Unreal Tournament Revolution: A Postmortem

[Dark Pulse]

Bersy, head of the long-defunct Unreal Tournament Revolution project that aimed to remake the original Unreal Tournament under UT2004, posted a retrospective of it on Youtube.

A post mortem of a project I led for 2 years with one successful release before it was disbanded. UTR was created as a remake of the original UT, for Unreal Engine v2.x - it is what you would classify as a "total conversion" mod for UT2004; every detail of the original game was to be remade and made better in the process. We made it approximately 75% to our final goal in my estimation.

Because of the unpredictable nature of mod teams, who are by no means under any contract to stay the course, and life circumstances of my own, we finally laid it to rest in 2007 for good. Leading the development of a game, managing a team, and having to wear many hats in the process gave me experience that remains valuable to this day in my work with graphics and animation, as well as in many other areas.

Today, many of the talented members of the team have gone on to work for game studios behind some of the AAA titles you've probably played.

As one of those lucky few who got to work on this project, I can indeed say I don't personally regret it, and while it's sad it never got finished, life moves on.

Let's cue it up one more time... for old times' sake.

​

 

[Bersy]

I didn't really expect to see it in BU news, but hey.. why not I guess. It sounded a bit self centered and I would have given more attention to the team effort if that were my intention. You might also ask yourself why bother to dredge it up 5 years after we even saw our last proper release. Mainly I just had the footage laying around and since there was no record of the project that I could find on YouTube and I also wanted to show my work, I made this. I don't have it installed anymore so I would have included the whole cityintro cutscene and some of the other visual progress we had made since these clips if I had but alas.. for example you can see I wrote "high resolution weapon models" but here only the flak was finished in 1st person view, the rest were just temp jobs using the original models which anyone can tell. Still they brought back the feel even in that version and we had all the benefits of new net code etc.

I did feel it was important to give credit to anyone I could remember at least in the vid and did so.

Cept where Snake.Plissken is concerned that is, that guy's a bitch.

 

[Crotale]

This was a great project. I played the release version for a short time and enjoyed it. This was one of the very few UT2004 mods for which I was waiting to see finished. Perhaps it was the nostalgia that drove me to want this mod in the worst way.

Wasn't the original name of the mod something like, "Unreal Tournament 2341"?

I know where Henrik is coming from on team members moving on. I was recently got enough courage to shutdown the UC2004 website, as there had been no team activity for a few years.

 

[Bersy]

UT 2341 was my attempt to rebrand it, I'm still stuck with the domain name to this day and am not sure anymore what my motivations were to even do so, but it was probably because of 3 things:

1. At the time everything was called "evolution" or "revolution" and I said NOT US!
2. I was pissed at the 200x branding the series had taken and thought using the year in the story of the original game was a way to counter that.
3. I was dumb.

 

[Capt.Toilet]

Could have done without the ****ty music but overall looked really nice.

 

[cosmix]

Very nice project. You have done 75%? Sad to know that you haven't time to finish even if you spent so much effort before. Biggest challenge is to keep on. Always.

 

[Bersy]

Well eventually you think "why the **** am I putting so many years of my life into someone else's product". I've got plenty of other things I'd rather be doing with the limited free time I have. But yeah, it would have been great to see it fulfill its full potential.

 

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

Why don't you let some other guys to finish the project or release what was done anyway?

I have not seen the alpha or beta versions either..and couldn't find them anyway.

 

[Bersy]

It's a long story and one I've covered ad nauseum before, but a "final" version that deviated from the rest of the team's vision was in fact released by the last guy to code for us, who thought he knew better about where to take it. We don't endorse that version nor really want it released.

A lot needed to be restructured, and we attempted to revive it several times but I am no coder and nobody else was willing to step up.

By now I don't care what version gets released just so long as someone gets some enjoyment out of the work we did, I might do that - release all the versions for the heck of it including that one - but it's just not been something I thought about at all until I found and released this footage. As far as someone taking over, if anyone really cares to at this point, go nuts, I can release the source and maps and whatever other resources, but I don't see very many serious developers wanting to make a TC for UT2004 now that there's UDK (and doing UTR for UDK would be illegal, I've checked with Jay Wilbur of Epic on that).

 

[silentlykiller]

wow i just so the video and i am shockt it really look good
too bad there willl be no download
like too pay it

 

[EisWiesel]

well that looked like, many of us ut99 players would say, a nice improved and worthy successor to ut99 ^^
the style of the maps/animations/models and weapons look good where i always felt, those from ut200X were wrong and too plastic-like.
too sad...

 

[Sir_Brizz]

All I have to say about this is code organization and flow CAN ruin a project, and did in this case. The last version of UTR intentionally didn't use the mod architecture in UT2004 and the way it was written made it so that doing so was not even really possible without breaking tons of things.

 

[Lruce Bee]

Being an old mapper myself, (haven't opened up the Unreal editor in at least 2 years) I can appreciate how much time and effort this project must have consumed and I often wonder where I found the time to create levels myself.
It was fairly easy to let go of the odd map that wasn't heading in the right direction, even after a couple of weeks work pumped into it but to see project of this scale die in the closing stages must have be heart breaking.
Some of my all time favourite multiplayer maps are in UT, so it would have been interesting to see those recreated and played again.
The mapping community isn't what it used to be unfortunately.

 

[Vaginal Epiphany]

UT99 still remains the best UT game in the series. This project was worth the praise, though.

 

[Raynor.Z]

I did enjoy playing it when alpha was released. Too bad it never reached into final, but very good job nevertheless.

 

[MrMaddog]

1. At the time everything was called "evolution" or "revolution" and I said NOT US!

Oh boy, do I remember that "phase" in UT2004 mod making...

I helped out on Unreal Fortress Evolution andthere were plans for a Weapons Factory: Evolution mod as well. But not only did I and my partner Nonya decided to make the WF mod standalone after the UNF:E public release, but there was also another mod called Weapons Factory Revolution for Quake 4. The mod is now stillborn dead so it doesn't really matter now...

Anyway, it's a shame UTR didn't work out. Right now I use the Nostalgia 2006 mutator for UT gameplay in UT2004, though it's not perfect. Would like to check out the various versions of UTR if and when they get re-leased.

 

[GreatEmerald]

And ChaosUT2: Evolution

 

[DarkSonny]

Chaos UT, Jailbreak, cft4, RA...Ballistic Weapons great mod.

Someday those mods shall rise up again on the wave when an new ut is out without them ut inst ut itself

I cried when this project has gone to ****

 

[CyMek]

To those who wanted something to download: I still have all my files, and would be willing to share given that Bersy has greenlighted it. I have at least three separate versions right now, and can't remember how each differs from the others save that one was my sandbox. Also not sure if any of my versions represent the final progress we had made. I don't remember if we ever included the version of Pressure I made or if I even got the chamber working, but I would be happy to throw that in there too.

 

[Bersy]

CyMek: I encourage you to read this post and consider carefully if you want to release them.

It might not be that terrible to release them, but I don't really want them spreading around only for people to look at them, believe that's it for sure and never consider the project again.

http://ut2341.com/utr

I'm not saying I'm picking the project back up, but I want to give a bit more serious thought before committing to anything, such as possibly doing a new polished up release which gives the EXISTING work the treatment it deserves - and if we release project files I would like to do it via the site, which as you can see I'm putting back up - if you don't mind.