Unreal Tournament Revolution

Will you explain what the mod is Fuzz?

It's pretty much UT for UT2004. The first alpha's/beta's looked very promising (I'm a huge fan of remakes), but after a while it became apparent that the project wouldn't make it. I'm guessing that different opinions lead to arguments which lead to people leaving etc. (but Brizz would know more about that than I)

There should be a download link around somewhere though (try the search function or google).

^ So it like removed dodge jumping, etc?

That's right, UT1 movement, weapons etc.

Yeah, someone took it away from me when I kept it going for a very quiet year and I've heard nothing since.

I'm still working on some classic conversions but the'll probably appear for UT3.

Officially, it's still on, but unofficially, you're not very likely to see it.

We did do quite a bit of work on it - we had the code pretty much done and more or less just needed models and such... our modellers disappeared and everything more or less went off. Then UT3 came out and did pretty much what we hoped to do.

There's still a chance it might see the light of day, but that's admittingly rather slim unless we get a dedicated team together again. Half the problem was the mappers were waiting on the coders, who were waiting on the modellers, who were waiting on the animators...

That's what tends to happen to projects when you put out calls for help and nobody helps out. Everyone wants to play it, nobody wants to make it...

Fuzz said:

People won't help because they can't.

I can list numerous things I would love to do with any version of UT but I haven't got a clue where to start and what I am doing wrong when things don't seem to work.

Click to expand...

And that's pretty much the crux of the problem, even today.

We'd need people that have UT2004, are interested in working with the mod, and - perhaps most importantly - are still interested in working with 2k4. The move to UT3 will be done by most people.

If we get the help, we'll release it; if not, I will see if Bersy can perhaps upload the last code drop and release it strictly "as-is."

The mods' history doesn't really help your case either.
I myself would love to contribute, but seeing how the project already died twice (afaik), I'm not sure if I should apply and potentially waste a lot of time.

Also, do you have a site or forums or anything like that?

To me this mod seems like it will have a tough time finding a target audience.
It's aiming towards people who have UT2004 but want the UT gameplay.
I would imagine though, that the people who want the UT game play, play UT or have migrate to UT3 which tried to bring the UT feel to the new engine.

So people who liked the UT feel are either playing UT or have moved on to UT3. I would guess that trying to appeal to the UT 2k players with a mod that takes away precisely those things that they like about UT 2k would be a tough thing.
UT3 tried to do precisely this too, I think. (bring the UT feel to a new engine)
Then again people who download mods are looking for something different from the standard gameplay, so who knows.

Well, I would like to have something like UT gameplay in graphically enhanced worlds. But the question is, what's UT gameplay? What should the mod change?

Fuzz said:

Thing is, framerates are horrible in UT3 at old computers. If you compare to the Abracadabra, most people won't get near that. The graphics are blending as always but you will have a clear disadvantage without the nice framerates. While I'm at it, loading times are quite long too, especially when most of it have to go through the swap files.

Click to expand...

Long? Most maps load for me in 20 seconds or so, even when I only had 2 gigs of RAM.

Vehicle maps are a bit longer to load, perhaps 10 seconds or so more.

And that's with maximum details. It spends perhaps another 5-10 seconds streaming stuff.

Load times are bad if you only got a gigabyte of RAM, though. Took 2 minutes for a max details match of VCTF-Suspense to be finally stutter-free...

Here's the story all about how this mod got flip turned upside down..

After we released the alpha, things were looking good, until I started having some health related issues and thus wasn't able to manage the mod very well for some months, and the guy responsible for the programming started getting all crazy about getting it out before UT3 because he believed nobody would play UT2004 anymore (to which I say HA! in retrospect) .. we all tried to say that we preferred to take the time to do it right, we wanted it to basically be UT with a new coat, same maps same characters.. and maybe even improve on the detail of UT2004 a little.. you know... something to impress people.

Well this guy just wouldn't have it, and every once in a while he'd pop up with a new codebase, eventually it was less UTR and more CDOM4 with his additions and parts of other mods and his crappy models and ut2004 remakes of maps.. he completely messed up the mod architecture so that it would be compatible with a "compact" version of UTR which was essentially a set of mutators or something.. and kept threatening to release it publicly. Anyway it came to the point where I said look, we've had enough of these stupid threats, you have a choice, you can make the changes we need to bring this back in the right direction and go along with what we want to do with UTR, or you can leave.. I think you can fill in the rest.

Afterwards we found that it would be a huge bitch to undo a lot of the crap he did, we would have had to more or less start over from where the alpha left off. The fact that we didn't have any fresh talent coming to the team also meant that if I wasn't doing anything on it, it was at a standstill. I really lost any desire to continue it and although we have attempted to get the ball rolling again once last year I have serious reservations about investing that kind of time into it anymore.

It's unfortunate but I think the time has passed for this sort of thing. UT2004 might still have potential as a platform for it, and nobody really has any clue what will happen with UT3 at this point. In fact I think there's a pretty big question mark over the entire Unreal franchise.

It is bitter sweet that we were able to get at least one release out with some success, I guess that is something. The lesson I've learned is that "remaking UT" is a concept people are going to all see differently and it's not going to be pretty. It's different when it's someone else intellectual property.. really it almost becomes a job that you don't even get paid for. So.. maybe someone will continue it, they're free to do so, I'd love to if I had all the time in the world, but I don't. And if not, then it is what it is.