The Biggest Explosion... Ever

[hal]

A gem of a UT2004 video has surfaced in the OT section of the BU forums featuring a Redeemer and many, many... many exploding barrels. (thanks T2A`)

[Mister_Prophet]

Well....that was pretty awesome.

[toniglandyl]

reminds me when there were challenges like that and it made the game crash

PCs sure have evolved in the last half-decade.

[Mr. UglyPants]

That, was awesome.

[Sir_Brizz]

Kind of reminded me of Matrix Monkey Moves with Tally Ho set to only spawn bugs and firing redeemers into massive groups of them in slow motion. Wee!

[«MechikTaj»]

That was awesome! The wall at the end was beautiful.

[nELsOn]

That was fun to watch actually

[DarkSonny]

OMG! How many hours were needed to fill all those huge areas with barrels? O.o the end exploding reminds me a lot a movie "mommy" wow fun vid xd

[War_Master]

very nicely done!

I wish I had a PC that can do that, with the one I have now I barely play UT2k4 at 20fps or less lol.

[-Jes-]

Originally Posted by -Jes-

The youtube comments alone describe my overwhelming joy.

[JaFO]

If 1812 overture ever deserved a (game)video-clip this one nailed it.
Nice editing

[Hedge-o-Matic]

Yeah, the editing on this was really fantastic. This was great. I was actually laughing out lout when the "sea of barrels" was being panned over. The work with setting up not only the maps, but the camera angles, and then editing it all together to synch with the music is pretty mind-blowing.

[Alopexau]

I lol'd for real at the epic overhead panning shot... damn that was so much fun to watch. The music choice was /brilliant/

I remember trying something like this myself with just barrels and ctf-face and it made my PC very, very sad.

[aximon]

cool video

[hieloco]

EPIC.

By the way, what beast of a machine does this man have that can handle so many particles at once without missing a beat? Hmmm... that means that UT2004 maps could be made using incredibly complex particle systems to make up for a lack of volumetric effects, and they could run well on modern machines. (/Hieloco left to load UED 3.0 to try it out!/)

[HedgeMaster]

This video made my day! Truly epic as hieloco said (even though this word had inflated). An impressive multimedia show which may attract attention of not only UT fans.

Now imagine doing the same in UT3 with all these physics and dynamic lighthing . Maybe someday we'll see a computer able to handle it.

[Bi()ha2arD]

This just rocks!

Setting up the map was probably not that hard, its just copypasting stacks of barrels.

[TPC]

EDIT: One thing I need to add is that I did not "create" these maps. They're modified versions that are played over at the Omnipotents of ONS server. If you want a copy of these maps go over there and ask them, I will not be uploading any of these maps unless someone specifically requests one of the barrel maps, but it's much easier to just imagine running them, just do this:

1 Take random screenshots of Dria
2 Print them all out
3 Tape the first one to your monitor and stare at it for a few seconds
4 Swap it for the next one.

Gripping.

Maps Used

AS-Junkyard
AS-RobotFactory

DM-Antalus

ONS-ArticStronghold
ONS-Barracks
ONS-Battlefront
ONS-Bitchslap
ONS-Blockfort
ONS-Dria-Gorz
ONS-HomeSweetHome
ONS-HooverDam
ONS-Flurry
ONS-Grit
ONS-Kakmo
ONS-MagicIsle
ONS-MasterBath
ONS-Minus
ONS-Tanks-a-Lot
ONS-Torlan
ONS-Tyrant

Yes yes I know, internet famous, omg explosion, here's an autograph now get off me.

I did not expect this video to get very far beyond the Omni forums.

Okay, I'm here to clarify things, for those that are wondering.

System used:
AMD 6400+
2GB PC6400 DDR
8800GTS 512MB
About 80GB of HDD space (for 4 minutes of video!)
Windows XP 64 bit

A 64-bit OS and the 64-bit version of UT2004 was REQUIRED.

The video took about two weeks to make.

I started on XP SP3 32-bit but quickly ran into a problem. While rendering the explosions, UT2004 would swell to nearly 2GB and then crash with a GPF, claiming that there wasn't enough swap space left on the drive. Unfortunately the real reason was that XP32 had a max RAM limit of 4GB, and the most a single program can use is 2GB... no bueno. I dug up an old copy of XP 64 I had lying around (never though I'd use it) and bypassed this problem. UT2004-32 wasn't kidding about there not being enough swap. My PC only has 2GB of RAM but some of the explosions pegged over 6GB of RAM + swap usage... the Dria lake explosion was the largest of the entire bunch of tipped the scales at 10GB of RAM + swap in use. A fresh install of UT2004 is about 6GB. Holy crap.

There is a limit to how many emitters the emitter system in UE2.5 can handle. It's however many emitters come out of about ~28,000 exploding barrels. You know those clips at the end of the video where ALL the barrels blow up at the same time? I tried to do that to Dria. The Dria lakebed has almost 300,000 barrels. UT2004 couldn't even GPF. The UT2004.log said something about a critical in the emitter system... I figured I'd hit a hard limit.

As for making the maps, there wasn't any secret, it just took time. Place a few barrels, duplicate, place those, select all, duplicate, repeat repeat repeat until the map is full.

I did not shoot this in realtime. Nothing you see in the video was rendered at 30 fps... except maybe the opening fly-throughs, I didn't check. With barrels, it was anywhere between 20 frames per second to 10 seconds per frame.

The full Dria lake bed explosion is not in the video, you can see it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozi8zgnz-Eo

This video has 3,503 frames and took about 5 hours to render, which is about 5 seconds per frame. If think that takes a long time, Pixar spends about an hour per frame on much more complex scenery. This is nothing.

The secret is in two console commands, fixedfps and dumpframes. You can pipe these together:

x=fixedfps 30|dumpframes
y=fixedfps

"fixedfps 30" tells the engine to render 30 frames per "second" no matter what. "dumpframes" just dumps each frame to a screenshot.

Load these screenshots into VirtualDub or use AviSynth's ImageSource, play them back at 30fps, and wooha! Smooth video.

I couldn't get the engine to dump frames faster than 30fps, but that doesn't mean it's not possible.

You won't be able to render this at 30fps for a few years yet. Even a quad SLI would choke on the Dria explosion.

Do not try to use fixedfps while playing online. AntiTCC prevents the command from executing but that doesn't mean the server admin won't find out and ban your ass for trying to speedhack.

The inspiration for this video dates back to spring of 2004, when an Atari forums member by the name of "sethdonut" posted his own exploding barrel video. It was equally epic. Thanks to sethdonut for that one, and thanks to Omni for not banning me about finding all their custom maps rigged to explode.

Lastly, for any lurkers who are reading this, UT2004 could benefit from some new players. It is widely regarded as one of the best FPS games for any system ever. There are still many good servers out there, and the game will run on just about anything built from 2003 onward. It's great fun for both the competitive and the casual gamer... and defies industry standard by having no intrusive DRM. If you're curious, head on down to the local bargain bin and pick up the Unreal Anthology for $5. It's a game development studio in a box and the amount of custom content is endless. Yes, it's 5+ years old, but we're still having fun with it.

[nELsOn]

An interesting read. Especially that part about Pixar and the time it takes them to render 1 frame

[IronMonkey]

Great music and fantastic fun!

Well done.