I wish they would GPL it like Quake. Even if it was missing some proprietary dependencies I bet the community could replace them.
I recently helped port ioquake3 to the web, complete with UDP multiplayer, and set up an online demo using the internet archive's copy of the Quake III demo: https://thelongestyard.link It would be cool to be able to do the same with Unreal Tournament.
The state of things here is that Unreal Engine 1 may be open sourced one day but would need cleaning up first. And they just never got around doing it:
When I was a kid, I had so much fun playing open-source games based on Quake engines. Tremulous stands out as especially delightful at the little LAN parties we threw at my house on birthdays and New Years' Eve.
I can't find a link to your port's code. I think you have to include it as per GPL's license (and also because it's awesome and I want to see the code!)
Fortnite uses Unreal Engine 5, the most advanced Game Engine in existens which sourcecode is freely available for a few years now.
Open sourcing old stuff is a lot of effort. You need to find all people involved or know the legal status of the copyright. You need to go through all the code in case you had some properitary stuff in there which you might have paid for. And you need to do all of this next to what you normally do without a direct benefit.
It doesn't make a lot of intuitive sense, but code can be released under multiple different licenses. A 1:1 relationship between code and its terms is not required.
My first introduction to Unreal was via the "Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition" right around the year 2000. I fondly remember some of those maps (Facing Worlds for one) but to think that lineage ends up at Fornite is crazy to me.
Oh man, I loved that game as a kid. I did not have internet back then, but I didn’t care - I spent hours playing against bots. I still remember the voice taunts and callouts (“I slaughtered that guy!”) and creative maps like ctf_face. Then there were the built in gameplay mods like insta-gib and low gravity, fun guns like Redeemer - kept me glued to the screen for hours. I did not understand why people are playing CS at the computer clubs - UT was a much better and bigger game!
Thanks for a trip down the memory lane. Good, simple times.
"I did not understand why people are playing CS at the computer clubs..."
I was the same. UT was so much fun - bouncing flak cannon shrapnel round corners! But my LAN group all wanted to play CS or that UT mod that was similar (Tactical Ops?).
I don't think I knew too much about computers or gaming at that age to figure all that out. I just played the base mode.
My introduction to programming was thru a different game (Subspace VIE, a MMO on dialup back in the 90s later community-remade as Continuum) when squad had a login page at a domain. I really wondered how example.com/?login worked and that led me to where I am today.
The base game was fantastic. Never could say no to a game on dm-morpheus. But what really made it great for me were the total conversion mods.
I spent probably thousands of hours playing Infiltration back in the day. I can't imagine how much time and energy must have been poured into completely re-doing a game like that.
That’s a name that brings back memories. Infiltration was so far ahead of its time, and it’s interesting to look at how many of its features are now standard on even run-and-gun FPS these days.
That shouldn’t have any impact on its ability to be relicensed and open sourced though— any secret sauce in Fortnite is elsewhere, and arguably none of it is code, but rather in asset-level stuff like game/map/character design and monetization/progression strategy.
Even the current Unreal Engine doesn't have much in the way of trade secrets, its entire source code is available on GitHub for anyone to look at (aside from the console-specific parts bound by NDAs).
Yes, it's WebRTC. It uses real unreliable and unordered UDP packets, peer-to-peer. But WebRTC requires a connection establishment step to happen first, so it can't send traffic to arbitrary UDP services, only cooperating WebRTC peers. Which is fine for multiplayer games.
Unreal Tournament multiplayer with mutators[1] was awesome fun, like the one that made the player avatar grow bigger when the player scored a kill, and vice versa.
It's a shame later multiplayer games didn't pick up on the mutator concept. Being able to easily tweak the gameplay mixed it up and added extra challenge or fun.
In a LAN party, we hacked a mutator together from code scraps of other mutators. It replaced all weapons with the green one, modified to replace the bullet stream of little plasma balls with a stream of redeemer rockets.
Turns out, if a redeemer rocket flys over, sound frequency goes slightly lower. If a few 100s of these fly over, sound frequency goes rock bottom, making the announcer say stuff like: Monsterkiiiiiiiuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuooorrgglllll. And then the whole level explodes because hundreds of redeemers tend to set each other off in a chain reaction
Fingers crossed UT2004 will end up in the Archive eventually. I still boot it up to play occasionally because nothing else has scratched the arena shooter itch that well.
UT2004 is on archive.org already, fully patched with some modern additions.
I'm very hopeful this will get Epic's blessing too.
What is strange is that they approve of the archive.org download, instead of say, OldUnreal hosting it themselves. The archive.org uploader could update it with malware. It would be nice if they allow OldUnreal to host.
Yes, I recently found that out. I bought Unreal on GOG a few years back and was wanting to get Unreal Tournament 2004 recently (I played a bit of the demo back in 2005 or 2006) but currently no digital options.
Its a crime that Halo 1 had Boarding Action and it never resurfaced (outside of Forge recreations) in later titles such as Reach with movement options like jetpacks.
I'll be honest I was never a huge Halo buff at least until Multiplayer.
Maybe you can help me. My earlies memories of Halo2 multiplayer involved a map with two bases on opposite sides in a canyon. I bring it up only to talk about it, I know I could look up the name...
It was the first online pvp game I had played. Having 1v1s with people with voice chat was so addicting.
I remember it used to use an ELO calculation for rank so I would calculate my buddies matches when I was at his house telling him how much he would gain or lose in the current match.
I think you mean Coagulation[1]. I remember playing this map with a bunch of friends and two split screen TVs. Hearing somebody swear at you from the neighbouring room is a wonderful experience.
I used to play it all the time on CTF mode in Sauerbraten. I remember it being very difficult to score since you could be sniped from basically anywhere on the map.
Man this game changed my life. I always preferred it to quake 3 mainly because of the brighter color palette and the assault mode. Also facing worlds was the most amazing maps I had ever seen.
Me too, there was a real “wow” moment for me when I went into the computer store at like age 14 and saw it running, it really started to show what computers were capable of to me
heck yeah. UT was one of those absolutely-essential LAN games, to be sure. I remember taking my computer and heavy CRT monitor to my buddy's place to play -- good memories :D
That's nice of them (esp given their track record of shittiness). It's always seemed absurd to me how companies refuse to just make old games that they no longer sell available for free, or just leave them available for cheap purchase. I just don't understand "we refuse to make this available, even for money" just because something is old.
I can kind of understand the behavior in the case of non-game software, e.g if a company makes a tool to do X, and someone wants to do X, you want them to buy the new profitable version not the old one for cheap/free. But I just don't think that applies to games - even a "remake" that is literally just a graphics update (no gameplay, UI, or anything changes, just increased asset resolution) people prefer the updated graphics so will generally buy that when it becomes available, but in the absence of such an update the old game is not competing for new ones.
I think part of the problem is if they provide a game, even for free, then they are responsible for the security of that game. Even if not legally, they don't want an article saying "unreal hacked by Ransomware people infecting anyone who joined a public server, people could download the game on the Epic store for free"
At least if a third party provides it then it's not really an official copy of the game.
I remember my freshman year of college playing Unreal.
I had worked all summer to be able to buy myself a computer for college (and made sure it had a decent video card).
I recall, some weeks into my Freshman year, one Saturday night getting a call from a friend of mine who lived down the hall, "Hey I'm at this party, and my friend (Jenny or some other common lady name) wants to talk to you". So he puts this girl on the phone.
Her: "What are you doing?"
Me: "Playing Unreal."
Her: "So, you're going to be doing that all night?"
Me: "Yes."
Her: "OK... I guess I'll talk to you later"
All these years later, I still think I made the right decision.
I will never forgive Epic for not trying to finish their alpha of the latest Unreal Tournament. I had so much fun on that alpha. Unfortunately the dev team got put to fortnite when that started printing money. Logical, but still sad.
Is there a working 64 bit linux version for Unreal/ut 2004? :(
We should make a petition that they opensource the code at least for these two ones. i still have the CDRoms.
i even would buy it again, if that would make this more likely.
That being said, xonotic is a bit like it (and opensource) and there are maps like Facing Worlds available, but sadly no good npc / npc-way-mapping for it.
I made a UT level (DM-Charge) and it got onto the PC Gamer CD as part of a competition. An UT designer reviewed it but was pretty critical which as a teenager made me feel like I didn't have what it took to go further. Shame. These days I look back and think I did pretty damn well to teach myself without any help at all what it took to build a level, one that was good enough to get onto PC Gamer's CD and that I would occasionally see people playing online, even if it wasn't perfect, and wish i had had the confidence to take the criticism on the chin. Something to bear in mind - a lot of talented kids and people out there just need a bit of encouragement and may take criticism harder than you intend it to be.
From what I gather Epic delisted various of their Unreal Tournament games across all stores a couple years ago due to them not supporting their modern online services (including chat). This was within days of being fined $500m for, among other things, allowing on-by-default text chat in one of their other games that is available for children/teens to play, so some believe they'd rather delist than update some of their older games.
Did you know the soundtrack was composed in a module tracker? Someone recently recorded the full soundtrack playing back in Milkytracker. Pretty neat since you can see how the composers wrote the songs.
And you could use a utility called umr (unreal media reaper) to extract the songs. It was mind blowing to then understand how the game switched patterns to suit the pace, a very clever use of this technology.
I don't really understand where the dividing line is between Jungle and Drum and Bass, but I'm pretty sure Foregone Destruction is on the DnB side of it.
Yeah I should have bought it on Steam. It's only the Epic games store that I can't access it on anymore. The strategy with that store is all over the place.
I just want to make a top level comment noting how many people (myself included) have mentioned the Facing Worlds map. I think everyone here agrees it's a fond memory.
Would love it if Epic made the source to UE actually public so that LLMs could be trained on it and provide better help when learning the engine. The source code is semi-public already, you can see it if you register an account, seems like a small step to have it be much more accessible as a learning resource through LLMs.
Or, "How To Get Some Public Appreciation With Minimal Effort: An Attempt".
If they actually cared they'd host (and more importantly, supported since they probably don't run on modern systems without some fiddling) those games themselves.
Not like they don't have a store with games or anything.
I have not much love for Epic and they can always do it better. Still, it’s a step in the right direction and I wish other game developers would do that.
Also, another argument for proper funding of the Internet Archive.
? Internet Archive is sure to outlast Epic. Putting all your eggs in the same basket is worse than allowing the archive to do what they were created for
Imagine if they added something like this to UE5 licensing:
If your game has not been updated in N years...
1) Internet Archive can distribute it for free
2) Let people distribute modified versions that does not need license key or whatever copy protection.
Harder but extra cool: To get a UE royalty discount, put source code in escrow set to release it if game not updated in N years.
I recently helped port ioquake3 to the web, complete with UDP multiplayer, and set up an online demo using the internet archive's copy of the Quake III demo: https://thelongestyard.link It would be cool to be able to do the same with Unreal Tournament.