Unreal Gold Free

[Brian]

I saw on Blue's News that they're giving away the original "Unreal" game for free:

https://www.bluesnews.com/s/190474/u...-gold-for-free

I believe I still have the original CD-Rom game; I was astounded by the graphics back when it originally came out but I didn't finish the SP campaign, I think I got bored. I played the Unreal Tournament games a lot more when they eventually came out. Anyway, might be fun.

[Wookie06]

I wouldn't believe anything unreal gold says especially if it's "free".

[Reid]

I would play some UT99 for sure.

[Jon`C]

I'm not gonna say games were better 20 years ago, but at least their technology had some character.

[Ni]

It's a nice game and at the time the graphics were incredible. The first 2 hours of the campaign are incredible, I'll always remember leaving the ship for the first time and seeing the waterfall but overall it was too long and drawn out. You fight the same enemies over and over. Still, a fun game but I've never completed it either. I had the same issue with Quake 2.

[Brian]

Haha I actually forced myself to play Quake II all the way through, and after the first few levels I found it actually got better. I'm with you, though, I played those first few levels over and over and gave up many times before I forced myself to continue. Unlike Quake I, Quake II actually had a story and a progression through the maps. In Quake I they just got bigger and bigger and the keys were scattered everywhere and I just kept getting lost and frustrated. Quake II was so much better. I only played through it once, though.

Interestingly, I actually played through Quake 4 multiple times and I really enjoyed the SP on that one.

[Reid]

I'm not gonna say games were better 20 years ago, but at least their technology had some character.

Remember when game R&D changed gameplay and wasn't behavioral economic woo woo about how to get teenagers to buy more fake digital tokens to fuel gambling addictions?

[Brian]

Remember when you could make and distribute skins for free? My son spent something like $20 on a single skin for some stupid game. Ugh.

[Jon`C]

Remember when you could make and distribute skins for free? My son spent something like $20 on a single skin for some stupid game. Ugh.

I’d rather games that take a hard line against modding (as competition for their own micro transactions) than third party mod marketplaces where the studio and platform holder take excessive, exploitative shares. Not that either is good, but what Valve and Bethesda have been doing lately deserves an extra special “**** you”.

[Jon`C]

(Last year Valve was taking 94% from Dota 2 skinners. IIRC it’s only 75% for Skyrim. They aren’t upfront about either number so I’m not sure if it’s gotten worse since then.

Valve doesn’t do **** to deserve their platform rents to begin with. Taking 94% from fan modders is beyond the pale.)

[Reid]

I love how the progressively awful video game market is slowly radicalizing millennials to the left as they see a once free and open hobby wrecked by capital.

[Reid]

"I wanna make video games, I should build a portfolio by producing goods for Steam for nothing.."

[Reid]

I love how the progressively awful video game market is slowly radicalizing millennials to the left as they see a once free and open hobby wrecked by capital.

well, either that or they blame multiculturalism and start watching jordan peterson vids

[Thrawn[numbarz]]

SJWs want to fill our games with lootbox feminism

frt the old PC deathmatch games provided a really unique opportunity for character modelers that I didn't really appreciate until it was gone.

[Jon`C]

frt the old PC deathmatch games provided a really unique opportunity for character modelers that I didn't really appreciate until it was gone.

It was also a fantastic testbed for game design. You could distribute new gameplay modes to players using cohesive and polished assets, under the umbrella of a product that people already accept and enjoy. You can't do that today. There's no step below 'product' anymore. The closest you'll get is buying up stock assets and YOLOing art direction, like PUBG.

[Brian]

So there are no modern games you can mod anymore?

[Thrawn[numbarz]]

So there are no modern games you can mod anymore?

There are, just not with the same audience--Unreal Engine 4 does allow developers to offer mod support, but very few actually do,, ARK: Survival Evolved is the last one i heard about. Skyrim is probably the most popular fully-moddable game, and it's years old. Like Jon mentioned Bethesda's practices for compensating modders have been pretty exploitative, although there are sites like Skyrim Nexus that offer free and unregulated mods without a problem, afaik. I'm very interested to see if the next Elder Scrolls game has a full suite of modding tools, but last I heard they haven't even started development so I'm not holding my breath.

I would have loved to see real mod support for the Doom reboot, or Quake Champions, or Arkane's imsims, but that doesn't look like it's in the cards. Everything is pretty locked down nowadays

[Jon`C]

Developers don’t even need to try to block modding. Modern game content pipelines bake in so much stuff that creating third party editors is practically impossible. It’s not like the old days when reverse engineering the data files meant you knew how to write a level editor - you might understand exactly what the files mean today, but that doesn’t mean it’s feasible to write a third party pipeline for it. The pipeline for a modern AAA engine is where all of the secret sauce is. You can’t afford to build one.

[Reid]

Are AAA game devs really worried that their superb, fantastic, totally-worth-it DLC content isn't actually worth its cost compared to the inferior modding community's? Either that or they just try to charge for other people's work. I guess your past post was right on about game devs trying to take a step function supply curve and make it as linear as possible. Because everything is about nickel-and-diming, if you can get content for free then there's competition against that.

I still remember when DICE basically called the modding community morons who couldn't figure out their editing tools. LOL, as if their monkey work game devs are more competent than the modding community.

[Jon`C]

I still remember when DICE basically called the modding community morons who couldn't figure out their editing tools. LOL, as if their monkey work game devs are more competent than the modding community.

Frostbite is why ME:A turned out the way it did, so

[Reid]

Oh, is frostbite a poor engine?

[Jon`C]

Not poor. More like opinionated and incomplete.

Over the past few years, one of BioWare’s biggest obstacles has also become one of EA’s favorite buzzwords: Frostbite, a video game engine. An engine is a collection of software that can be reused and recycled to make games, often consisting of common features: a physics system, a graphics renderer, a save system, and so on. In the video game industry, Frostbite is known as one of the most powerful engines out there—and one of the hardest to use.

Developed by the EA-owned studio DICE, Frostbite is capable of rendering gorgeous graphics and visual effects, but when BioWare first started using it, in 2011, it had never been used to make role-playing games. DICE made first-person shooters like Battlefield, and the Frostbite engine was designed solely to develop those games. When BioWare first got its hands on Frostbite, the engine wasn’t capable of performing the basic functions you’d expect from a role-playing game, like managing party members or keeping track of a player’s inventory. BioWare’s coders had to build almost everything from scratch.

(Over the past few months I’ve heard a great deal about Frostbite’s challenges. In August of last year, I went to BioWare Edmonton’s studio and interviewed many of the leads on Dragon Age: Inquisition for my book, which tells the full story of that game. In short, they had a very, very hard time.)

By the time BioWare entered pre-production on Mass Effect: Andromeda, the Dragon Age: Inquisition team had built some of the tools that they’d need to make an RPG, but not all of them. Engineers on Andromeda had to design many of their own features from scratch, including their animation rig. “Frostbite is wonderful for rendering and lots of things,” said a person who worked on the game. “But one of the key things that makes it really difficult to use is anything related to animation. Because out of the box, it doesn’t have an animation system.” (Frostbite was later attached to an animation system called ANT, that source said, but it was full of “duct-taped issues.”)

While describing Frostbite, one top developer on Mass Effect: Andromeda used the analogy of an automobile. Epic’s Unreal Engine, that developer said, is like an SUV, capable of doing lots of things but unable to go at crazy high speeds. The Unity Engine would be a compact car: small, weak, and easy to fit anyplace you’d like. “Frostbite,” the developer said, “is a sports car. Not even a sports car, a Formula 1. When it does something well, it does it extremely well. When it doesn’t do something, it really doesn’t do something.”

“Whenever you’re trying to do something that fits the engine—vehicles, for example—Frostbite handles that extremely well,” the developer said. “But when you’re building something that the engine is not made for, this is where it becomes difficult.” Designing the large maps of Andromeda’s planets became a struggle on Frostbite, where the maximum size of a map was initially 100 by 100 kilometers. The Andromeda team needed their maps to be way bigger than that. Other struggles included the streaming system, the save system, and various action-RPG mechanics that Andromeda needed in order to work.

“It’s been painful,” said a developer. “The pain started with Dragon Age: Inquisition and continued on with Andromeda as well.”

[ECHOMAN]

Is the Sith engine a Yugo that easily catches on fire?

[Brian]

Remember when they turned Quake II into an RPG? eeehhhh Anachronox. I was so excited about that game. But it was so glitchy and even though the environments looked cool it you were still locked into essentially corridors and the super-limited number of areas and enemies made leveling up your character "ahead of schedule" impossible, which meant winning a lot of the battles was essentially a coin toss (at least for me, maybe I just sucked bad). Reading the wikipedia article it sounds like years later they finally released some patches which fixed all the crashing but that was too late for me.

[Jon`C]

Is the Sith engine a Yugo that easily catches on fire?

Not sure. Does the Yugo’s rubber band break a lot?

[Reid]

(Last year Valve was taking 94% from Dota 2 skinners. IIRC it’s only 75% for Skyrim. They aren’t upfront about either number so I’m not sure if it’s gotten worse since then.

Valve doesn’t do **** to deserve their platform rents to begin with. Taking 94% from fan modders is beyond the pale.)

You're joking us, I think. Didn't you see how excited people got over the trading card game?

[Freelancer]

I'm not gonna say games were better 20 years ago, but at least their technology had some character.

cogscript