. - Fixed Hoverboard foot placement when watching other client get on. - Improved the turret controls on the rail turret with analog controller. - Fixed friendly fire mutator showing up as option for Duel. - Fixed bug where second enforcer wouldn't show up if picked up while switching to enforcer. - Fixed shock/instagib beams which were grabbed from emitter pool sometimes incorrectly having DPG_Foreground set. - Fixed "missing required file for demo playback" error message. - Fixed redeemer explosion on client when shot down. - Fixed big head mutator head scaling popping out at distance. - End the match right away in duel if a player leaves. - Fixed not getting kismet node destroyed event when node captured by orb. - Fixed effect showing up for disabled weapon lockers. - Don't modify power core damage caused by kismet. - Fixed scavenger legs disappearing in kill volumes. - Deployables can no longer be deployed onto hover/flying vehicles. - Fixed Hoverboard script warnings and possible crash if hoverboard fails to spawn. - Fixed impact hammer impact camera shake for low gore clients. Engine/Rendering: - Added motion blur menu option for PC (defaults to off). - Fixed zero extent collision bug in octree code (finding nodes in Z axis). - LOD Hysteresis / LOD Decision making bug fix. - Fixed default mesh not having proper LOD settings. - Fixed rare darkwalker physics crash. User Interface: - Added player name list to server browser. - Added midgame map voting, with serverside config options in UTGame.ini: - bMidGameMapVoting: Enables/Disables midgame map voting - MapVotePercentage: The percentage of votes required to initiate a map switch, counts down based upon VoteDuration; - NOTE: When VoteDuration=0, votes for a single map must exceed this percentage, but when VoteDuration is not 0, the number of players voting must exceed this percentage - MinMapVotes: The minimum number of players that must vote in order to initiate a map switch. - InitialVoteDelay: Delays the enabling of map voting for this many seconds - Fixed History being saved for servers joined via cmdline and console. - Fixed leading vote count indicator when map voting underway. - Don’t show muted talking player portraits on HUD. - Simple crosshair tweaks. - Added the number of files left to download to the package downloading message. - Fixed Krall portrait. - Fixed clipping vehicle HUD beacon when not visible. - Fixed endgame timer so that it isn't affected by changes in game speed (also fixes vote timer) - Fixed SPMA deploy icon offset. Networking: - Always sort relevant actors by priority. Should fix the weird actors/properties never getting replicated issues. - Fixed gibs not showing for clients of listen server if the gibbed player wasn't visible to the server player. - Fixed gibs not showing for clients of low-gore listen server. - New dynamic netspeed adjustment system for listen servers. Improves network performance for listen servers which typically have limited upstream bandwidth by dividing available bandwidth between clients. Configurable through new properties in UTGame.ini: - TotalNetBandwidth=32000 (total upstream bandwidth to be apportioned) - MaxDynamicBandwidth=7000 - MinDynamicBandwidth=4000 - Fixed "you have lost the match" messages to spectators at end of duel match. - Fixed cases where GameSettings cache in the GameInfo wasn't properly getting NULL'd out on DestroyOnlineGame(). - HTTP redirect with compression now falls back to the uncompressed case if the compressed file could not be found. - Fixed erroneous "connection failed" error when performing non-seamless travelling. - Fixed hoverboard link failure sound playing in the world and being replicated. - Fixed low gore clients seeing gibbed players as headless if playing on full gore server. - Increased tracked turret net priority. - Fixed Hoverboard networking replication issues (hoverboard now smoother in net games). Server administration: - UWeb fixes for WebAdmin. - Fixed downloaded cooked maps not being loaded correctly in some cases when requested by the server at initial connect time. - Fixed net object count problem when using the conformed/cooked audio packages in PS3ModTools. Fixes some networking issues for custom maps. - Final fix for packagemap problem with going from DLC -> RTM maps. - Fixed properly showing number of players needed for match to start when minplayers is set and bots are enabled on the server. - Fixed bug with PlayerID being reused for bots after a seamless travel. Mod support: - Added support for Interactions to have a PostRender call (to render to canvas). - Added support for Interactions to have exec functions be called on them. - Added cut/copy/paste support to the console. - Added Deproject() to canvas. - Fixed base InventoryManager implementation of GetWeaponRatingFor(). - Fixed crash when placing a new UINumericEditBox in UI editor. - Fix for custom factions in the UI. - Added optional flag for ScriptedTextures to skip next clear so that a ScriptedTexture client doesn't need to draw every texel of the ST every update. - Added support for -mod commandline option so that a TC mod can have a .ini file "sandbox" - where they can have new content paths, new startup maps, etc.. - Improved system for getting camera death effect. - Implemented fix from Aegia for an NxFluid crash. - Fixed beams not rendering in Cascade. - Fixed crash when updating a UIPrefab. Map specific: - Fixed CTF-Searchlight black boxes before match starts. - Fixed CTF-Searchlight search lights. - Fixed CTF-Hydrosis collision issues. - Fixed DM-Morbias collision issues. - Fixed collision issue in DM-Deck. AI improvements: - Fixed bots not using link gun beam on enemies. - Better bot celebration management. - Fixed bots doing multiple end of match celebration taunts. - Improved impact hammer AI. - Improved darkwalker AI support for crouching under obstacles. - Improved bot hoverboard AI. - Fixed bots sometimes not picking up flags/orbs they dropped. - Fixed bots never spawning in if initially not enough playerstarts.

In our Black Sierra update this month, we have a couple things to mention. One of the nicest changes we've made; happens to be the new website we've moved to. Yes, yes, we took everyone’s suggestion and got rid of the freewebs site. The new website will allow everyone to access everything all in one easy ad-free environment, this will include all our updates that we have here on Moddb, and some more exclusive information that will follow along the progress of production more closely. In addition to a much cleaner website, we've imbedded a new and professional forum in the same place.

As for actual game updates, Black Sierra has fixed the way it handles map switching. We've managed to link all maps together which allows for a quick ingame loading time, along with keeping all the information about the player, such as points, health, ammuniton and weaponry thoughout a whole game. This puts players into a position where a more logical approach is required to finish the campaign, as well as giving players a better reason to use team work. If a player rushes into battles, and loses health, his low-state of health will transfer to the next map resulting in higher chances of death later on.

We have also managed to put another weapon in-game, it is an effective fully automatic primary weapon that can be selected at the beginning of the game.

Well this week has seen some big change for the Warm Gun team...
We lost 3 members this past week who were all picked up by professional studios.
This is the main reason for us to be in this mod world so I look at it as a positive thing, these 3 members were an integral part of our operations so with them moving on we now have positions open.
If your looking to join a project that will get your work noticed feel free to visit our forums and post your work. We are looking for 3D talent as well as Texture artists.
You can apply here... Warmgun.ca

So now onto this weeks update...
First up we have some new weapon renders, these shots feature the outlaw pistol.

Next up we have A new Character render to show...Unfortunately the modeler has bailed so its not finished...it will need some love, so if your a character molder please step up and help out.

Next is the blacksmiths Gatling Gun... This is also a WIP shot...

Next week we will have some fly by videos of the newest level...that should hopefully get people up to speed on what the Warm Gun world will look like. We have had so many comments about how confusing the genre is so we have hired a new writer to help re-evaluate the Warm Gun back story so expect to get a more detailed impression of the story soon. Thanks again for the great feedback... we are pushing forward as always.
Rock N Roll.