So, is there any way to save this game?

[DGUnreal]

I just think alot of people are exaggerating the flaws, I mean clientside demo record? ever since I heard about this one I havent heard the end of it. Honestly I didnt know it even worked properly in 2k4, my experience with it was that it was pretty dodgy.

The nay-sayer's have simply latched onto the half-dozen items in UT3 that have issues or are broken, regardless of the actual "usability" or popularity of those features. I'm sure we can all list them off by heart by now since they have been repeated ad nauseum...

The list of items tends to change as the nay-sayers get continually shown why various items on their list are flawed. The new batch includes the demorec and the inability to export textures.


Regarding the demorec, it had issues in UT2004 as well. Just go to the Epic forums and do a search for "demorec" in the UT2003/2004 forum area, you'll get a pile of threads with people asking why it crashes when they record.

The UT3 nay-sayers just want to find every little issue just to try to validate their negative position against UT3 and state that "this" is why I don't like the game or "this" is why it didn't sell well or "this" is why there is no one on the servers. As if demorec or exporting skins has something to do with the number of players online...

Is a malfunctioning demorec really an issue here? Does it affect playing the game in Instant or online? Does it affect mapping or mod'ing?
It is all totally unfounded and silly.

There are other issues that I would like to see fixed long before the seldom/never useful demorec. And don't ask me what they are... I'm not going to give you more fodder to fire at UT3...


I will agree that stability/crashing for those who are encountering it is an issue. That is an issue with any game and something that needs to be resolved. However, as a comparison, I still have issues with BF2142 and that is 18 months since its release.
But stability, along with everything else mentioned can be fixed in future patches and without re-releasing the game (interface, demorec, server browser, texture export, adrenaline, weapons, vehicle handling, game types, ...)


If everyone complaining really took the time to search back through all of the reviews and posts regarding issues with UT2003 and UT2004, they would see that UT3 is no better and no worse. UT2004 patches and packs fixed bugs and added features and new characters and new vehicles and new game types, etc. etc. The initial release version of UT200x was no more and no less better or complete.

A few quotes right from BU reviews:

Community compliants over UT2004:

"The game’s flaws are minor, yet enough for die-hard critics to employ a platform for complaints."

UT2004 Interface:

"Death and taxes remain constant, but so does the love and hate relationship fans have with Unreal’s interfaces."

UT2004 Interface:

"I'm still not happy with the GUI, sure compared to UT2003's it’s a godsend, but I can’t help but feel a little let down. It’s extremely cluttered, too colorful (mainly in regards to the loading screens), dull in areas, inconsistent, and not to mention just downright ugly in sections. I’m not going to sit here and preach."

UT2004 Vehicle Handling Issues:

"Vehicle models react well with the world, but will occasionally experience slight problems with a map."

UT2004 Bot AI:

I won't bother attempting to link to all of the comments on this, which includes: bots sticking on map geometry, bots walking past you without engaging in fights, bots staying in vehicles, bots dismissing roles, etc.

UT2004 Mutators:

"Some critics opined that these mutators would hinder the game play or flow of the maps –especially the new ones."


Shall I continue with more or do you all get the point...
I'm sure I can fill a dozen pages in this thread with complaints and issues with UT200x when it shipped as well.

 

[FuLLBLeeD]

Brizz, I'm curious, do you currently think UT3 is doing well?

 

[Grobut]

Did I already ask you if you had Gears of War installed? Or to check in your Add/Remove Programs for AMD Multicore Driver or something like that?

Yes you did, and no i do not, Gears is not really my sort of thing.

I really have tried everything, but there is a smoking gun here:

The game will crash instantly upon map load online, or in instant action with bots, but, instant action without any bots works perfectly! with zero bots enabled, i can run any map for houers on end, at full graphics and max resolution at a rock solid 80 or above FPS (unless looking at a portal, of course), and all hardware monitors say my system is running cooler than the Fonz, so my system can handle it, it can run the engine, but add just one single bot (or more, whatever), and its an instant one way ticket to my desktop upon map start..

That really seems to indicate that its a bug with the game (possibly tripping over its own legs because of some hardware combination or whatever) and not with my rig or drivers.

 

[UnrealGrrl]

The thing is, the people that played UT2004 to the bitter end, by and large did not want any of that junk. I'd wager more people complained about that stuff than are complaining about the removal of that stuff.

Adding more options seems like a good way to revitalize a community, but it's not. UT2004 suffered because there was simply too much in it and it didn't really excel at any one thing. I'm pretty sure that TAM, a custom 3rd party mod that completely removes every nuance of UT2004 gameplay is still in the #1 or #2 spot of most played gametypes in UT2004. That should tell you something about how much people like the core gameplay..

absolutely true... i played 2003 and 2k4 and never looked back to UT again even though that was my fave ... i loved 2k3 & 4 but did not like the floaty jumpy cartwheel adrenaline and neither did most major fans of UT i know...

of course i cant speak for everyone, but i know alot of UT fans and UT3 is alot closer to UT and what most fans i know wanted.

 

[UnrealGrrl]

Brizz, I'm curious, do you currently think UT3 is doing well?

hi my names not Brizz, but...

UT3 is doing kinda so-so online. i have no clue if the sales of it (pc & ps3) made anyone happy... i do know it has a chance to be the best FPS ever if its given a chance and [robert plant]a whole lotta love[/robert plant]

and that means Epics gotta take this baby by the tail and whip up alotta "cool stuff" and re release a monster of a marketing spree with a new fixed edition and the players will come... no pun intended

 

[DGUnreal]

I really have tried everything, but there is a smoking gun here:

Maybe that is the problem... you shot your PC...

but seriously...

I haven't followed any threads with your issue, but what does the log file show, if anything?
Have you tried running the game single-threaded?

 

[UnrealGrrl]

The nay-sayer's have simply latched onto the half-dozen items in UT3 that have issues or are broken,

and ALOTAA other stuff.

maybe its just me but those "half a dozen items" (more like a couple dozen) are things that UT needs, is known for or always worked before and are now horribly broken or missing from the game.

we're not talking minor stuff here and ppl who want to try to say that those who are complaining about the broken features or lack of features and polish are whining are just reverse forum trolls. (especially after Epic already admitted to these problems and mistakes!)

we're not making this **** up my friends... the game was released too soon, unfinished and with broken stuff that even the producers of the game didnt like. end of freakin story.

now as the title of the thread asks... is there any way to save this game? Yes.

Play the Game

Mod for the Game

and HOPE that Epic is working on a re-release with a good marketing spree to go along with it.

 

[NedroidicusPrime]

There are so many people complaining about bugs with UT3, but do they ever consider that it could be something other than UT3 causing the issue?

There have been a few people like this I have tried to help, and the response has always been hostile.

I have since come to the conclusion that they don't want to fix their UT3, because then they would have nothing to complain about that hasn't already been beaten to death.

*edit* Not every program crash is caused by the application itself. Take COD4 for example, I couldn't get the MP to work at all for almost a month. Turns out that the drivers for my sound card were the issue. This didn't make sense, since they were the most updated ones on the manufacturers website. I did some hunting, and found drivers from another manufacturer (same onboard sound), and got it to work fine.

Heck, I thought 2k4 was buggy as hell, but it turned out that I had a really weird memory timing issue on my old comp. Almost every other game ran fine, but 2k4 crashed every single time. Memtest showed nothing at all.

My current system has an Asus mobo that supposedly has this "AI Overclocking" feature that is supposed to auto-overclock as needed. It is enabled by default, and made my system so that I couldn't even reach my desktop (until i manually set memory timing, and all that fun BIOS stuff).

Just earlier today I was having trouble with my net connection, webpages wouldn't come up or anything. So I tried to start UT3, and it crashed before it could even get to the advertisement movies. As soon as the net worked again, so did UT3.

I guess what i'm sayin is that you can't have tried everything if you are still having the issue, since you are apparently the only person in the world experiencing it.

 

[DGUnreal]

Brizz, I'm curious, do you currently think UT3 is doing well?

I'm not Brizz either, but if I could post a reply it would be:

Doing well in what way?

I feel UT3 could be doing better in some ways. However, I also felt the same way about other games that I have bought over the past two years, then either went to their community forums to find very little there, or went online and found almost nothing for servers or gamers who were serious about playing the game.

The UT3 community complainers seem to be basically in two camps:

1. Those who are focusing on the issues in the game.
This would be those who bought the game.

The people in camp 1 will be the same sorts of people who complained about everything in UT200x. See my previous post just up a bit regarding that.

2. Those who are focusing on the issue of game sales.
This would be regarding those who didn't buy the game.

The people in camp 2, those who didn't buy the game, they are there for various reasons.
- Some will be due to the demo if they didn't care for the game, so they didn't buy it.
- Some will be due to the demo, which was said to be a beta, and then finding out from others who preordered and received their box that the released game was pretty much the same (oops).
- Some will be due to the poor advertising by Midway. All of my friends who bought UT3 didn't even know it was out until I told them. Plus it always boggles my mind to see the UT3 ads on TV where it is only advertised as PS3! Every other multi-platform game states on the ad that it is for platforms A to X (ie. XBox, PS3, PC, etc. listed on the ad bottom). Epic really needs to slap Midway over this serious fumble.
- Some will be for others reasons I haven't covered here or thought of yet...

 

[Grobut]

There are so many people complaining about bugs with UT3, but do they ever consider that it could be something other than UT3 causing the issue?

There have been a few people like this I have tried to help, and the response has always been hostile.

I have since come to the conclusion that they don't want to fix their UT3, because then they would have nothing to complain about that hasn't already been beaten to death.

*Sigh*

Of course they reply to you with hostillity, some of us have spend houers and houers running over the DXdiag, checking for new and updating drivers, scanning for conflicting IRQ's, running Virii and Spyware scans, rebooting en masse, running temperature probes, RAM tests, 3Dmark tests, reinstalling the game several times, switching out vid cards, switching out RAM blocks despite knowing they should be fine, looking over the sysreg and log files and everything else we can possibly think of, by the time we go on a forum and say "PLEASE HELP ME!", the very last thing we want to hear is.. "durr, are you sure your not just an idiot?".. ohh man, if you where in the same room with us, we would cave in your scull with our keyboard and drink whatever leaked out!

 

[DGUnreal]

maybe its just me but those "half a dozen items" (more like a couple dozen) are things that UT needs ...

UT3 needs demorec?
UT3 needs texture export?
UT3 needs Shieldgun, Adrenaline, etc. etc. ?

The definition of things that it needs are things that the game cannot function without. Mine works just fine without demorec...

I will agree that the interface could use some tweaking, but as I said, this same thing was also said of UT200x, and it is something already agreed upon by Epic.
And I will agree that there are a few other items, but these things don't stop people from going online in-and-of-themselves -- the "not going online" is the gamer's choice (unless they have no internet).
IMHO less than half of the things being complained about actually have some degree of validity. And even those can be fixed with future patches.
Some of the things complained about with UT200x were fixed in later patches. The issue these days is that most people have no patience and demand instant gratification. I'm not saying this to defend any company releasing software with bugs.

There are so many people complaining about bugs with UT3, but do they ever consider that it could be something other than UT3 causing the issue?

This is 100% true.

Go over to the Epic forums and read through the thread on my last UT3 map (last as in most recently released ).
There were a couple of people with complaints that my map was crashing their game. I mentioned multiple times that it is not my map, but I continued on attempting to help them determine the exact issue. Finally, after uninstalling UT3 and all of the (IMHO poorly designed characters and mutators) and reinstalling UT3 fresh, my map worked just fine on their systems. The issue being the other stuff they had installed that was hacked into UT3.

I would bet that probably 50% to 75% of those people having issues with UT3 stability are actually issues with their computer, other software they have running (ie. AV's etc.), or garbage community content that they installed that has made their UT3 unstable.

 

[Anuban]

All I know is more folks could actually mod UT2k4 and had greater success with it as evidenced by the tons of voicepacks, weapon/character/vehicles models, weapon/character/vehicles skins, gametypes, mutators, and yes even levels and some beta TC Mods that were not too shabby. People who say that modding is better in UT3 are missing the larger picture. If it is better then we haven't seen it yet. Fixing the issues associated with modding would go a long ways in getting people to return to the game.

 

[DGUnreal]

All I know is more folks could actually mod UT2k4 and had greater success with it ...

Some of this is not as easy as one might think, so the comparison isn't entirely valid. Sony and their audio, the reasons behind package cooking, etc.

I will agree that better import/export could be available, but in my opinion that also goes back to UT2004 where I was always irritated by the lack of ability to export textures to non-dds format and the lack of export of meshes.

 

[MonsOlympus]

I like ut3 I cannot play the single player campaign because it halts during the cinmatics at the beginning apart from that everything is a box of roses for me.

There is actually a fix for this, I dunno what it is though sorry. I had the same problem myself when I bought the game, I just hammered away online or against bots

I think it might be one of these from UTEngine.ini

[Engine.ISVHacks]
bInitializeShadersOnDemand=True
DisableATITextureFilterOptimizationChecks=True
UseMinimalNVIDIADriverShaderOptimization=True
PumpWindowMessagesWhenRenderThreadStalled=True

Ummz you might not want to set that ati one if you have an ati card


To add to this conversation though, one important feature I dont see people hammering as hard as the interface or demorec...

Is the lack of decent voting options for servers, I mean cmon, that could have more to do with online player counts then anything else people like to mention more often.

For eg, if there was decent voting then you wouldnt be in the server browser as often perhaps. Just my 2 cents but perhaps you should rethink your priorities

All I know is more folks could actually mod UT2k4 and had greater success with it as evidenced by the tons of voicepacks, weapon/character/vehicles models, weapon/character/vehicles skins, gametypes, mutators, and yes even levels and some beta TC Mods that were not too shabby. People who say that modding is better in UT3 are missing the larger picture. If it is better then we haven't seen it yet. Fixing the issues associated with modding would go a long ways in getting people to return to the game.

You can still do voicepacks and characters hey but I see alot of people criticizing because they cant get their head around the new systems. Like for eg, you can create a new character which has a new voice but some people are like oh but we cant skin anymore or choose voice packs. I just think the new system works well for cohesion and perhaps it'll bring people together to form teams where there used to be just 1 person working on something.

[screenshot]http://skincity.beyondunreal.com/src/img_models/pic2_id666.jpg[/screenshot]

Like this for eg, this would be the way to go. Get a custom head and alittle code then you got yourself a voicepack

I dont think anyone is saying modding is any better overall in UT3 but it certainly has its upsides when compared to previous UT's, the uscript upgrades alone for eg are very powerful especially components. The lack of a mod system is a worry though I really would have liked that but hey give alittle get alittle, Im not gonna sit here and write a big list when there is better channels to go through where I can be as technical as need be

 

[DGUnreal]

Of course they reply to you with hostillity, some of us have spend houers and houers ...

Do you have a thread somewhere with what you have tried?

 

[Grobut]

Do you have a thread somewhere with what you have tried?

Yup, posted it on the official forums long ago, a few people also tried to be helpfull, but to no avail, it might still exist, i dont know.

But pretty much everything i allready mentioned, plus new BIOS revisions and Chipset drivers, plus all the various UT tweaks that are floating around on the official forums, in FAQ's and posts alike, ini tweaks, disabling this and that, trying this or that beta driver, you know the drill, but its been a while, just shy of a Format C:, i really have tossed everything i, and the tech help community had at it, now im reduced to waiting for a patch or a beta driver that manages to solve the problem somehow.. but i really think the problem is somehwere in the game and not with drivers, things seem to point in that direction.

 

[Vitamin-Carrot]

yeah vista will do that to ya

vista is the reason why im a linux user now

 

[MonsOlympus]

Hmmz well did you perhaps post the dmp file up on utforums in the tech section?

 

[DGUnreal]

Yup, posted it on the official forums long ago, a few people also tried to be helpfull, but to no avail, it might still exist, i dont know.

I assume that it is this thread?

I have access to stuff the community doesn't...

Mind if I PM?

 

[Grobut]

yeah vista will do that to ya

vista is the reason why im a linux user now

I'm WinXP 32 all the way! but sadly that could be part of the problem, it seems alot Vista based Gforce owners have had good luck with the new beta drivers, whereas XP32 users have had less to be thrilled about.. Vista beating XP in something game related, its certainly a first!

Hmmz well did you perhaps post the dmp file up on utforums in the tech section?

I don't recall doing that actually, no.


EDIT for instapost:

I assume that it is this thread?

I have access to stuff the community doesn't...

Mind if I PM?

Thats the old one, i had a later one where i went into more detail, after finding out more about when it did and did not happen.

But PM away, i'd be interested in anything that might work.