/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.6295854]

What do you think about Unreal

[Anonymous No.6295928]

>>6295854
I always felt bad for those innocent aliens. It was a pretty decent game but the potential I feel could've been sooo much better, I think it would be really cool and interesting to see that idea done again with a more fleshed out manner. I also find it interesting that this game did lots of things that people give Half-Life 1 credit for, because this game is actually slightly older. Also it has probably some the best graphics of any 90s game, besides perhaps Quake 3.

[Anonymous No.6296063]

>>6295854
The atmosphere, music and level design are fantastic.
The gameplay, not so much.
https://youtu.be/9IISjIMpepo

[Anonymous No.6296083]

It's a nice looking game with nice music, terrible weapons, terrible enemy design, boring as fuck levels and overall is extremely unpleasant to play.

[Anonymous No.6296203]

>>6296083
The weapons are good, but improved in UT. U1 multiplayer is also quite alright.

[Anonymous No.6296452]

Played it in coop and it felt like an exotic adventure

[Anonymous No.6296892]

>>6296203
>The weapons are good
How? A limp pistol, a shit shard-shotgun/shard-minigun, an awkward grenade launcher/shotgun, a useless nickelodeon gak gun, the most tedious rocket launcher around that barely compensates for the ridiculously inflated health pools of the enemies.

It's the worst set of weapons I've ever used in a game.

[Anonymous No.6296897]

>>6296892
the only shit weapon is the stinger, which got replaced/fused with the minigun in ut

both the goo gun and the rocket launcher are high risk/high reward weapons where you have to get in close for maximum effectiveness, and the grenades are great in multiplayer too

also the flak cannon is awesome, it's like a shotgun but not gay, and the secondary makes it super useful

[Anonymous No.6296909]

>>6295854
Pretty game, shit gameplay, ultimately very boring.

[Anonymous No.6296964]

>>6295854
I thought it was good, but there's a reason it's not as highly regarded as Doom, Quake and Half-Life. It feels far too long as well. UE1-era Alexander Brandon music is just the absolute best shit though. I've beaten it once a few years ago, along with RtNP but I don't see myself going through it again in the next few years

[Anonymous No.6297010]

>>6295928
There was a hub system (like in Strife) planned for Unreal but ultimately it was scrapped because of time constraints and bugs. There are still remnants of this in game files names (ie. Hub7.umx, hub maps in the beta versions were called "FHub") and in the code itself that is the part of the engine and was reused in Deus Ex.

>the most tedious rocket launcher around that barely compensates for the ridiculously inflated health pools of the enemies.

>>6296892
I think you're tedious when using eightball gun against Skaarj that can and will dodge them every time you launch a projectile weapon onto them, these are not your typical 90s FPS cannon fodder dudes who run blindly at you only to get gibbed. Also the Automag is not limp, in fact, it's pretty much OP in single player if your aim is good, you can easily snipe a Skaarj from afar with it. Minigun is good only in multiplayer with its limited ammo pool.

As of the inflated health pools, the AI was so CPU-heavy that they had to reduce the quantity of enemies per map and thus increase their health. On the highest official difficulty level every encounter with a Skaarj feels like a mini-boss battle and on the fan-made Godlike difficulty it's a deadly encounter, especially the first one at Rrajigar Mines. Hell, every single opponent that's not a wild animal will murder you in a fraction of second if you're not careful.

>>6296897
>both the goo gun and the rocket launcher are high risk/high reward weapons where you have to get in close for maximum effectiveness, and the grenades are great in multiplayer too

I've seen some pros doing crazy stunts with the BioRifle, sometimes clearing a room with four people at once in a deathmatch.

[Anonymous No.6297132]

>>6296063
Pretty much. The weapons all feel like they do about the same damage and all the enemies are way too spongy. Combined with the game being really long by old fps standards leads to it feeling pretty tedious before too long.

[Anonymous No.6298197]

>>6296964
>I thought it was good, but there's a reason it's not as highly regarded as Doom, Quake and Half-Life.
Which is a shame because Unreal has a very robust editor packaged with the retail game and U227 replaces it with even better UEd 2.0 from UT436. Name me another game from the era that's shipped with a fully functional editor capable of editing anything short of engine's core code.

[Anonymous No.6298242]

>>6295854
I loved the game, the music was awesome for Unreal and RtNP, not so bad level design, the weapons are okay at the beginning, gets frustrating at the end of the game where those big-ass Skaarjs, they dodge everything, this is where the weapons become useless, let alone how much ammo you can carry.

Going to play it again with HD textures, definitely worth a try ;)

[Anonymous No.6298281]

A cool game that had a lot of potential that was completely and irrevocable ended by the worst sequel of all time.

[Anonymous No.6298389]

People seriously overexaggerate the bullet-sponginess of enemies; Unreal has slighty spongier enemies than its contempararies, just slightly.

[Anonymous No.6298395]

nowundi

[Anonymous No.6298428]

i've tried to play it many times but i just hate all the enemies

[Anonymous No.6298657]

>>6298389
Reminder that fun is directly proportional to TTK.

[Anonymous No.6298673]

>>6296063
>>6296083
So its Quake 1, barring the nice looking since Q1 is a turd in that regard too?

[Anonymous No.6298682]

>>6298673
It's more like shadow of the beast but an FPS.

[Anonymous No.6299329]

>>6298682
Yeah that sums the game up perfectly.

[Anonymous No.6299342]

>>6295854
It's an adventure across an alien world with weird, but beautiful environments, with weird aliens and weird guns.
Rushing/binging it is a mistake - play it 1-2 levels at a time, otherwise it gets tiresome.
Also it runs out of steam past 2/3 of the game.

>>6298242
Against Skaarj use hitscan guns like AMSD, minigun or rifle, or make them dodge where you want then shoot where they gonna be.
Also rocketlauncher has a lock-on system. Start pumping rockets with both fire modes at once, hold crosshair on target - it changes to red circle, release and the roeckets will home in on dodging skaarj.
GES can act like mine layer.

Also HD textures are incompatible with Unreal's brand of precedurally generated detailtexturring (with individual algorithms for each surface material), and IMO they I'd rather have those if I have to chose.

[Anonymous No.6299373]

>>6299342
>Unreal's brand of precedurally generated detailtexturring
It's not procedural, each texture can be assigned with a detail dexture which is a static grayscale picture projected onto the main texture when the camera is close to the surface.

[Anonymous No.6299382]

>>6299373
It generates and blends in additional layers as you get closer using procedures to generate new blended mix of higher and lower scale (but same res, which results in high texel density) texture same way it does for "particle cluster" textures and most other fx.

[Anonymous No.6299627]

>>6299382
noise textures aren't procedural.

[Anonymous No.6299681]

>>6299627
>he doesen't know
Spotted someone who never opened the editor

[Anonymous No.6299812]

>>6299681

[Anonymous No.6299974]

I'm a nostagiafag and love unreal. Criticisms are valid but I just love the editor and making stories

[Anonymous No.6299993]

>>6299812
now go and approach a surface with that detail texture applied beyond normal limits
you will see how new layers emerge as you move closer, and they do it differently every time
meaning they aren't pre-mapped

I don't think any other engine have such ferature (I mean detail textures layering in, not just statric detail).

[Anonymous No.6301571]

>>6296452
Coop is the best way to play it.
Shitload of fun.

[Anonymous No.6301575]

>>6298197
Thief, I guess. Didn't Duke3D ship with an editor too? Half Life?
Not many.

[A͠͠n̡͟on̸͞y̧͢m͝o͡us No.6304286]

I love facing worlds

[Anonymous No.6304390]

>>6299993
It shouldn't even be that hard to implement.
I believe Unreal does all projection in software and lets the GPU take care of rasterizing exclusively. With vertex shaders, all that can be done pretty much automatically by the hardware. A shame that nobody else was so ambitious with the concept.

[Anonymous No.6305062]

>>6298197
Heretic 2 came with QuakeEd and I probably spent more time with it than the game itself.

[An̕o͏n̛ymous̴ No.6305092]

>>6299993
>now go and approach a surface with that detail texture applied beyond normal limits
>you will see how new layers emerge as you move closer, and they do it differently every time
Isn’t that just mip blending? Detail texturing is usually handled in a similar way to mipmapping.

[Anonymous No.6305104]

>>6299974
Based

[Anonymous No.6305113]

>>6304286
For me, it's Lava Giant.

[Anonymous No.6305292]

>>6305092
They are both texture and whether they are shown is determined by distance, but the similarity is superficial. They are not even close in any other aspect, including algorithms, math and purpose.

Mipmapping decreases resolution of the texture, to show lower res version at distance to 1) Improve performance (at the small cost of RAM) 2) Reduce shimmer from texels fighting for render space.
Mipmaps are generated by sequentially dividing textures by power of 2 until minimal size is reached
In most cases they are made as byproduct of (bi/tri)linear filtering since those algorithms include all the necessary steps, with just couple added steps you can get both done at once, thus optimising prerformance.


Detail texture is a multitexturing algorithm that lays a mask texture on top of another when you are close to it. That texture is usually higher resolution than one its layed onto.
Consoles aren't that good with multitexturing and are low on RAM so for the past few generations they fell out of favour, PBR is basically evolution of the idea, but it usually uses same res textures, not higher so actual detail increase is of different nature.
Very few games that DO make use of the technique usually resort to lowest effort variant, just adding noise to make it "look detailed".

Unreal Engine is the only game engine I remember that uses detail textures right, and goes beyond the regular - it doesen't stop adding layers when you approach even closer than is possible in the game by default (using cheats). And it has a different detail textures for different kinds of surfaces. On the example image you can see the fibers of the wood with good clarity even if you get super close. The texture never seems blurry thanks to added detail (the texture pixels act more like color mask for detail texture at that point).
Why no other engine did this is beyond me. I see many games that could benefit from this, but dont use it for some reason, and end up with blurry textures.

[Aņ͢on͘͜͜ymo҉͘u̴s̵͝ No.6305332]

>>6305292
>Detail texture is a multitexturing algorithm that lays a mask texture on top of another when you are close to it.
Yeah but the point I was making was the multitexture blending would be done similar to mipmapping where the LOD distance determines the progression of the noise blend.

I agree detail texturing is cool and I'm surprised why more engines didn't use it.

Curiously the N64 actually had hardware support for detail texturing but I don't think any game used it.

http://n64devkit.square7.ch/pro-man/pro13/13-07.htm#05-01

[Anonymous No.6305373]

>>6305292
Detail textures were absolutely mindblowing back in 1999. Especially since I was playing this game in software mode.