My favorite holiday ever is happening tomorrow

Instead of going and reposting all of the papercrafts i’ve found for halloween, laziness has struck and i’ll just point you in the direction of some of the larger papercraft sites that have halloween stuff up now.

http://paperkraft.blogspot.com/

as of today, they have tons of halloween themed papercrafts up

http://www.papercraftmuseum.com/?s=halloween

a few halloween papercrafts

http://www.ss42.com/pt-halloween.html

has a bunch of links to pages with more papercrafts

In other news, I finally found a copy of “Beginning iPhone 3 Development” yesterday, and I’m beginning to work my way through the book.  Also along those lines, the Unity game engine now has a free basic copy of the engine (still have to pay for the iphone engine or the pro versions)  I downloaded a copy of this last night and started messing around with it a little bit….gonna take awhile to learn i think.

Next on my agenda of things I wanted to post:  started work on my first ‘real’ Unreal Tournament 3 level yesterday in class.  So far I’m liking the feel of it.  Need to make a few changes here and there, and add in some detail, but so far it’s going swimmingly.   Whenever I finish the thing, I’ll possibly post the file here so people can download and play the thing.  I’m a little iffy on that though, since it may become a portfolio piece….We’ll see.

Lastly, I’m thinking about making a website for my portfolio.  Going to start looking around to see if I can find any cheap places to host my portfolio, then begin looking into actually making it.   I may post a link to it here, depending on how I have the page set up (may do a password protection to avoid people stealing my works)

Have a Happy Halloween!

Woho.. Min första model importerad in i UT3, gött.  Är till stor del  klar med texturerna..KANSKE blir att fortsätta på dem ett tag,men skulle kunna sluta nu och vara ganska nöjd.

Finns ju teoretiskt mycket jag kan förbättra men..  Nu bilder:

Här är två bilder på pumpen importerade, dessa är från UT3 Mesh editor, är realtid shading så tyckte det såg fint ut.

Här har vi pumpen InGame. Är ju inge avancerad ljusättning av mig dock. men fungerar fint. Gillar hur editorn o motorn fungerar, lätt o importera modellen också.

Sorry that it has been soooooo long since my last post…so busy and stuff breaking and just have a lot of crap to deal with…but anyways..onto the blog

I saw a post on the Ubuntu Forums for a game night on Sunday Sept 20th for a game called Sauerbraten. Here are some screen shots:

From what I can tell, it looks almost like UT3 or CSS…and apparently the game is pretty popular in the open source community. There are leagues and tournaments just like you would find with CSS. So I will be giving this game a chance. This game does work with Windows, Mac and Linux so that gives it another + in my book for being a cross-platform game. Here are some more screen shots:



Now there is some graphic eye candy to this game but the main intensions of the game was not really to be a graphic heavy game. Here is the description of the game:

“Cube 2: Sauerbraten is a free multiplayer/singleplayer first person shooter, built as a major redesign of the Cube FPS.

Much like the original Cube, the aim of this game is not necessarily to produce the most features & eyecandy possible, but rather to allow map/geometry editing to be done dynamically in-game, to create fun gameplay and an elegant engine.

The engine supporting the game is entirely original in code & design, and its code is Open Source (ZLIB license, read the docs for more on how you can use the engine).”

So give it a try…you might like it:
Windows Download
Linux Download
MacOSX Download

Other Links:
Quadropolis (community site for maps etc.)
Premier Sauerbraten League (competitive league)
Sauer Joutes (French community site)
sourceforge project page (downloads/cvs)
Cube Server Lister (external browsing app)
Wouter’s homepage (developer/designer)
Lee’s homepage (developer)

Revisions:

7-30-09: Initial release.  Added another section for Underground Gamer requests.
7-31-09: Added World in Conflict and Warcraft 3 gamer request.
8-01-09: Added No One Lives Forever 2 gamer request, Far Cry 2, and Gears of War.
8-02-09: Changed the game request section slightly.  Now it has a “Known to work Straight Up” part of it.
8-3-09: Added notes to the games section for quake 3 and call of duty 1.
8-7-09: Added Worms Armaggedon and Worms World Party to games section.
8-8-09: Added hamachi channel. I hope I am not going to regret this.
8-11-09: Added Call of Duty 2 and Gears of War to verified games list.
8-13-09: Added install Tunngle demonstration video.
10-31-09: Added a long list of games: Battlefield Vietnam, Borderlands, Demigod, Duke Nukem, GTA IV, Killing Floor, Left 4 Dead, Need for Speed Most Wanted, Shift, and Underground 2; Red Faction Guerilla, Resident Evil 5, Section 8, Serious Sam – The SEcond Encounter, Splinter Cell – Pandora Tomorrow, Starcraft, Street Fighter IV, Titan Quest, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3

Foreword:  I am very excited.  This is definitely one of my favorite posts for 2009, and as you read further, you will understand why.  This guide is clearly not illegal.  It is simply another method to enable users to play their LAN enabled games over the Internet with friends.  No longer are you bound to be in the basement with your PCs to play LAN games! There is a reason why I spent two long nights working on this guide and the excellent video!  ~ Versatile

If you follow this blog, or know anything about VPN programs, Hamachi is a great program that people can use to play LAN games with each other.  In short, Hamachi was the king for implementing LAN games to play over the Internet.  How it worked is people would join these networks, and Hamachi gives each user a unique IP address.  When you launch a game, the game is tricked into thinking that everyone in the network is on the same LAN, and hence, you can see each other to play the game.

Of course, Hamachi has other useful purposes such as being a great secure chat medium, as well as being an alternative as a safe VPN to tunnel into your PCs and transfer files or encrypt remote transfers or remote administration.

See you are praising Hamachi?

Just like any program in life, everything has its downfall unfortunately. Hamachi is a great program, but when you try to play LAN enabled games over the Internet, it is not an exact science.  I harp a lot about the importance of VPN alias, and I thought that was the holy grail to make games work, but that is not true unfortunately.

Although you do the VPN alias for the user, it turns out that sometimes it doesn’t make the server show up in the game.  You may have to disable encryption, and instead of having the the first 3 octets of the IP address same as host and the last octet the same as the client’s last octet, you may have to change the method where the last octet of the VPN alias is one number higher than the client’s last octet.

For example:

Host IP: 5.156.23.333

Client IP: 5.142.69.449

The traditional VPN alias for host would be:  5.156.23.449.  Sometimes not all games will work properly, and through error and trial, you find out the VPN alias should really be 5.156.23.334.  Get my drift?  It is not an exact science.

Plus, there are claims that in Vista and Windows 7 that the UDP traffic that Hamahi used is not being routed properly in the OS so that is why you may not see a game in the LAN menu.

Well frick man.  How about Garena?

I’m glad you reminded me about Garena.  Don’t get me wrong, Garena is a great program to. Hamachi is limited in the sense that in order to play your favorite game, you need other people online at the same time in your network.  Since the network is limited to 16 players, you constantly have to kick people to get new people inside.

When using Garena, this is not the case anymore.  Garena is almost like Valve’s Steam in the sense that it has a game browser.  It has multiple network rooms, where the max limit of each room is 225 players.  Garena takes care of the VPN alias in the background.  All you need to do is make sure your game is the latest version as the other players, host a game, and then people can instantly join you through the multiplayer aspect of the game in question.

The problem? Garena has a small list of games. The hottest games they got going on right now is Left 4 Dead, Killing Floor, Starcraft, and the Warcraft 3 series.  It is funny that they have COD4 and COD5.  Although its nearly empty for USA rooms, its vastly popular in Brazil and Europe networks?  What gives? >_>

If you have a LAN game like Diablo II, there is no way you can make that work in Garena.  You can try to make it work in Hamachi though, but you will have to mess with the VPN alias, and making Hamachi the primary adapter in Windows, which I have guides on already.

This is why I am so glad to find a new program called Tunngle.

All right, you got me.  What is Tunngle?

Tunngle (pronounced as “tung-gle” – I hope that is right pronunciation) is another VPN client program like Hamachi or Garena.  However, it is vastly compared to Hamachi because of its feature set.

Take a look at the chart below, thanks to the source, and major props to Brioche.

As you can see, Tunngle blows Hamachi out of the water.  It has an interface that is a cross between Steam and Garena.  It has a list of game networks that you can join and its very easy to play a game.  Zero configuration which I will talk about later in this guide.  It truly is the holy grail that all the hardcore PC gamers have been waiting for.  Oh yea, and if a game is not on the Tunngle network, you can go to a misc network and play your game there!  It has sexy written all over it.

You are killing me with anticipation.  How do I get started with Tunngle?!

Haha, keep your pants on. Here is the guide you have been waiting for in easy to follow steps:

Note: The program is made by German programmers, and it is still in beta.  They are working on an English translation, which I hope is released soon!

1) Go to www.tunngle.net.  Download the program and install it.  Make an account at the website and fill out the required information.  Make sure to confirm the email message.

2) Launch the tunngle.net program.  It will look like the screenshot when you first load it.

3)  After awhile a message will pop up below.  Say “Ja”.

4) Type in your account and software password.

It will take about a minute to connect and it looks like the screen below.

5)  Here you are at the main screen.  Click on community, then network, then go to browser.

6)  On the left hand side, is all the categories. If you select any particular category, you can break it down to the specific games.

7)  Enter into any game room.  Now minimize Tunngle, and launch your game.  When you go to the LAN portion, you should see servers if anyone is hosting.  Likewise, you can host and others will see it.  No configuration.  No need to mess with VPN alias or other settings.

Pretty cool right?  Let’s say that your favorite game is not in the Tunngle game browser.  No worries!  Just go to any game room, although you can go to one of the rooms under “misc”.  Host your game there with your friend, and Tunngle takes care of the rest.

OMG, this really is the holy grail!

Of course it is. If you do not realize the beauty of this program, then I ask you leave or reconsider why this program is a breakthrough. Easy to use, easy to setup, and best of all, it works with all games with LAN functionality.  Screw you Garena.  Hamachi can rot in hell when your favorite game is not working, but yet it works great in Tunngle!

The only problem is right now like 98% of the user base in Tunngle are Europe/Asia game players.  There are hardly any USA players, maybe 0.05% are USA/Canada players.  My goal is that this article, coupled with my Youtube video, will open up other peoples eyes to get onto the Tunngle network.

I will definitely be visiting the Tunngle network to share my story as well as this article and see if I can help with promotion of such a fine program. Thank you Tunngle.  You are a blessing.

Timeless Video Tutorial – Learn how to use Tunngle.

After recording this video at least 10 times, I finally have a version that I am satisfied with.  (Well, being that it was like 12:30 AM in the morning may have played a factor in it too.  Haha).  Enjoy!

Tunngle Install Video – Start to Finish

Underground Gamer Requests

Tunngle is still in its infancy stage.  With that said, as more and more people read about this article, I want you to let us know what games you have that you want to play on Tunngle.  As more and more people comment, we will have a special list for everyone to contribute to!

Games we want you to have to play with us.  Games with an * means modification may be needed.  Just go to the tunngle server, host a LAN game, and people can join without special instructions!  All games below are verified to work unless noted below:

• Battlefield Vietnam
• Borderlands
• Call of Duty*[best if you use the windows 1.5 private server crack to defeat "awaiting cd key authorization" method]
• Call of Duty 2* [Use the 1.3 private server crack to defeat "awaiting cd key authorization" method]
• Call of Duty 4* [Use the 1.6 private server crack to defeat "awaiting cd key authorization" method]
• Call of Duty 5* [Use the 1.7 private server crack to defeat "awaiting cd key authorization" method]
• Call of Juarez
• Demigod
• Duke Nukem 3D
• Far Cry 2
• Gears of War* [See special tutorial here]
• Grand Theft Auto 4
• Half-Life
• Halo 2* [requires special steps. See tutorial here]
• Killing Floor
• Left 4 Dead
• Need for Speed: Most Wanted
• Need for Speed: Shift
• Need for Speed: Underground 2
• No One Lives Forever 2
• Quake 3: Arena  [better if you turn on dedicated server, then join it to fight lag]
• Quake Wars: Enemy Territory  [needs verification]
• Rainbow Six Las Vegas 2
• Red Faction Guerlla
• Resident Evil 5
• Section 8
• Serious Sam – The Second Encounter
• Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
• Starcraft
• Street Fighter IV
• Titan Quest
• Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3
• Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos
• Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne
• World In Conflict
• Worms Armaggedon
• Worms World Party
• UT 3
• UT 2k4

Hamachi Channel

Want to play with us and know when we play? Join the hamachi channel. We clean it out almost every single day to play halo 2, quake 3, worms, call of duty, whatever we want!

• Network name:    Jewbacon’s Kosher Kastle
• Password:  333

If you got more, leave a comment!

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by AXIS of Reality

©2009 Alex Baldwin

Cast your mind back to 2003. Remember seeing those amazing E3 videos of Half-Life 2 with a Combine gunship shooting a car the player was hiding behind?

You know, where the doors would swing and the whole car would lurch on its suspension under the impact.

It was at that time that the buzz was officially started for the so-called physics revolution.

Yet here we are 6 years later, with fancy schmancy new hardware (360/PS3) and what is there to show for 6 years of tech exponentially improving in game physics?

For the most part, just a few more boxes that can fall off shelves. Yay.

Next-Gen Unleashes new graphical powers?

It’s with that in mind that I’m going to have a close examination of where we are at the moment and why, since it’s one of the key elements of games next to graphics, sound and gameplay.

First, time to go even further back to the late 1990s when Dreamworks was working on a PC game known as Jurassic Park: Trespasser. This was a title being prepped to turn what people expected from games on its head.

• Jurassic Park: Trespasser demo

Turok takes a bite out on the graphics this-gen

Instead of controlling a camera with a gun strapped to it poking out the right-hand side of the screen as most FPS do, you would actually have control of in-game hands.

Pick up in-game objects to use, all physically accurate and all dynamic to use against the evil dinosaurs (a game enemy that seems to have ironically gone extinct since Turok).

Pretty impressive for the age of the PSX and N64, yes? So why haven’t you heard of it along with other landmark titles like Half-Life and Mario 64?

Time to execute

Well, it was buggy as all hell, but did convey the message

Unfortunately Trespasser can be attributed with damning the use of physics in games for years.

Simply put, it was broken. Horribly, horribly broken. Everything was glitchy and bugged, making everything with ‘physics’ appear to just be acting randomly.

Because the physics didn’t work, the game didn’t work. And after all, what designer wants his/her game to be destroyed through no fault of their own simply because the technology just isn’t there?

• Half Life 2 at E3 03

After Trespasser sank into oblivion, nothing much was heard of game physics or ‘dynamics’ until Half-Life 2’s first trailer and the release of Deus Ex 2: Invisible War.

Possibly the first large commercial release with properly working physics (provided by the soon-to-be industry standard providers, Havok), Invisible War let the player pick up any object (or corpse) not bolted down and throw it around.

Admittedly it was in the early days so boxes and human corpses seemed to weigh the same but hey, the physics worked.

You knock out a guard, pick him up and stick him on a bonfire to watch him wake up screaming (and then die). Entertaining stuff.

However it wasn’t until 2004 that game dynamics started to become common and feasible for developers.

Halo 2 and Max Payne 2 both used Havok to great effect to make shooting enemies that much more entertaining – after all, who wants to watch the same death animation over and over when they could see a body slump down in a heap or fall over the edge of a cliff?

Crates went flying from explosions, lights would swing and all-in-all it was a much more dynamic experience.

No more static environments

Environments weren’t static anymore – they were part of the action.

It must be said though that Half-Life 2 really set things in motion – literally. Using a modified version of Havok in their Source Engine, Valve showed its use in gameplay with physics puzzles utilising one of the most brilliant weapons ever: the physics gun. Run out of ammo?

Just rip a toilet out of the wall and hammer your opponent’s urinals. Good times…

Soon after, the rumour mills were grinding into action about new games with grenades that would blast holes in the ground, weapons that could blow open the sides of buildings and vehicles that could be smashed and destroyed piece by piece. Lofty expectations indeed, which were further fueled by a newcomer to the scene: Ageia.

Developers of the PhysX game dynamics engine (brand new at the time), Ageia suddenly released a unique piece of PC hardware, a physics processor (PPU).

It worked much like a graphics processor (GPU), but instead was dedicated solely to accelerating physics calculations to allow the generation of game dynamics on a scale that was never before possible on a regular processor (CPU).

This was attributed to its use of parallel processing. Each core on a regular processor can only perform once calculation at a time, so if there’s something like barrels being thrown away from an explosion it needs to queue up the calculation of where each point on each barrel should be in the next frame from the game’s physical rules.

This is all well and good if it can be done before the next frame is rendered at 30 or 60 frames per second, but what happens if there’s too much to calculate for a processor not fast enough to do it before the next frame is due? The framerate drops and ‘chugs’, as can be seen quite commonly in games such as Half-Life 2 for the split second after shooting an explosive barrel.

While dual-core and quad-core processors have alleviated this to a certain extent, there is a lot of room to improve.

The Xbox 360’s tri-core Xenon CPU has 6 effective threads (2 per core) which can theoretically allow these calculations to be performed up to 6 times faster than a standard single-core CPU providing it’s not doing anything else at all on the CPU at that time (such as AI, sound, etc) which is very rare.

The PS3’s Cell CPU fares a bit better with 7 effective streams (8th stream is locked) and is designed for extreme parallel processing, but still far from ideal when the CPU is in demand by other game elements.

The Ageia PhysX promised to fix this by using massive amounts of parallel processing (but at a slower speed per core) which is ideal for physics, and it succeeded.

However, unless there’s a significant market penetration developers won’t have a real chance to utilise it.

After all, if a game can sell 1 million copies on PC, what happens if only 1 in 20 people own a PhysX card? Sales are reduced to 50,000. Not attractive at all.

Instead, the developers that did use the card simply offloaded regular game physics to it that a CPU could easily handle, raising the framerate as the CPU is freed up for other tasks but not changing the gameplay in any significant manner at all.

The PhysX card was relegated to just an expensive way to get an extra 5 or 10 frames a second in certain games.

Illusive PhysX exclusive

There was only one PhysX-exclusive game ever developed, and really it was just a tech demo.

Cellfactor and it’s ’sequel’ Cellfactor: Revolution let you destroy pretty much everything including tearing cloth and causing massive explosions with debris raining down that was extremely impressive but in the end nothing more than something to ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at, then get back to playing UT2004.

Still, Ageia did prompt Havok to up its game. No longer was Havok sitting easy as king of physics engines, and unless they did something fast Ageia could steal a large chunk of their clients as PhysX could also work as a regular CPU-run dynamics engine.

Hence, there was the much publicised Havok FX unveiled by Nvidia and Havok. Instead of running gameplay physics such as characters and objects, Havok FX would run ‘environment physics’. This translated into more superficial physics use such as making accurately moving snow or waves in water. Basically, prettying up your game.

The most significant aspect though was that this would run on the console or PC’s GPU. No extra hardware would be needed, as the GPU on modern graphics cards work similar to Ageia’s PhysX card – using extreme parallel processing. ATi also took the opportunity to boast that their new flagship GPU (the X1900) could run physics many times faster than Ageia’s ill-fated dedicated card.

Despite Havok’s insistence that many developers were already working with Havok FX and the first games with it were right around the corner, it soon sank into nothingness never to be heard of again.

This may be because of two major events.

First, Intel announced its purchase of Havok. This made sense as physics are traditionally run off the CPU which Intel specialises in. It was also around this time that Havok FX’s other partner Nvidia split ways, unveiling their complete purchase of Ageia including their PhysX technology.

Not long after, Nvidia made the move that may define the future of game physics: Ageia’s PhysX technology would be run off their GPUs at faster speeds than even Ageia’s dedicated card. Nothing extra to buy, and able to be unlocked in a driver update for Nvidia’s already released GeForce 8 series and above as it runs off Nvidia’s CUDA programming interface to design applications for their GPUs.

Ageia’s launch impact

This made more of an impact than Ageia’s card launch, as Nvidia is the largest GPU supplier in the world with approximately 65% market share.

Games such as Unreal Tournament 3, Prince of Persia 2008 and Mirror’s Edge using the PhysX engine could have their physics accelerated on Nvidia’s PC GPUs and as such some had PhysX-exclusive add-ons.

Mirror’s Edge added dynamic ripping cloth and accurate glass to GeForce owners while UT3 had 3 extra maps utilising the increased physics processing allowing effects such as accurate hail and even tornados moving through levels ripping up objects as you play.

The regular games are playable on all PCs (and consoles, where applicable), but some PhysX extras gave bonuses to Nvidia users. Upcoming games such as Dragon Age: Origins and Heavy Rain also use PhysX.

Modders also revealed that if the PhysX programming was simply ported to the new unified language OpenCL that works on all modern GPUs it could work just as well on ATi’s hardware.

However, Nvidia owns the tech and there’s little chance ATi would ever want to pay their arch-rivals to license that tech. Instead, ATi and Havok revealed at GDC 2009 that they had Havok’s new product Havok Cloth running on ATi’s 4000 series GPUs at dozens of times the speed a CPU could handle.

Better yet, it was being developed in OpenCL so ALL modern GPUs had the ability to use it. This is a much more attractive proposition than one such as PhysX that is only available to one segment of the market for developers.

Hope is always there

It’s unclear whether this is possible on the Xbox 360 GPU (from ATi) or the PS3’s RSX GPU (from Nvidia), but we hope there’s a way.

All in all, it looks like we’re finally on the verge of having physics fast enough to be a significant element of the gameplay. While Red Faction: Guerilla and Force Unleashed had impressive destruction, imagine the possibilities with dozens of times more physics processing power.

While other engines such as Euphoria and Digital Molecular Matter have shown additional uses for physics in dynamic character animation or breaking materials uniquely they haven’t had a real chance to shine as CPU speed has held then back.

After all the side-switching of Nvidia leaving Havok for PhysX, and ATi partnering with Havok despite being owned by Intel which is ATi’s parent AMD’s rival in the CPU business (confused yet?) we might finally get some progress on the physics front.

It might not materialise fully this generation, but one thing is certain: physics on the GPU is the future.

And hey, if we know Valve it will probably time with Half-Life 3’s release.

©2009 Alex Baldwin

Please share us around

There is a lot of ambiguity on the internet about making custom content for the Unreal Engine, Unreal Tournament 3 specifically. There are dozens of resource for mapping as well as texture creation but  more advanced assets such as weapons or characters can be very difficult to piece together without scouring the web and amalgamating all of the piece meal tutorials and including a lot of guess work.

This post showcases some of the weapons I put together as well as a list of all the resources I used to understand the process.

The first weapon I made was a Walther P99. This is just a very cool looking gun and was simple to model as well as rig.

It has only two main  sections; the slide and the body of the gun. The rig has four separate bones: base, fire, anim and slide. The base bone dictates the main reference point for the weapon and is the bone that all other bones link back to. The fire bone is placed at the end of the muzzle and it tells the Unreal Engine where to spawn the muzzle flash emitter when the weapon is fired. The anim bone is required by the Unreal Engine if you have other animated bones. It acts as sort of the ‘base’ bone for all the animated bones, and it links back to the main base bone. The slide bone is skinned to the slide of the gun model exclusively. This allows the slide to move back and forth independent of the rest of the gun.

The UTWeap file was built using the UTWeap_ShockRifle file as a base. It is not derived from the shock rifle, but I did use the structure of the file to build my own implementation and by the end most of the shock rifle code was gone.

The second weapon that I built was constructed in a very similar fashion. The gun I decided to recreate was the H&K UMP .45. This gun is bigger and cooler. This made the model a bit more complex, but there are very few discernible moving parts on it, so rigging was simplified even further.

The code for this weapon was easy as this time I could just take the P99 code and change a few values. The muzzle flash is the same, the firesound is slightly altered and the rate of fire was changed significantly. Other than that the two guns are very similar in their behavior.

Finally, as an experiment messing around in Unreal Tournament 3, I decided to honor the request of my girlfriend to make a gun that shoots Daniel Craig heads, as the UMP .45 is the gun he is holding at the end of Casino Royale.

I contemplated modeling a 3d head and having the weapon spawn it as a full 3d projectile when it fired, but I realized that I could achieve it much more easily by creating a particle emitter system that used giant pictures of Craig’s head as particles and created only one particle. I threw that together and simply replaced the muzzle flash emitter with this one. The result if perfect and can be seen in motion at the video link below.

It took an unbelievable amount of trial and error to create these weapons but like many things in this realm once you’ve done it once and get the process locked down it only gets easier.

I was going to put a list of the different sites that helped me through the process of creating these weapons, but when I went to check I realized that only one really helped me out, and it did a great job:

• Geodav’s Video Tutorials: Great if you need a step-by-step walkthrough of the process.
• Geodav’s Weapon Tutorial: Another great read, slightly dated but still working.

The source files and .upk’s for the weapons described above can be downloaded here.

To view a video of these weapons in action, check out the clips on Youtube.

• P99
• UMP and Craig Popper

With this video you can snag two Achievements: Survival of  the Fittest and Delivering the Hurt.  Unreal 3 is one game you can jack up maybe 500 pts for your gamerscore.  The online you gotta earn!  And that ain’t exactly easy.  But the weapons Achievements you can boost with a friend or alone. Just follow the tips these videos provide and the pts are yours.

Yesterday whilst browsing the mod list at www.moddb.com, I came across this single player mod for Unreal Tournament 3, Prometheus. This mod won 1st place at phase 2 of the ‘Make Something Unreal’ competition, in the ‘Best Game Mod’ category, so that’s a clue as to the mods quality.

In the mod you play as a test subject for the Prometheus device, a machine that allows you to rewind time and play along side your previous movements. This is a mechanic that allows you to access switches in correct orders and other tasks with past versions of yourself in order to allow the current version of you to progress through the mods two main levels (there is also a quick tutorial to teach you the basics).

This mod is very interesting and definitely worth checking out, especially if you have a copy of UT3 on your hard-drive just sat there doing nothing. Just like I did after the recent Steam sale. Speaking of which, there is another free UT3 weekend this coming weekend, so you have no excuse not to check out this mod at the same time!

Today is the Western Province election day. Well, for a lot of people, today was an important day. Same for me. But not because of the election. I don’t give a damn about the election. The reason why today was important for me was because we planned to have a LAN party at our place. And it actually happened!

It didn’t go really smooth from the beginning. We had a lot of delays. First, the guys were late to come at our place. We were supposed to start early in the morning, but they arrived at around 10am.

We decided that we would play UT3.

Then we took a long time setting up the PCs. 4 PCs, one for each. My PC, dad’s PC, Tharaka’s PC and Damitha’s PC. Damitha had his VGA burnt, and though we thought it was a PCI-E VGA, it wasn’t. That sucked! We were gonna put in my X800GTO in it and use GMA X3000 on dad’s PC to power the games there. I had to ask for my cousin’s Geforce 5900XT to get Damitha’s PC working. But it wasn’t enough for smooth playback. Probably it was the 256MB RAM that was the culprit. We gave up playing on that PC after a while.

The other 3 PCs worked well. We had a lot of fun. Of course one guy had to watch the other  three play. But still, it was great. Of course a lot of areas to improve. There isn’t enough room inside my room, and it was really hot even with the fan running full.

We only could play UT3. There wasn’t enough time for other games. I think if we do this again, we have to plan properly, so that we can get the best use of time. For example, decide on which games to play and install them on PCs before coming together.

P.S.

Tomorrow is Devinda’s birthday, and I guess this was a occasion to celebrate it 

Another classic UT2004 mod.

Jailbreak is a team based game, the main mechanic being that if you are killed you are put in jail.  Your team mates then have to race into the enemies base and unlock the jail releasing all inside.  Should all members of a team be locked in jail, the game is over and they are terminated.  This idea was originally developed for Quake 2, then a version for the original UT was developed, there have since been many other versions including an update to UT2003 and UT2004 this is where I first encountered it.

There are a large amount of settings you can tweak, such as respawning freed players back at base or out of the jail and temporary invulnerability after being released.

I picked the Arlon-Gold map, it’s nice and simple with mirrored base layouts.  The water is a bit annoying, and getting up on the top level isn’t easy but otherwise it’s a great map.

Within the first thirty seconds I ended up in jail. At the top of the screen is the jail counter, the row of figures represents free players and the ones in the circle are prisoners.  To pass the time you can fight with your team mates in the jail using the impact hammers (this can be disabled), you can also see out to the players fighting and some maps have cameras in the jail.

Later on in the game I decide to play defensive and go to guard the lock, the blue team have just one free player left.  I jump up to the window to see the prisoners inside.

A minute later and we’ve won.  The camera then goes to the jail and shows the players being terminated.  One of the winning team is also shown, posing.

You can see the lock outside, if our last team member can touch it we’ll all be freed.  Sadly that doesn’t happen and we lose this round.

The bots don’t actively fight in the jail, but if you start attacking them they will attack back, they often ended up beating me.

Dashes for the lock are often very frantic, here I am attempting to stop a player freeing his team mates, I managed to defend it most of the time, but not in this instance.

The leaderboard has also been heavily modded, as well as scores it also has ratings showing whether the player was mostly offensive or defensive.  You can use the Plus and Minus to cycle through offensive, normal, and defensive to control the bots behaviour (I’m not sure what it does in multiplayer).

There is also another way to be released from jail, every so often a player is taken from each of the jails for a one-on-one deathmatch, the winner is released.  This doesn’t happen very often but you have the option to force human players to be selected over bots.

What makes this mod great is that it’s full of great little touches another example is Llama hunt.  Players who disconnect while in jail, then reconnect allowing them to be free are marked as cheaters and gain a llama head.  They can no longer shoot and are free for everyone to chase, the person who kills them gets a nice little bonus.  There must also be some other triggers because I remember being the llama once in an offline game, and in this play one of the bots became a llama.

All the maps are specifically designed for the Jailbreak mod, and there are some really good ones included.  My personal picks would be; Conduit-Gold, a futuristic map, with two spherical bases joined together by high-speed conduits.  Addien-Dwy-Gold, a 19th century house.  And Arlon-Gold as seen above.

Find a list of places to download Jailbreak from here.  Choose the umod version as it’s easier to install.

The main reason I decided to do this now was that I’ve only just found out there is a Jailbreak mod for UT3 currently in development.  It’s still in the alpha stages so it’s not available to try, but this could be a lot of fun.

UT3 kääntyy pikku hiljaa linuxille

Pelaaminen linuxilla on pitkään ollut kuuma peruna. Tehdäänkö pelejä yleensäkin linuxille? ja mitkä ovat esteet jos näin ei tapahdu. Onko se jotenkin erityisen vaikeaa vai eikö touhu ole vain taloudellisesti kannattavaa.

PC on hallinnut pitkään pelikehityksen pääasiallisena kohteena, ja ainoat uhkaajat viime aikoina ovat olleet lähinnä kolmannen sukupolven konsolit. Linux ja mac käännöksiä on alkanut tulla  markkinoille suosituista peleistä, mutta tehdäänkö niillä rahaa. Vastaus on että jos tehdään niin ei merkittävästi. Tosin jo vanhenemaan päin olevista ja PC:lle hyllyikänsä ylittäneistä peleistä voidaan vielä pienellä vaivalla tiristää viimeisetkin roposet linuxilla tai macilla.

Jos pelistä tehdään jo lähtökohtaisesti mac versio, niin linux käännös on pala kakkua. Win only tuotteista käännöksen teko voi joskus olla lähes mahdotonta, ellei äärimmäisen vaikeaa. Esimerkiksi Blizzard tekee kaikista tuotteistaan sekä win että mac versiot ja pakkaa ne vielä samaan koteloon. Toivoa kuitenkin on että käyttöjärjestelmä sidonnaisuus alkaisi kadota ja windows saisi kilpailijan myös pelialustana. Linuxilla on kuitenkin vielä pitkä matka kuljettavanaan ennen kuin uusimpia pelejä sille julkaistaan. Vanhemmissa tuotteissa raudan suorituskyky vaatimukset eivät ole niin suuri kynnys että sitä ei pystyttäisi ratkaisemaan.

Uusissakin moninpeli tuotteissa usein vaaditaan linux ympäristöön sopiva serveriohjelmisto, vaikka senkin saaminen on ollut nykyään yhä vaikeampaa. Esimerkkinä Call of Duty: World at War jonka dedicated server ohjelmistoa odotettiin melkein puoli vuotta julkaisun jälkeen. Vielä surullisempi esimerkki on Crysis jonka linux serveri tuen puute oikeastaan tappoi ennen aikojaan.

Linux peleillä on kyllä monta kantoa kaskessa. Yleinen raudan tuki joka linuxilla ei taida olla  alkuunkaan windowsin tasoa, eikä ääni puolellakaan kovin ruusuista ole. Jos prosessorien suorituskyky kuitenki kasvaa tätä tahtia niin kohta pelkällä perus moniydin suorittimella hoitaa koko pelin laskennan niin 3d:n, fysiikan kuin audionkin.

Myös pelkkä markkinoiden koko rajoittaa usein sitä mihin suuntaan panoksia pöydälle asetetaan. linux voi kuitenkin hyötyä merkittävästi, jos mac laitekanta yleistyy ja sille aletaan tekemään tai kääntämään enemmän pelejä. Tällä hetkellä pelkkien linux käännösten teko ei liene taloudellisesti mitenkään kannattavaa.