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Sir_Brizz

Administrator
Staff member
Feb 3, 2000
26,020
83
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.

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.
We aren't going to drop any functionality, but we've got to be realistic here. NONE of the Unreal-based forums get enough traffic to justify keeping them all separated anymore and the fact that we ARE still keeping them separate for the time being should make you happy enough.

That "active community" you're talking about is, on average, making 1-2 posts per week. That is not much activity (on this forum).

Of course, if you want to make that forum more active, we'll be happy to pull it back to the front page.
 

UBerserker

old EPIC GAMES
Jan 20, 2008
4,798
0
0
Not a fan of the new layout, to be honest.

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.

Pretty much these should be the best ideas.

Right now a BETA of a SP project for Unreal/UT-oldskool got released out of the blue http://www.unrealsp.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2107
 
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hal

Dictator
Staff member
Nov 24, 1998
21,409
19
38
54
------->
www.beyondunreal.com
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.

Thanks for the feedback. We'll count your vote as a "no" for combining all game related talk to a single forum (which we did not do).

Even though clicking your mouse button may be burdensome, you'll probably have to continue to do so if you want to access those forums. If we do change it, it'll likely look something like this:

BeyondUnreal
- Site Discussion / Suggestions
- Unreal Series
-- (hidden from main index) Unreal
-- (hidden from main index) Unreal 2
- Unreal Tournament Series
-- (hidden from main index) Unreal Tournament
-- (hidden from main index) Unreal Tournament 2003/4
-- (hidden from main index) UT3
- Games
- Off Topic
Unreal Development

Nali City 4!!! and maybe fixing all the broken links!

Nali City 4 was abandoned. We had people trying to help with it but everyone running the site left. While Nali City was indeed founded by QAPete, who started BeyondUnreal, it remained a hosted site and not functionally a part of BeyondUnreal. We'd love to get it running, but there aren't exactly volunteers lining up to make it happen.
 

shoptroll

Active Member
Jan 21, 2004
2,226
2
38
40
Probably going to be redundant at this time, but...

1) Focus on UDK stuff. Absolutely necessary since there's a lot more going on in this space. I'm not a developer, but posts about the new UDK updates are interesting. News updates on UDK projects is something I'd like to see. Especially if you guys can go ahead and get interviews with developers on upcoming titles like Hawken and Waves.

1a) Interviews with community mod/map veterans would be good as well.

2) More interaction with Epic. We know Flak posts here regularly. Get some trips for staff to visit Epic or have some interviews with people there. Maybe orchestrate some sort of developers and community event?

3) Rally the troops. We don't have FragBU these days. This was a focal point back in the UT2 era. UT3 might be dead, but there's got to be another UED/UDK game we can agree on. Could we get maybe MNC or Section 8: Prejudice matches going, or maybe just say "to hell with it" and just do a throwback server to UT or UT2.

4) Could Fileworks be replaced by a torrent tracker? I'd gladly seed patches, maps and mods if that was a way to help out.

EDIT: @Hal: I completely agree with adding an overarching "Games" forum. But where did the licensed game forums go?
 
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Sir_Brizz

Administrator
Staff member
Feb 3, 2000
26,020
83
48
Right now, my plan is to roll content reviewing functionality right into the main BeyondUnreal site under the guise of NaliCity. I'm hoping to roll all the current content review sites we have together to do this. NaliCity, Insite and ModSquad are already on board with this. I'm hopeful that SkinCity and UTUnlimited will join in as well. This will help things to get consistent, I hope. It should also make it easier for industry veterans to put their mark here with helping to review content if they have time and such.

For FileWorks, we will probably eventually relaunch it with a single file hosting partner and perhaps torrent tracking. I haven't decided which direction to take there. I would love if BU could be a web seed, but I don't think that will happen.
 

Mozi

Zer0 as a number
Apr 12, 2002
3,544
0
0
In the Borderlands..
www.mozidesign.com
Probably going to be redundant at this time, but...

1a) Interviews with community mod/map veterans would be good as well.

2) More interaction with Epic. We know Flak posts here regularly. Get some trips for staff to visit Epic or have some interviews with people there. Maybe orchestrate some sort of developers and community event?

3) Rally the troops. We don't have FragBU these days. This was a focal point back in the UT2 era. UT3 might be dead, but there's got to be another UED/UDK game we can agree on. Could we get maybe MNC or Section 8: Prejudice matches going, or maybe just say "to hell with it" and just do a throwback server to UT or UT2.

Agree with these comments!

Also for Frag BU, it could be changed to be more of a community game night on UE games or even non UE games. For example we could do a BUF TF2 night, or as Shoptroll mentioned do some old school UT games.

Also if it can be arranged even do some Gears 3 games in the future with BUF folks over LIVE.
 
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Feralidragon

UT n00b coder
Feb 25, 2008
182
0
16
Well, imo the news are good as they are, perhaps more news are needed about the actual UT series though (but this is developers fault for not emailing it to news).

For instance, I am a UT1 developer, and unlike most people think around here, this game is still kicking, not so well like 5 years ago, but it's still a popular game (16th place in gametracker is quite something for a game of this age).

And there is still stuff being activelly developed: Shadow's SDK (a mini UDK of sort to speak for UT1), Food Fight (a whole team is into it right now, and very original concepts), my own new weapon pack (Nali Weapons 3), new Siege versions (Siege is the most popular custom gametype right now, the "main" Siege server is ranked #1 in gametracker from UT servers), etc, etc.

Thing is, none of them/us provided any news to BU to show them off (for instance I believe Food Fight would have a great interest around here).
In my case, I was about to make the NW3 Preview 2 a news item, but since I already had a topic created and all, I thought it wouldn't be worthy to have a seperate news item for it, but within a few months (2 or 3) I intend to make the release and email the admin to post it as news, and I intend to talk with the Food Fight guys to request a news item as well when they release it, so people notice the still ongoing activity of this old game, considered being still the best one by many people.

And I cannot even imagine the amount of great content which is still being develop for all the UT series that no one knows or heard about because of lack of news from their end, therefore people are left into oblivion and think the games are dead when they are not.
So, GAME DEVS, please make your work get noticed by emailing it to the BU news from now on! (as long it's something that gave you a certain amount of work, single small 1 hour maps or mods aren't "news" worthy imo)

Perhaps this is one of the missing keys to make the news fullfilled and more interesting to the actual users, so BU gets more activity relative these games as well.

Besides that, I think ModSquad should start to make reviews from mods from all the UT series again (if there are any members left or new ones willing to join the crew), and perhaps a system where both mods and maps can be rated and get noticed easilly (like in moddb) so people actually know about them and keep this BU spirit alive in all the UT series.

Anyway, just my 2 cents
 

CyMek

Dead but not gone.
Jan 4, 2004
1,932
0
36
cymek.deviantart.com
Would like to see more news about UT, (Hard as that may be with the franchise lying fallow) more UT mod news, and more SDK news. There are plenty of sites that cover general gaming news and (sorry) do a better job of it. Stick with something that you guys are more or less the only ones covering at this point, give people a reason to check the news.
 

JohnDoe641

Killer Fools Pro
Staff member
Nov 8, 2000
5,330
51
48
41
N.J.
www.zombo.com
3) Rally the troops. We don't have FragBU these days. This was a focal point back in the UT2 era. UT3 might be dead, but there's got to be another UED/UDK game we can agree on. Could we get maybe MNC or Section 8: Prejudice matches going, or maybe just say "to hell with it" and just do a throwback server to UT or UT2.
I tried man, I really did. Several times. It started out well but interest faded really quickly. But I guess the mistake was using UT3 as the game and not a game that's actually... liked.

I'd definitely be down for crappy 2k4 or some UT matches, I'd also suggest looking into KF or ............... or... Quacklive. Yeah, I said Quack. It's free though so everyone can play it. :p
 

SleepyHe4d

fap fap fap
Jan 20, 2008
4,152
0
0
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.

Lol, you complain about the smallest things don't you? Even with Classic Unreal Titles hidden under "Games", it will still get more attention than it has before. At least I've noticed that with me, I was inclined to check those boards when I was looking through some game threads earlier. That's the first time I checked those boards in months.

(cont. below)

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.

Okay guy that posts once every 4 days, who are you to claim the site is going downhill? :lol:

If you look at it logically, this can only help the classic unreal game communities from what I've said above.

And to both of you: Do you realize if they merge all those boards with the "Games" board like I suggested, whenever you bump a UT or Unreal thread, everyone looking at the modern games threads will be exposed to those classic threads too? If we did that, it would definitely help the classic game communities.

I personally think you both should reconsider your position and give me a +1 in merging those boards with the "games" board.

Also, it wouldn't really cluster the games section because there aren't TOO many games threads and there aren't TOO many classic games threads being posted in often. It would be a perfect mix.


BeyondUnreal
- Site Discussion / Suggestions
- Unreal Series
-- (hidden from main index) Unreal
-- (hidden from main index) Unreal 2
- Unreal Tournament Series
-- (hidden from main index) Unreal Tournament
-- (hidden from main index) Unreal Tournament 2003/4
-- (hidden from main index) UT3
- Games
- Off Topic
Unreal Development

I like how y'all kept offtopic and such under "beyondunreal", I didn't think of that, but it's true, that does make it look a bit cleaner. After some consideration, my opinion of the layout has changed from before.

Beyondunreal
-Site Discussion / Suggestions
-News and Articles
-News and Article Suggestions (or "User News and Articles" ? or maybe not... :p)
-Off-Topic (no hardware or art subforums)
--(hidden) Forum Archive
--(hidden) Forum Classics
-Games (no classic subforms, but instead add optional buttons/tags such as the ones in Content Releases and automatically apply the right ones to the subsections when merged. I don't know how hard that would be)
-World Discussion (politics, religion, world news, ect)
Unreal Development
-Ect.

Right now, my plan is to roll content reviewing functionality right into the main BeyondUnreal site under the guise of NaliCity. I'm hoping to roll all the current content review sites we have together to do this. NaliCity, Insite and ModSquad are already on board with this. I'm hopeful that SkinCity and UTUnlimited will join in as well. This will help things to get consistent, I hope. It should also make it easier for industry veterans to put their mark here with helping to review content if they have time and such.

For FileWorks, we will probably eventually relaunch it with a single file hosting partner and perhaps torrent tracking. I haven't decided which direction to take there. I would love if BU could be a web seed, but I don't think that will happen.

Sounds good, you guys definitely need to reorganize the front page though, it's a cluster fuck of text. Center all the information to the middle of the screen web2.0 style and space the different text sections out more, make it less cluttered. Have a thinner news article section so the text doesn't go 20 inches across my 23 inch screen.

In fact, do this for the forum too. Center it instead of having posts stretch across the whole screen.
 
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DannyMeister

UT3 Jailbreak Coder
Dec 11, 2002
1,275
1
38
40
Bolivar, Missouri
BeyondUnreal
- Site Discussion / Suggestions
- Unreal Series
-- (hidden from main index) Unreal
-- (hidden from main index) Unreal 2
- Unreal Tournament Series
-- (hidden from main index) Unreal Tournament
-- (hidden from main index) Unreal Tournament 2003/4
-- (hidden from main index) UT3
- Games
- Off Topic
Unreal Development

Count me as a "no" on the current layout that hides Unreal related games... I like this quoted layout much better. (though why those 5 extra lines for displaying the individual Unreal games on the main index need to be saved, I have no idea :( )

Count me as a "yes" on more UDK project and UT mod coverage. I don't necessarily think there is any reason to drop the big UE3 title coverage, especially if some kind of filtering is added.
 

Sir_Brizz

Administrator
Staff member
Feb 3, 2000
26,020
83
48
Well the whole point is to keep the main index clean and not cluttered. Before, it was a huge mess of forums that NOBODY USED. Sad as it is to say.

I wonder if splitting the game series' forums out as suggested inside the Games forum would work better. Perhaps having shortcuts to those split out subforums on the main index would be sufficient. Then people who visit the games forum would still see the series' forums at the top of the Games forum (possibly leading to more interest).
 

hal

Dictator
Staff member
Nov 24, 1998
21,409
19
38
54
------->
www.beyondunreal.com
There are plenty of sites that cover general gaming news and (sorry) do a better job of it. Stick with something that you guys are more or less the only ones covering at this point, give people a reason to check the news.

:lol: no need to be sorry, it's true! There's no way our limited resources can compete in that arena. It's part of why this discussion exists too.

Count me as a "no" on the current layout that hides Unreal related games... I like this quoted layout much better. (though why those 5 extra lines for displaying the individual Unreal games on the main index need to be saved, I have no idea

What I hear you saying is that you're for combining the Unreal forums and combining the Tournament forums. Correct?
 

Crotale

_________________________ _______________
Jan 20, 2008
2,535
12
38
Anywhere But Here
I would like to see more UDK coverage on upcoming titles for the indy teams.

Keeping open sections on game series will be a big help, with focus on Epic's current game offerings such as Gears, Bulletstorm, Infinity Blade.

As someone else suggested, more stuff on portable gaming (iPhone UDK games, etc.) and platforms such as the Sony Vita.