What do You Want from BeyondUnreal?

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Desp2/ROG

New Member
Mar 5, 2004
180
0
0
41
Jersey
www.planetunreal.com
Sometimes I browse around here still. I always thought this site would grow into a UDK community, but it sort of missed that boat. Here are some awesome works for udk lately map wise. Check it out :)

Bath House from street fighter done in UDK.

http://www.polycount.com/2011/07/16/bath-house-download/

Some great modular work flow sample

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=86588

Funky rabbit level.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=69263

Work in progress still but interesting.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=86400

All these are great samples of mostly new people making maps/environments for UDK. Their are tons more being constantly made. It is almost a shame you can not find these maps in one site to download and have a review of them and even perhaps awards. Sure enough most of these are non playable but are still great showcases of imagination.

As for me I have been gone from the Unreal community :| Lately been trying to get some time back to udk but crytek is sooo sooo tempting me atm lol. Work has taken over having some private time with Lara Croft :D

Hope this site finds its way it is still one of my favorite sites.
 

SleepyHe4d

fap fap fap
Jan 20, 2008
4,152
0
0
Hey folks, it's been a long time coming, but a few forum comments and my own nagging gut feeling have brought to the forefront an interesting question. What do you want from BeyondUnreal?

Our mission from the beginning was to continue covering the Unreal series first and foremost and to capitalize on the budding licensee list to keep the news fresh in between Unreal titles. Well, the licensee list kept growing but the Unreal spigot trickled uneventfully to a halt.

My questions to you are these: do want more or less Unreal Engine Licensee news? Do you want news of whatever Unreal/UT/UT2k4/UT3 projects have been released, however small? What else do you need from BeyondUnreal?

Finally, to fulfill this mission should the outcry be for more Unreal news, we'd certainly be interested in working with someone who has a finger on the pulse of whatever projects were happening out there. A simple news report at news@beyondunreal.com would be nice, but if you're interested in writing about it for the front page we'd be glad to talk with you about it.

Your feedback regarding the direction of the site is important.

Very interesting question and I wonder how serious you guys will take the responses.

Since you bring it up, I think you should make this a major change and have some major considerations. I personally think this site should abandon all Unreal-series focused stuff and change it to purely UDK focused. By this I mean have the focus of the website spread fairly over everything UDK related and have no bias at all towards the Unreal series or Epic. This of course meaning to remove all the Unreal related forum boards and links on the side of the main page. Instead have a "Gaming discussion" forum section and other boards to complement the Off Topic board. I think this would actually be healthy for all activities, because you can have stuff like a "UT99 server" thread in the gaming forum and give it more exposure since it would be under a broad forum subject. It would also relieve some traffic from Off Topic if you split that section into different subjects since that is where like 99% of the traffic is.

I know it's sad, but this would be the smartest thing to do seeing as how the use of this website has evolved up till now.

I think the forum would make a lot more sense if it went something like this:
Code:
Beyond Unreal
          News and Articles (No Unreal-bias, but fair UDK-based news. NO UE3-GAME NEWS. I can go to big sites for Mass Effect news.)
          News and Articles self-posts/suggestions
          Site Discussion
          Site Suggestions
          Bans, Appeals and Complaints
General Discussion (no hardware forum, people always post shit in offtopic anyways. Maybe a "PC Troubleshooting" thread?)
          Off-Topic (no art subforum)
          Gaming (gaming discussion AND news)
          World Discussion (for world news, politics, and religion. ENFORCE THIS RULE!!!)
          Adults Only (18+ section would be neat and funny)
          Forum Classics
          Forum Archive
UDK  (UT3 and other game-based mods go in these sections too)
          Announcements
          Recruitment
          Modeling
          Mapping
          Coding
          Project Discussion
          Project Ideas
Affiliated Site Forums
          Ect.
          Ect.

Seriously. Things have changed. We don't need 200 Unreal series related boards. It would benefit both the Unreal series and other games too if we just had one "Gaming" board.

inb4 someone comments on my text size. It's more of a "tl;dr" purpose.
 
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hal

Dictator
Staff member
Nov 24, 1998
21,409
19
38
54
------->
www.beyondunreal.com
Good suggestions and, yes Sleepyhead, we will take them seriously including your forum updates which are long overdue. I can't promise all of those things will come about without taking on a few volunteers to help with technical and content, but we will try.
 

Lruce Bee

Transcending to another level
May 3, 2001
1,644
3
38
Sherwood Forest
Yeah, the front page needs a bit of a clean up generally.
There's a lot of personal sites from old level designers that never get updated, so they need taking down and replaced with some newer, more active stuff.
 

Northrawn

New Member
Feb 21, 2009
571
0
0
My very personal preferences for the future of this site:

- Keep the amount of news for games from EPIC as it is. It is nice to know about sales, trailers and so on.

- Increase the news about UDK projects. I am interested in them a lot. I can help for news on two or three of them which I follow.

- Also keep on posting UDK news as well (directly about the UDK itself, not any projects made with it), as you do right now.

- I would like to hear more about good mutators and mods for Unreal, Unreal 2, UT,UT2k4 and UT3. Maybe even if these things are smaller and not finished yet. Maybe they are looking for testers or so.
One example is the Betrayal gametype from UT3 made for UT2k4 by Wormbo. It is currently in Beta and tested over at Titan (EU). It already gets full servers with dedicated UT2k4 players to improve, report on bugs and suggest things.

- More boobies.
 
U

Unregistered

Guest
I also share that opinion. More community games/projects, fewer big games.

Well, I agree with that, except the "fewer big games" statement.
If there's news on a big game go ahead and post it, just don't sacrifice the other stuff for it.
I mean, that is, if you only post one news story a day, and then have to take a nap - make it a community news post. :D
 

r1esG0

Unreal Engine Padawan
Feb 4, 2008
174
0
0
Seville, Spain
Sometimes I browse around here still. I always thought this site would grow into a UDK community, but it sort of missed that boat. Here are some awesome works for udk lately map wise. Check it out :)

Bath House from street fighter done in UDK.

http://www.polycount.com/2011/07/16/bath-house-download/

Some great modular work flow sample

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=86588

Funky rabbit level.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=69263

Work in progress still but interesting.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=86400

All these are great samples of mostly new people making maps/environments for UDK. Their are tons more being constantly made. It is almost a shame you can not find these maps in one site to download and have a review of them and even perhaps awards. Sure enough most of these are non playable but are still great showcases of imagination.

As for me I have been gone from the Unreal community :| Lately been trying to get some time back to udk but crytek is sooo sooo tempting me atm lol. Work has taken over having some private time with Lara Croft :D

Hope this site finds its way it is still one of my favorite sites.

damn, your post has showed me how live the udk community really is.
Kinda dissapointed Beyond Unreal has not talked about this awesome art.

When the new toolset came, lots of people said that the new degree of complexity would stop people from making levels, because they said this level of complexity could only be achieved by proffesionals who spend lots of months on their projects.

The community has not only proven to deserve this quality tools, but also has demonstrated what they can do with it.
 
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Mozi

Zer0 as a number
Apr 12, 2002
3,544
0
0
In the Borderlands..
www.mozidesign.com
I agree with more focus on UDK would be good. Also I know a lot of people out there still like to make maps and mods. As we all know (or most of us at least) an outlet to showcase the best maps and mods is dead. We used to have Ownage from Cliff but that died out after UT2k4, granted the man is busy to review maps, but then we had pwnage and that too is down. We also lost Insite.. also to add to the list CBP is also at a halt.

Without an "Unreal" game news and content is slow. Though if people are willing to make awesome content to be featured on BU then we should provide an outlet for that and have more maps and or mods showcased on the front page.

I guess what I am saying here is that beyond unreal can help promote the best community content featured here or from other sources. If things work out BU could host its own contests for level design every now and then if cool prizes could be secured.

I don't have the time or resources to put together a new pwnage/map review site but I would be willing to volunteer to do reviews and critiques along with other established community level designers to help keep the unreal mod scene active be it with UDK, UT3, UT2x or even old school UT.
 
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gopostal

Active Member
Jan 19, 2006
848
47
28
It's an interesting decision to be made. I just peeked at GameTracker and the listing is:
U3 is ranked #42
2K4 is ranked #27
UT is ranked #17

So do you continue forward with the Unreal discussion being focused on the newer, prettier content or the older (and obviously more chosen) legacy content? Groups still develop and release a lot of UT content. I get many emails and requests for help with new developers coming on board often. You wouldn't know it though because there is not a dedicated release/information point with so many sites down. It tends to be shared among the dedicated server admins for that particular style and doesn't really break out into the mainstream much. Mods like Siege and MonsterHunt and Tac Ops everyone knows but no one realizes is still getting love and attention. Someplace besides ModDB would be nice to highlight this.

Also there is this tidbit I got in a PM the other day:
Although it seem unlikely that this game gets more popular again, well, fact is more simpler games have been developed lately and getting very veeerrrry popular. Why? Because people are now looking for simple games which run everywhere, and UT is somewhat one of them.

It's a valid point. MineCraft anyone?
 

NRG

Master Console Hater
Dec 31, 2005
1,727
0
36
34
I'm sure this has already crossed minds but, for the front page news I would continue with what ever can be determined as to what visitors come back for. As in, people who aren't regulars of the message boards (most of the people posting here) but frequent the news page as part of their daily favorites routine. (lurkers) There's bound to be a good amount of those kind of visitors, right?
 

Leo(T.C.K.)

I did something m0tarded and now I have read only access! :(
May 14, 2006
4,794
36
48
This new layout is terrible, the "classic unreal titles" should have stayed as it was imo, now people need to go through "Games", etc to get to normal Unrela or UT board, wtf. Those games still need support, just because Epic deleted Unrealtournament2003.com and unreal.com doesn't mean that everyone else has to drop support. Look at 3Drealms, their site still going and they still have files for their own old games, easy as hell. Now, few years ago planetunreal and planetquake dropped many mod and developer subsites. FTL.
 

Delacroix

Successor of Almarion
Jan 12, 2006
811
3
18
40
Warsaw, PL
There still is an active community for the older games and making it more difficult to reach their forums is nonsense. Thanks but no thanks. This site really is going downhill faster than before. Congrats.