2001-era Unreal Championship beta released.

[AWW SNACK]

A 2001-era beta for Unreal Championship has been released. This build appears to have been compiled around late October 2001, more than a year before it was released. This beta can be run on your PC, so there's no need to worry about trying to get it to work on an XBox.

Needless to say, there's a ton of differences:

*Almost all of the levels in this beta are unused in the final game. What did make it to the final game was notably revamped.
*Tons of changes for the weapons, both visual and behavior-wise
*The Impact hammer and Sniper Rifle are in this beta!
*There's an unused vehicle you can spawn by hitting H. You can drive it too!
*The player model selection screen is actually the "planet information" screen found in later UT2k3 betas.
*Really messed up mouse looking. Might be because of a bug regarding autoaim, but there's no 100% way to tell at the moment.


Download: http://oldtimes-software.com/42@_ffd-43/UTX-Build.7z

Video: http://www.youtube.com/v/4XgPXQQUUow

How to get bots working: "to "enable" bots you have to go into UC.ini, find bNoBots and set it to False."

I know this technically shouldn't be here, but UC is almost exactly the same as UT2k3, so I say it fits here. Doesn't help that you can run it on your PC just fine.

 

[Darkdrium]

So they were experimenting with vehicles at the time. Interesting.

 

[JohnDoe641]

Is the unused car the Bulldog thingy from 2k3 or 2k4?

 

[Delacroix]

Snack, please fix your topic as well as contents. This is not a beta. It's too early, too underdeveloped. It's more like an alpha at best

 

[Blade_hunter]

For me extraction doesn't work

 

[cUnNiNg_StUnTs]

Is the unused car the Bulldog thingy from 2k3 or 2k4?

The Bulldog was from 2003 but the model itself was still in the 2004 pak files. You just have to call it from the console or a map that places it on the map.

 

[nELsOn]

For me extraction doesn't work

Same here.

 

[Raynor.Z]

You need to use later version of 7-zip (v 9.20 for example).
It also appears that 2004 demo of Unreal Engine 3 has found its way into wild

 

[Delacroix]

The more the merrier. I just hope some build of UT3 emerges with the files that are needed to fully open the ut3-cines maps

 

[Raynor.Z]

Yeah, that would be really nice. I still want to see that E3 version of OnyxCoast map that got axed and replaced by different version and also the E3 city map where you blow up barricade.

 

[AWW SNACK]

Snack, please fix your topic as well as contents. This is not a beta. It's too early, too underdeveloped. It's more like an alpha at best

I called it beta because that's what most people call prototype versions of games, no matter how early it is. The Sonic 2 "Beta" is clearly an alpha, but people still remember it being called a beta.

 

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

There was this 2001 trail of UC which had those vehicles in it though, there's also some other unused vehicle mesh in this. Btw even final UC might have leftovers from this, I found it in some of the ini files from UC these hoverbike stuff.

EDIT: Found the link to the old trailer but look what happened to it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLOTjggvofs

 

[Sir_Brizz]

If you have the Totally Unreal pack (like me) the bonus disc has this UC trailer on it.

 

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

Delacroix pointed me to here, this is the trailer:

http://unreal.pl/dzial.php?dz=uc&id=filmy

 

[Sir_Brizz]

[m]http://youtu.be/w34FcqHRznQ[/m]

It's kind of amazing how good we thought this looked back in 2001...

 

[nELsOn]

You need to use later version of 7-zip (v 9.20 for example).

That's what I have installed. Could try the 9.22 beta, though. I'm really interested in this now...

EDIT:
Got it extracted wit the 9.22 beta. Pretty interesting to see how ugly some of that stuff started
Not entirely sure but that "Plan 1" map looks like a very early version of UT2004's DM-Gestalt, doesn't it?

 

[Sir_Brizz]

I just used Peazip, worked fine.

 

[gopostal]

Thanks for that vid Brizz, that brought back a lot of memories.

What's striking is all the shooting and no one gets hit or hurt. It's amazing the acceptance level of violence in game previews has changed in just the last few years.

You mind if I host that at my site? I think I'll start gathering these videos too as I find them and put them with the lost webpages section.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

Feel free. I have no rights to it whatsoever, it was just an mpg on that bonus CD.

 

[MrMaddog]

It was a nice look at what UC was orginally going to be. Great to see the planet menus even though it took forever for the description text to come up. Even with lack of music and heavy ini editing, it still plays a decent game with the bots.