Strange World in UT99
Posted: 07 Aug 2017, 09:21
I decided to play through Strange World again, but in UT99 this time. I think the last time I played it was in '01 or '02 if I remember correctly, so that was 15 years ago! The experience went pretty well, but I had a few issues. In particular, "Strange4.unr" was crashing constantly at the very beginning in the first hallways (inside the Mercenary base after teleporting in to the pool in the hallways with the reflective floors). The crash would give me no message; just a generic windows crash error. Sometimes the game would freeze completely and I had to ctrl + alt + delete. Has anyone else experienced this? I tried opening the map in UED and rebuilding everything, removing lights, reflective surfaces, pathnodes, fog, and more - but the crash still always occurred randomly in those hallways. I ruled out my drivers and settings, as I pretty much tried ALL of them. Does anyone have any clue why this crash happens? It's a very odd crash that I have never experienced in UT before... Is this a known Strange World bug?
Anyway, with a LOT of quicksaving, I managed to get past that part and beat all of Strange World. I have to say, this pack is still a blast to play all these years later! I had forgotten a lot of it over time. There are definitely some glaring BSP problems in this pack, but once you get by those - the visuals are not all that bad even today. I can't believe no mapper to date has used the idea of a sunset/sunrise... It really is a cool idea. I know that UB recently said that the skytown map "looks like ass" over in the MOTW thread, but I actually think it still holds up pretty well. Sure, there are far better looking town maps out there today (even in ONP), but there are also so few SkyTown maps to speak of. This one is actually pretty big, and the visuals hold up better than some other older map packs out there... For fun, I also changed the music to "SkyCity.umx" (the beta music), and it fits perfectly! It is much more refreshing to hear than the standard SkyTown.umx.
By the way, if anyone wants an HD Railgun skin with a much better firing sound effect, download this and overwrite the old file from Strange World (may break coop support). The skin was so simple that it took me less than an hour to create (The skin isn't perfect due to an incredibly low-poly model):
https://www.mediafire.com/file/zsnpewrn ... ailgun.zip
Anyway, with a LOT of quicksaving, I managed to get past that part and beat all of Strange World. I have to say, this pack is still a blast to play all these years later! I had forgotten a lot of it over time. There are definitely some glaring BSP problems in this pack, but once you get by those - the visuals are not all that bad even today. I can't believe no mapper to date has used the idea of a sunset/sunrise... It really is a cool idea. I know that UB recently said that the skytown map "looks like ass" over in the MOTW thread, but I actually think it still holds up pretty well. Sure, there are far better looking town maps out there today (even in ONP), but there are also so few SkyTown maps to speak of. This one is actually pretty big, and the visuals hold up better than some other older map packs out there... For fun, I also changed the music to "SkyCity.umx" (the beta music), and it fits perfectly! It is much more refreshing to hear than the standard SkyTown.umx.
By the way, if anyone wants an HD Railgun skin with a much better firing sound effect, download this and overwrite the old file from Strange World (may break coop support). The skin was so simple that it took me less than an hour to create (The skin isn't perfect due to an incredibly low-poly model):
https://www.mediafire.com/file/zsnpewrn ... ailgun.zip