Impressions of UT from the other end...

[Vexor]

I'll start by saying that I bought Unreal soon after it came out. Loved it. Had none of the lag/online problems that most seemed to have. Worked great on my 56k... I also had a Pure3D(voodoo1) at the time. Looked & played beautiful. Then I got a Diamond Viper v550(Riva TNT for those who don't know). All the sudden my beautiful Unreal looked & played like shiat. I was very disappointed,waited for a patch that would fix the problem & was disappointed again. Tried D3D & it looked like crap compared to games like Shogo(which woke me up to what D3D can do),Requiem etc.. And so Unreal faded fast off my playlist...

That said I only recently heard of Unreal Tournament(a couple of months ago). I never played the demo & really didn't keep up with news about it at all except for tidbits I'd read at Blue's... Then I hear it went gold etc.. I got a card from GTstore around the same time to order it & get a T-shirt(can't believe I fell for that gimmick!)... Well I did. And eagerly anticipated getting it which I did yesterday.

First, my system specs:

EPoX MVP3C mobo 512k
AMD K6-3/400
128 megs PC100 SDRAM
Diamond Viper v550/16megs (Riva TNT) WITH the latest Detonator Drivers!

So, I installed it & my first impression was how long it takes to fire the game up. It took at least around a minute for the thing to load. Well after I got into the UT desktop,my next impression was mouse control in the desktop(yes I have direct input checked). I wrote my impressions immediatly & so I might seem a bit pissed..

"Mouse sensitivity in the UT desktop is abomnible. It's like when you move it,it's very jerky & moves to the center of little squares or something. It was an exercise in futility just to get the damn preferences set up cause it's hard to get your mouse to go exactly where you want to click."

After I finally(& painfully) got my keys & stuff set up I immediatly tried to jump into a game online. Screw practice. Once I finally got in the game I was flabbergasted. It was like a slide show. Here was my initial impressions again written down as soon as I got outta the game:

"It ran horribly at 800x600x32 using openGL - was like a slide show.. It would actually stop moving for 1-2 seconds at a time.. 2 seconds everytime I picked up a new weapon. Unacceptable... You'd think after Unreal & all this time went by they'd have got openGL working by now. And don't blame it on my frigging video card OR the drivers! v550 & the latest Detonator drivers from nVidia.. openGL Smokes in Q2 & other games... It(UT)ran acceptably using D3D(@ 640x480x16) but looked like ****... Lot's of banding & colors had that blotchy look like 256 colors instead of 16bit."


Also this happened:

"Crashed my machine in the middle of DM... I got fragged & the screen froze before I fell & the mahinegun sound just kept going..forever... Locked up tight. Had to reboot.."


Anyway,I'm not here to trash the game. You don't know how bad I want to like & enjoy playing it online. I hope someone here can offer me some advice as to what to change to make it look better(& still play decently).

The one thing tho,that I am truly disappointed about is the shoddy openGL performance. I just find it hard to believe that they haven't fixed it yet. I have too many other games that run beautifully with OGL. Is it the Unreal engine?? I can't help but get the impression it is... Which bums me even more. Is Duke Forever & other unreal engine games gonna have this problem???

BuMMed in Austin.. Vexor13


PS. Please don't flame me to hell & back if you don't agree... I just needed to get this stuff off my chest & I'm gonna go home tonight & play & try to like UT...

 

[RW]

Take your TNT card store it in a round container found in most homes then buy a V3-2000 install it and frag away. Or you could spend the time needed to figure out what drivers/tweaks or whatever it takes to get your current system to run at a good rate as others before you have.

 

[BirddoG]

yes the ogl sucks in the Unreal engine
but it wasnt designed to use ogl
im not putting dont ogl and tnts and crap but Unreal is meant to be played on a 3dfx card using glide
its sad but true
the D3D has come along way in the Unreal engine though which is good

 

[Tanqueray_boy]

A couple of comments:

1) The documentation specifically says to use Glide or D3D. Why are you using OpenGL and then complaining about it? OpenGL won't even be around in another year, since both Microsoft and SGI (the originator of OpenGL) are dropping it, to support D3D (the Register and Slashdot both have stories about it).

2) I don't know what you consider the latest nVidia Detonator drivers. The 3.xx series is *compatible* with TNT and TNT2 chips, but are specially written for the GeForce. You should be using the latest 2.xx series (2.42, I believe). There have been a dozen reports of bugs when using the GeForce drivers with TNT cards on this forum.

3) The problems you are seeing with color banding, etc., sound to me like driver problems (whether you believe it or not). When hundreds of people are running the game fine, and you aren't, it just might be your systems fault.

I cleared up all of my problems with the game by turning off pre-caching in the advanced settings, adding more memory, and allowing Windows to manage my virtual memory.

 

[Vexor]

Allright cool.. /~unreal/ubb/html/smile.gif I'll try your suggestions. Except for buying a V3... hehe

I do have a Banshee in my second machine. Hmm.. But I like the richness of color with my tnt blah blah... /~unreal/ubb/html/wink.gif


Tanq: I didn't realize that about the 3.xx drivers & that is what I'm using. nVidia's site is a bit misleading then. I'll try the 2.xx drivers & see what happens.

Is there a tweaks page yet? If not I guess I'll keep checking the board...

Thx again for all your replies..

Vortex

 

[RW]

http://www.gamesurge.com/ut/tweakguide.shtml

 

[Simulacrum]

It's a pity that OpenGL is being dropped. D3D had better get really good in a hurry.

 

[HuFlungzeDung]

And, about the slow mouse speed in the UT gui: there is a slider setting in there to determine the speed of your mouse cursor within the gui! /~unreal/ubb/html/wink.gif

 

[Fireseal]

Anyone know where I can get my hands on the earlier detonator drivers from? Like the 2.xx version. I have the 3.53 (latest) with a tnt2 ultra and have seen less stability than with the 2.xx version. Thanks!

What is the average flight speed of an unladen swallow?

 

[Tanqueray_boy]

http://www.3dsl.com/

Select the nVidia link, then drivers.

 

[Fireseal]

Thanks!

What is the average flight speed of an unladen swallow?

 

[[OF]candyman]

the swallow on average flies at an amazing 58.343 miles per hour /~unreal/ubb/html/smile.gif Now if you believe that I have this big arching bridge that is up for sale /~unreal/ubb/html/smile.gif

 

[Dr_Grey]

Well...just tried UT, after the demo I was thinking that my TNT2 (none ultra) would be past it as I have a V2-SLI combo as well still, and in the demo that was faster than my TNT2.
Well I was pretty surprised and pleased to say that for me now, UT is running smoother and looking better than my SLI, so at last I can sell em on, as I was only hanging onto them for UT.
I haven't hadd any probs on them yet, been playing a couple of days (also have Cel300@450+128M).
Anyway Im pretty pleased with the performance, but the game seems a little processor hungry still /~unreal/ubb/html/smile.gif (no surprise there)

 

[IceStorm]

Windows driver support for OpenGL is being dropped (i.e. no OpenGL drivers out of the Windows box). OpenGL itself won't be going away.

D3D plays fine on my MAX, with slight problems that people swear are either UT, or the drivers (go figure). Then again, I have a G400 MAX mated to an Athlon 550 with 384MB of RAM.

 

[TheQat]

Hehe. . .barring any performance improvements thanks to the 3d card suggestions. . .

I run a 350 PII 128 RAM and use software render. The game runs absolutely fine with nothing else but Norton Crashguard open. I've yet to test framerates, but I would estimate 30 or higher during periods of non action, slowing to no less than 20 when action is going down. It's mostly fine on the internet (pinging round 250-less average on 49333 with Mspring) thus far, although I pretty much suck /~unreal/ubb/html/frown.gif

So if none of this 3d card stuff works, feel free to try software render. It might not look great, but I love this for the gameplay. I do run medium skin detail, medium world detail, and ultra-low gore, but those are all to improve my gameplay experience.

To sum it up, if you really want the game to play well and don't mind the graphics so much, 640x400 16 bit with high detail should be fine (I ran high for the first couple days, then switched down to get that minute amount less lag time). Plus, you have a slightly faster processor than me :-0

--Qat

 

[Solicitor]

DRGREY!

hey dude, please email me your configuration in order to get unreal working right.

I am running almost the same system as you. I have dual 8mb voodoo2 installed, GeForce 256, and I cannot get the geforce in direct3d to come close to the performance of my SLI. I am running the latest reference drivers on my board from Nvidia.

this performance I am getting is just unacceptable!

Solicitor