[U1] Unreal: 1996-1997 Remake

[ividyon]

This is actually intriguing to consider... making levels that look as simplistic as in the old alpha screenshots means that you break away from "l33tifying" the architecture and lighting to the maximum, as one would be expected to do in modern level design. This allows for a lot of content to be created in a short time span!

But, by extension, said content will not look/feel as grand and, perhaps, fun to play as maps that make proper use of all UnrealEd features. Hmm...

[UB_]

I think they'll be pretty fun with the new content.

[Master_Unreal]

I'm caught up (enough) on late school work so now I am able to get back to this

Right now, there are 3-4 main things that need to be done before level design goes further

Fixed Automag (A more complete model was recovered, so I still have to update my code to work with it)
Adjusting the HUD for all resolutions (800x600 will probably be the lowest to support the status bar)
Animating the Woman/Male for the AlphaPlayerPawn
Adding Hub related code to the AlphaPlayerPawn (optional for now: might wait a bit on this)

I may need someone who can use 1920x1080 resolutions to help with positioning the HUD on such resolutions, as my new monitor only does 1600x900.

Screenshots soon to come

[Master_Unreal]

Alright, it's been quite awhile so I'll get down to some changes

For now this project has been renamed to "The Unreal 086 Project", this name is being used because of the version of the alpha unreal that we have, which is Unreal 0.86

I got very tired of working with the same stuff, over and over again, so I wanted to take a whole new step with this project. The current plans are to have

-Alpha weapons and creatures incorporated
-Alpha Level Descriptions incorporated into this project as well as some brand new ideas on top of those
-Standalone (I'll get to this in a second)
-A great deal of new exploration standards (Backtracking, interactions with NPCs, etc)
-The mod will have it's own launcher (See Below)


Yes, this will be a standalone mod (Unless everyone votes otherwise), all Unreal I elements have been stripped with the exception of the textures and sound effects, Engine.u has been modified in terms of UnrealScript, So far the following has been added, these all have been sighted in previous unreal videos

-Strafe Tilting (Can be turned off if you don't want this feature, as well as tweaked so you can amplify the amount it tilts)
-First person death sequences(The original "fall over" sequence as well as a few new ones)
-The old view bob effect

I am using Unreal v200 at the moment (Strange isn't it?) to build this. Couple reasons for this are the CD Check, I believe that because of this I will be allowed to safely release this as standalone (Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm really not sure at all) that and I don't think that Engine.u is able to be modified in later versions.

I will port this so it works with a normal Unreal install eventually but at the moment my target is to make this standalone running with unreal 200. It's meant to be played in software rendering or glide if you really wish. Feedback and ideas are always great.

Edit: Brainstormed with Delacroix, got some nice story ideas down, new logo is shown in the launcher image

[[]KAOS[]Casey]

If I remember right, CD check is circumvented by setting the CD path to ..\

Why exactly did you have to change Engine.u when you could just make a new playerpawn class?

[Master_Unreal]

Ouch, yeah, forgot about that one

It's not just playerpawn, it's changes to some other classes too (Inventory, Weapon) and some more to come later on. If I don't end up changing much then I may just convert this to another version, but it would be recommended to make a new install and change some things in the .ini (Might have the launcher handle that automatically) In all honesty that aspect is just an experiment to see how things would work out this way and such.

[[]KAOS[]Casey]

Oh alright. It'd be a shame if we couldn't play it online. But then again, converting crap to work on different versions is pretty easy most of the time. In any path it's going to be a fun idea regardless.

[TheIronKnuckle]

not really keen on it being stand alone unless it dramatically reduces development time.

[Master_Unreal]

I will make my best effort to port it to 225 successfully at a later time (Tried this morning, half the things I coded didn't work right even after some attempted fixes) For now I will continue developing on 200

I have added some new features that I'd like some feedback on. These are all entirely optional so they will stay, but some suggestions on new ideas in this category or improvements would be nice.

There is now 2 HUD types to select (Can be enabled with bStatusBar in the config) The Status bar of course and an older HUD made before the retail HUD.

2 Automag skins can be selected now, an early black skin and the brown skin in later builds. I have also noticed that the older Stinger muzzle flash effect is in the skin itself so I took the liberty of applying that instead of a fireeffect and made the muzzle flash masked rather than transparent

Some people may remember this. People running Voodoo 2 cards could only go up to 800x600 on 16-bit (At least according to my voodoo 2 card). Because of the 16-bit limitation, that has caused a "noisy" effect to be rendered during gameplay. I have artificially added this feature by importing a scanline texture and stretching it across the hud. Early software rendering and glide builds show this same effect. Whether or not you'd like to use this is up to you. Comparison pics are below

Original "scanline" artifact - Glide


Emulated - Glide


Original "scanline" artifact - Software (A bit more than I can render with just a texture)


Emulated - Software(16-bit mode)

[Gizzy]

Liking the comparison shots

Forgot to tell you that I lost the version I had when I was working on resolutions, sorry! :'< (damned reformat)

[Jet v4.3.5]

One thing you might also want to do for the scanline effect is add some VERY subtle noise to it somehow. The current version you have is doing a good job, but the noise might make it look more like it's rendered that way rather than painted over the image. I'm really not sure what else to say about it, as it looks fantastic and I think it hilarious and awesome that you considered the effect in general. Great work so far.

EDIT: Another think I'm noticing is that the effect doesn't always show up as prominently as you would expect in certain areas (or on certain objects like the biorifle model). This might not be such a big deal, but maybe try multiplying its visibility or something so that it more strongly overlays the view and becomes more visible over more of the objects on the screen.

[Master_Unreal]

The screenshots kind of dumb down the effect it has, in game it looks a lot more prominent compared to screenshots. I did try adding noise to it earlier, but animated textures don't like drawing on the canvas. I did however try to simulate that by script but I haven't been successful so far.

@Gizzy: don't worry about the resolutions anymore, I figured out a way to make the status bar and all its elements fit on absolutely every possible resolution I did a bit of calculations with existing screenshots and essentially used "percentages" to calculate where to draw everything. (0.565346 = 56.5%)

[Master_Unreal]

The Impaler

[makemeunreal]

[quote="Master_Unreal"]The Impaler






Is it a Beta/alpha weapon? I never hear,or read about it.

[Master_Unreal]

Yeah it is. We found this model in a stash of models that came with the X-COM content package, the skin still happened to be in the 1998 beta of Unreal though. The gun is also described in the UNBIBLE as well.