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Open Source Elements of Unreal Tournament Released 53

Posted by emmett from the mom-says-it's-better-than-q3a dept.
GreenMarine writes "I've released the open source elements of the Unreal Tournament engine. You can get the files at openut.sourceforge.net. There is a link there to the main Source Forge project page. There are also discussion forums, mailing lists, and a bug tracker for everyone to use." According to the site, Unreal Tournament Linux Patch 402B is now available as well as a set of debugging executables. What are you waiting for? Go now!
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Open Source Elements of Unreal Tournament Released More

Open Source Elements of Unreal Tournament Released

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  • Re:What I hope for.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    not really any need, since johnc is one of the top hackers on the G200 and ATI utah-GLX drivers. The UT source release was because Epic didn't want to spend the money to make a Linux port that didn't suck. ID has not only made an excellent linux port, their chief developer in his spare time has made linux a more attractive OS for 3D gaming.

    In light of that, I can't see how UT's source release ups any ante at all. But I agree any source released is a step in the right direction.

  • New Patch (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There is a new patch with some bug fixes, located at this link: Unreal Tournament Linux Patch [gte.com].
  • Actually, there have been several Doom source projects, and I can only assume Quake will follow in its footsteps.

    Doom Source Ports [doomworld.com]
  • as far as i know the problem w/ the quake cheats was that they released pretty much the whole game.
    i'm guessing that the peices being released here are non critical, and people wouldn't be able to use it to create hacked clients/servers...
    just mods (i'm guesing.)

    but RIGHT ON!

    this rocks!
  • Original Unreal: Your a prisoner on a crashed prinsoner ship and you go around killing aliens and such on a strange world trying to leave and get back to wherever. That is the basic plot, theres probably more but I only played about 1/4 of the single player, then discovered BotMatch.

    Unreal Tournament: Screw plot. Your part of a game where prisoners kill each other, and the big evil corporation gets money for letting others watch it. The entire game basically is a BotMatch.

    I hope I have proved in some way useful.
  • Naughty client-side calculations.
  • No, it was unformatted information copied right off the website. That is not informative, but rather quite annoying.
  • That was supposed to be informatve?
  • I've always thought that the way first Quake, and now Unreal handle opening of source a very good model for commercial software-- open just enough of your goodies so that others can run with it and customize and add features.

    Started playing with doing some mods for Quake 2, using the messy messy C source. Haven't seen Q3A's mod development state of the art yet, but I have to tell you that that code for Q2 is the worst I've ever seen. :)

    But then comes Unreal and UnrealScript, and this is why I respect Unreal so much-- the code looked nice, was enough like Java and JavaScript for me to catch on, and it made sense. I was able to make some pretty cool mods in 1/4 the time as with Quake, and they were more satisfying with the pretty Unreal engine. :)

    So, as you can tell, I'm an Unreal loyalist.

    But back to the point... That I'm an Unreal loyalist IS THE POINT! I bought Unreal (and QUake) and found that I could extend it, and found that lots of other people could as well. So, I bought Unreal Tournament (the next version) expecting the same thing. It's likely I'll buy the next game in the series if they have the same extendability.

    What if every app followed a similar semi-Open model?

  • now we just need DRI support

    It is already possible to get direct rendering using Openprojects/Utah GLX [openprojects.net]. This works with XFree86 3.3.5 using the Matrox G200/G400 or ATI Rage Pro. It is seperate from the DRI that will be included in XFree86 4.0 but AFAIK offers the same performance benefits. It certainly makes Q3A run nicely, though I haven't attempted Unreal.

  • I just got flamed in a game of Half Life. We were playing on the level "Op4_Bootcamp". Teams were enabled. My friend and I were on one team together, and other people came and went in other teams. We got flamed because we were leading the fraglist by over 600 frags when we finished (combined). The next best team had a (combined) score of 75 (4 Players).

    When accused of cheating I usually utter things like "D'oh! My aimbot is broken!" It pisses people off even more. I have been kicked numerous times from servers for "cheating". Yet... I don't cheat.

    But I love pissing off people who think I do (it makes them play worse.)

    Now, I don't have Mad skillz at Q3A yet... But I can tell you that in the hands of a skilled LPB with a good mouse, mousepad, and sensitivity set high, the railgun hits around 80% of the time at medium to long range.

    Think about that.
  • About?
    Unreal:Tournament is about killing your buddies online.
    Unreal (the first game) involves escaping from a prison ship and exploring strange new worlds and killing the baddies.

    In other words, nothing to do with the former :)

    Pope
  • I'll agree with you on the coding part for Office. I had to do some integration with project and outlook and it was a breeze. Now on to the bad point.

    It's this kind of scriptability that makes viruses like Melissa and whatnot possible. You have to weigh your choices very carefully. Do you want your browser to just be a browser or do you want the control given to websites by the browser that you see in IE? I don't WANT a web site to remove the use of the back button.
    Do you want your word proccesor to be just that or do you want it to be so intertwined with your email client that someone can write malicious vbscript ,that was MEANT to be used in the word proccessor or spreadsheet app, that can clog your entire mailserver and plant a trojan on your PC?

    I'll be the first to admit it's a dificult decision. What is that common ground between the minimalist and the bells/whistles people?
  • ...when are we going to see support for the Nvidia chipsets? I'm tired of playing with this Monster Fusion card. I'd like to see some TNT/TNT2 binaries sometime this decade. How about it Brandon?
  • It was Quake I that was open sourced for the record... And the "cheats," were really exploits of performance hacks that are the direct result of backwards thinking when it comes time to open up the client to modifications... Security V.S. Performance has been an age long tradeoff...
  • Hate to tell you this, kid, but Quake 3 isn't open source. Not in the least.

    Maybe they're using a proxy bot, or something like that? That's what it sounds like to me.

    Regardless, this has nothing to do with open source.
  • Just today I jumped on Quake 3 servers to play and was greeted by cheating fools with an uncanny ability to aim the clumsy railgun and blast me left and right. Now this really annoyed me, considering at three out of the ten people were getting 30+ frags while everyone else had frags below 10. All the while they were laughing (chat) and telling us how lame we were because we didn't know their "secret." Somehow I don't see how this open sourcing of game software is working any better than closed source games. Apparently it's making cheating an awfully lot more simple because the inner works of games is open to exploitation. Before this, intelligent hackers had to work hard and reverse engineer code to get cheats. Why can't good game companies just hire out a boatload of smart coders who understand quality and keep the backdoors closed when they are broken into? With this open source trend, I'm seeing preteen script kiddies pick up on code and writing hacks and cheats like it was free candy. This isn't what open source was supposed to accomplish.

    -----
    Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
  • Face it: these people were probably just good (and on a low latency connection).

    My housemate is accused of cheating all the time, and I know for a fact he doesn't. No one here will play him because he is so good.
  • As somebody else has pointed out Unreal (which
    I'm ashamed to say I haven't played yet :>)
    is you escaping from a prison ship (or so I've
    gathered). Unreal Tournament is you blowing
    up other people/bots. Basically UT is to Unreal
    what Q3 was to Q2 - an excuse to frag massive
    numbers of people online. :> So far I'm
    preferring UT over Q3 - beatiful graphics,
    some good scenarios, and a little more variety.
    Nice.
  • The only thing that scares you is that some people can get that good at playing quake(1,2,3).

    Now let me tell you this, those guys that were kicking your bud, are probably only half decent q3 players. If they were any good, you wouldn't have scored a single point before they reach a 100.

    A good q3 player would kick their bud, and they would start screaming of faul play. The good player would lauch his head of, while chatting and railing.

    Don't even get me started on expert players. They kick you bud before you even know they're in the game. They'll rail you from places you didn't know existed and leave the game because you bore them to death.

    As some other poster pointed out, the 'secret' is 'skills'.

    If your skills are lacking:

    - do not aim for the top spot, but try to make it to the top 4. Avoid the better players for the time being, be a coward, it pays off.

    - find another server where you can possibly make it to the top spot.

    - quit playing.

    Johan Veenstra
  • I know that the release of open source code for, what was it, Quake 2?, created a bunch of new compiles of the software with cheats for multiplayer. I wonder if this UT source release will allow for that sort of thing? If it does, what will the UT people do to counteract this problem?

    Just some food for thought.
  • Well as others have mentioned UT is a lot about just fragging your buddies to pieces, but it has a lot of other interesting gameplay modes included with it.

    There's the standard capture the flag game play, which most people are familar with.

    They also have domination where each team gets points for holding certain parts of the map.

    Then there's Assult, which I've been finding a lot of fun. You have two teams, one defeneding a base, one attacking it. Each team takes a turn as each side, winner is the team with the quickest time to capture the base. The bases aren't just standard fortresses either, you go from a fortress, to d-day landing, to jumping onto a high speed train.

    So don't expect an actual story in UT, just tons of fun killing your friends and new people online.
  • I guess since I don't have a beowulf cluster of my own but what exactly is Unreal about? Quake is supposedly about a Marine distroying the Strogg from invading earth but what is Unreal about so that I can anticipate.
  • That's a pretty pessimistic and short-sighted attitude to take with a source code release - the release of the Quake1 source release (under the GPL) is exactly the thing the internet 'geek' community has been pressuring companies to do for years. FYI, cheating was rampant in Quake1 *before* this source release. If someone wanted to cheat, they probably would have been able to anyways. The client/server model that the Quake games use is inherently insecure. Even Carmack admits that. There may be more rampant cheating now, sure - but before the source release, Quake1 enjoyed 'security through obscurity'. As any developer knows, that isn't a valid philosophy.
  • i know it's not exactly what you are talking about but two examples that stand out to me are, [watch out for flames] microsoft office and coreldraw9.

    i'm at work right now doing a front end to a simple access database and it's taken me about an hour to make a really good, usable UI. I can do the same and bring in excel spreadsheets, word documents, etc etc. i haven't done much with access but it's the easiest and most useful thing i've used in quite a while.

    it may not be open source but i can more or less do anything i want with the application, with minimial skill (vb is soooo easy).

    coreldraw9 has similar features, using some sort of visual basic. belive me, i love linux and coding in 'real' languages, but to get it done fast and useable, this ms visual basic thing rules.

    more applications need to make themselves skeletons for people to plug whatever you want into ; imagine a netsacpe/mozzila where i can write a simple vb-style app to automagically fill out forms for me, etc! the list goes on ....

  • What you're referring to is the Quake 1 source release [slashdot.org] from the other week.
    This is by no means a release of the entire code for Unreal Tournament. It's a release of the public engine headers and assorted files, not of the entir game. This is to facilitate modifying of the gameplay. Quake and Quake2 had similar releases, Quake3 should have it soon (Carmack, please! :-)).

    Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
  • The way I see it, as soon as the cheaters saw how the code did what it did, it was much easier to cheat, although this may not be the case. I'm aware of the cheating pre-release, hell, I loved Quake then, and still play it (along with Q2 and Q3A). I was just comparing the possibility of someone gaining knowledge of the innards of the game and using it to their advantage, which is much easier with the full Quake source release than with this partial UT release.

    But still, I do agree with you. :?)

    Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".

  • Here's the skinny (Score:3)

    by pnevares ( 96029 ) on Sunday January 02, 2000 @08:04PM (#1413236) Homepage
    From the project root page [sourceforge.net].

    Open source libraries, executables, and tools relevant to the Unreal Tournament engine. This project will focus on improving the quality of the UT Linux port through open development as well as creating a community of open UT engine developers.

    Notice, this is not some kind of full code release that will facilitate mass cheating a la Quake 1 source release [slashdot.org].

    Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
  • Quake 3 isn't open source. Only Quake 1 is. If what you are saying is true, it would appear that someone has managed to hack the "bitwise-encoded" Q3A network protocol already. The same thing happenned with Q1 and Q2 (with NO source code available). So, really, open sourcing Q1 didn't change anything. Yet we know that more people have been cheating since Q1 went GPL. Boggles the mind...
    Well, anyway, the Unreal code release isn't the entire engine, and thus shouldn't make it quite so easy to cheat.
    ------
    -Everything has a cause
    -Nothing can cause itself
    -You cannot have an infinite string of causes
  • Why is it that all the source that's been released for commercial games thus far has been horribly ugly or badly obfuscated? Doom, Quake, and these parts of Unreal Tournament are no exception. Anyone that actually agress with BSD style(9) or Linus's style document would almost be offended by this stuff.

    Just an observation, though. I still think it's great that people are releasing the sources to their games, and I still think Unreal Tournament is cool. :o)
  • Yes, but there's a difference between between replacing all instances of the word "DOOM" with "XYZDOOM" and modifying a few small things, and actually reading the code and creating something better. What I meant to say was I hadn't seen any free, open-source games *similar* to Doom or Quake yet, or heard of any such projects.
  • Well, it just seems like everyone is running around saying "this is a big step for the *BSD*/Linux community," but not many that seem to actually be looking at the code and trying to understand it. I haven't seen any Doom or Quake clones, or heard of any such projects yet. Perhaps this is just because of a lack of good artists that are willing to do something like that, though. The art is the hardest part.
  • Actually I believe they (Unreal people) released the code to facilitate the linux port.
  • Not distributing a full code release does have a major benefit above releasing it entirely, but it also isn't perfect. The nice thing about the Full Release of Quake 1 is that you can compile the entire game with pgcc (Pentium GCC) optimized for your pentium, k6, ppro, whatever. At first, you might not notice major speed improvements, but after playing for 3 hours or so (quakeworld multiplayer with 5 opponents) I can really say that the game is a lot smoother.
    With UT you can't compile the entire shitload of code, just (as far as I've looked at it) a very small part. Ofcourse, I agree, it's the only way to prevent cheating, but it isn't perfect either!

  • With the full release of quake3 I've personally found it very easy to jump on a server and get 30 frags with most people not ever reaching 0 and I'm a very mediocre player. Let me put it this way....some people are just that good that it would surprise you, they're goading you (the "secret" is called skillz). You'll be surprised and amazed when you're flying through the air and they're able to follow the path of your body with frightening precision.

  • Don't just download it (Score:4)

    by spaceorb ( 125782 ) on Sunday January 02, 2000 @08:05PM (#1413244)
    Create a new account and add yourself to the developers list here:

    https://sourceforge.net/account/regist er.php [sourceforge.net]

  • But posting crap like that is just like sticking your finger in the eye of all the beholders here.

    Diggs

  • At crystal.linuxgames.com [linuxgames.com] there is a very good open-source 3D gaming engine. It is quite far along. Looks like this discussion ended a long time ago, though.

  • Good to see more games coming out for Linux, especially when parts of them are "open sourced" for the community, lets the games live on much longer via the addons and mods that will be created for it. Glad to see Epic following id's lead on this at least, just wish more of the games that were released for Linux weren't FPSs, but at least we're getting things like Civ: CTP, Myth II, etc..., and these all help to drive the development of 3d support in Linux, so "it's all good" as pimps like to say :)

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