Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-04-20, 17:54:

Overall, I really enjoyed how all WarCraft 3 campaigns formed a cohesive story, each one continuing where the previous one left off. It was like that in StarCraft as well, and I greatly prefer this approach to the diametrically opposed campaign storylines in the Command & Conquer games.

In principal I agree, this approach does give wider tools to tell a better story, but I'd just wish that story would be told by anything else than early 3d engine in-game cutscenes with incredibly janky animations 🤣

The Blizzard CGI™ cutscenes are awesome of course, the orc campaign end movie blew my hat off twenty years ago.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-04-20, 17:54:

That said, I'm a bit burned out on the RTS genre after going through all of these missions over the last couple of weeks. Think I'll pass on the Frozen Throne expansion for now, and play it properly at some later point.

IIRC the expansion missions were pretty gimmicky and hero focused, I don't think there were much of traditional build base and overrun the enemy missions. And even they often had you managing two bases at once which wasn't terribly to my liking.

Sombrero wrote on 2023-04-20, 18:40:

IIRC the expansion missions were pretty gimmicky and hero focused, I don't think there were much of traditional build base and overrun the enemy missions. And even they often had you managing two bases at once which wasn't terribly to my liking.

I've forgotten almost everything about the expansion as well, but I do seem to recall (what I thought was) an interesting mechanic from the Undead campaign. At some point, due to a plot reason, Arthas starts getting weaker and weaker as you progress through the missions. Sort of a reverse level up I guess.

I thought that was kinda neat back in the day, but it's been ages since I actually played through it.

Decided to play through Unreal using some hardware that I wish I had back in the day. When I first played this, my PC was extremely weak, so I was basically experiencing a very pretty slideshow. This is why I couldn't make much progress and never managed to finish the game. Time to fix that.

I'm running Unreal Gold on a Voodoo 3 and an Aureal Vortex 2 for this playthrough. The main reason is that Unreal was heavily optimized for the Glide API, and exhibits some visual glitches if Direct3D or OpenGL are used instead. Nowadays, there are third-party patches which fix these issues, but I'm not using them for this run. The Gold version of the game also appears to support A3D 2.0 at least according to the game logs and console output.

Gotta say, the visuals hold up nicely to this day, especially for the environments. Seeing that waterfall in the first outdoor area is still pretty spectacular. Characters and monsters do look a bit blocky, but that was the norm back when this came out. Also, the A3D sound positioning really shines here, especially when using headphones.

The only thing that bothers me are those nasty flickering lights that seem to be in every damn room at the start of the game. The flicker that these things produce is seriously seizure inducing. I remember seeing a similar effect in Deus Ex, but it was used much more sparingly there. Hopefully, this will become less frequent as I progress further through the levels.

Wow unreal was my ticket to PC gaming

Unreal is indeed a graphical gem. I always loved the Glide graphics with Unreal but in it's day the game got overshadowed by Half Life since it has the better gameplay I think (and I like the interaction with professors and Barneys).

But I do share your experience: since a week or three I started playing Unreal again, too. In my case a P3-866/Voodoo5/SBLive! 😀. I am about half way through the game and progress is usually one or two parts every 2-3 days now.

The flickering may be somewhat weird indeed but it fits the graphics. It gets better with V-Sync on but I'm not sure if the V3 holds up well throughout the game with V-Sync on. I have it turned off as well, maximum FPS it is!

Thandor wrote on 2023-04-24, 18:14:

Unreal is indeed a graphical gem. I always loved the Glide graphics with Unreal but in it's day the game got overshadowed by Half Life since it has the better gameplay I think (and I like the interaction with professors and Barneys).

Having recently played through Half-Life as well, I agree that its gameplay mechanics were ahead of the time. No contest there. But in terms of graphics, Unreal was on a whole different level compared to anything else that came out in 1998.

The flickering may be somewhat weird indeed but it fits the graphics. It gets better with V-Sync on but I'm not sure if the V3 holds up well throughout the game with V-Sync on. I have it turned off as well, maximum FPS it is!

Well, the Voodoo 3 handles Unreal fine at lower resolutions like 640x480 and 800x600. When using those, I get around 60 FPS most of the time. But anything higher than that, and the frame rate starts dropping off pretty quickly. And yeah, I did turn V-Sync on to help with the flickering, so my frame rates are a bit lower than they could be. Which is fine, as my eyes find the flicker slightly more bearable that way.

But I do share your experience: since a week or three I started playing Unreal again, too. In my case a P3-866/Voodoo5/SBLive! 😀. I am about half way through the game and progress is usually one or two parts every 2-3 days now.

Awesome, enjoy your playthrough! Also, that's a pretty sweet rig!

Continuing my playthrough of Unreal Gold. Visually, it is still very impressive, especially for a game originally released in 1998. Water and lava surfaces look particularly nice, and dynamic shadows cast by moving objects like ventilation fans look amazing for a game from that era. Wall textures which get additional detail when you approach them (instead of turning into a blurry mess) were also quite the novelty back then.

Unreal's sound stage continues to be excellent, and I'm digging the ambient music too. Also, I really appreciate that the weapons in the Gold version use the same sounds as in Unreal Tournament. While I barely touched the original Unreal in my youth, I played the heck out of UT '99 with my buddies. It was our go to FPS for online play, so its distinct weapon sounds are ingrained into my memory to this day.

In gameplay terms, Unreal slightly reminds me of the first Quake. You encounter fewer enemies, but they generally have lots of health. This is in contrast to the Doom design where you are usually facing large groups of enemies that are easily dispatched, but can still deal a lot of damage if you allow them to swarm you. The Doom approach is what I prefer, so the combat in Unreal feels a bit drawn out at times.

Some levels were overly labyrinthine, with lots of backtracking, and too many puzzles for my liking. The water temple was particularly egregious in that regard. Again, this is just my personal preference, and that kind of design doesn't necessarily make Unreal a bad game. On the plus side, there were no nasty flickering lights in the recent areas, so my poor eyes could finally get some rest.

i've started a playthrough of PS2 Half-Life on Difficult, "saved" the scientists, and currently at Blast Pit.

😁

I restarted Stronghold HD (GoG version) for the 4th time since I bought the original game way back then…one of the best RTS/Castle Sim games for me.

Been having a mix of choice paralysis and simply not been in a mood to play anything specific for a while now, but then I heard Beyond Good & Evil 2 had apparently overtaken Duke Nukem Forever for being in development for the longest time in history and remembered I had picked up the original game years ago for cheap.

I did beat the game once back in the day and I remember thinking it was an all right play once and forget type of game, but the thing is that I've never been the biggest fan of family friendly cartoony nintendo stuff and almost never play anything like that. So when I saw it for sale still in factory wraps I figured maybe it would be interesting to revisit it one day, I had played it all the way to the end after all so it must have done something right.

That day finally arrived, time to see do I still find it worth beating and does it seem like a game thats worth having a sequel that takes 15+ years to make.

After five or so hours I'd say mmmmaybe and NO. It's all right I guess, still. Combat is not exactly exhilarating and the worst enemy is the camera that occasionally fights you harder than any boss has so far. On the other hand I kinda like the picture taking side activity where you earn cash by taking a picture of all the animal species living in the world. I remember liking that back in the day also, goes well with my fondness of exploration. The game world is inhabited by anthropomorphic animals, something I normally find kinda off-putting, but I guess I became blind to that extra fast here considering I've twice now talked to a new species of them and completely forgotten to take a picture because in my mind they are "people" and not animals.

But I've got no clue why Ubisoft hasn't axed the sequel long time ago. I don't think the original game even sold all that well? I'm sure it still has its fans but 15 years of development hell with clearly no idea what kind of game it even should be, somebody at Ubi could use a major reality check.

I'm about half way through Unreal Gold having just finished the Sunspire level. At this point, I've acquired all of my favorite weapons from UT, namely the ASMD Shock Rifle, the Flak Cannon and the Minigun. Naturally, they get used the most, except when facing the rock throwing giants. Those guys kinda demand the Rocket Launcher treatment, or an amplified ASMD combo shot.

So far, there doesn't seem to be that much variety between the enemies, but I am impressed with how intelligently some of them behave. Especially the warrior types who casually dodge missiles, roll behind cover and actively look for ways to ambush you. In that sense, they remind me of the soldier opponents from Half-Life.

After going through some of the more complex levels, I think Unreal could have benefitted from a goal tracker, similar to the one Quake 2 had. Sure, you gather info using the translator, but it would've been nice to have a HUD element which clearly shows your current goal(s). A few of the maps are absolutely humongous, and manually keeping tabs on everything that needs to be done can get tedious.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-04-26, 06:51:

I'm about half way through Unreal Gold

If you were planning on playing Return to Na Pali, Unreal Gold's version of it has some really dumb issues that the standalone retail copy of doesn't have.

I've had to manually change to the next part of the UMS Prometheus crashsite because for whatever reason a lot of that map depends on a custom GameInfo class that progressing to the map normally doesn't switch you to properly itself.

That map's is still prone to softlocking even if you properly switch to it in the console to "?Game=UPak.CrashSiteGame", so don't feel bad if you have to ghost yourself to the exit if the events in it don't fire off properly.

I think the reason why all those problems happen in the first place is when even starting RTNP in Unreal Gold it sticks a ?Game= into your client's URL and it never gets removed. If a ?Game= argument exists in your URL for whatever reason then the LevelInfo's selected game is never considered, it only sets it to whatever the ?Game= URL option is set to.

DracoNihil wrote on 2023-04-27, 10:00:

If you were planning on playing Return to Na Pali, Unreal Gold's version of it has some really dumb issues that the standalone retail copy of doesn't have.

Thanks for the heads up! I do intend to go through the expansion after finishing the main game.

That said, I will probably play that on my WinXP machine with the OldUnreal patch installed. I think this game has enough texture detail to justify running it at 1600x1200 using the DX9 renderer.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-04-27, 12:04:

That said, I will probably play that on my WinXP machine with the OldUnreal patch installed. I think this game has enough texture detail to justify running it at 1600x1200 using the DX9 renderer.

I'm in the strange circumstance of actually being able to run retail Unreal on version 225f with the original OpenGLDrv because Mesa drivers let you cut back the GL_EXTENSIONS string to hilariously minimalistic sizes.

There's no DetailTextures but the Coronas and VolumetricLighting work fine. Wireframes can also be drawn like what my custom console does.

When I set MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=1.2 and MESA_EXTENSION_MAX_YEAR=1997 I end up with this, and this is what allows me to run really ancient OpenGL code flawlessly:

1OpenGL vendor string: Intel
2OpenGL renderer string: Mesa Intel(R) Iris(R) Pro Graphics 580 (SKL GT4)
3OpenGL version string: 1.2 Mesa 22.3.5
4OpenGL extensions:
5    GL_ARB_multisample, GL_ARB_point_parameters, GL_EXT_abgr, GL_EXT_bgra, 
6    GL_EXT_blend_color, GL_EXT_blend_minmax, GL_EXT_blend_subtract, 
7    GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array, GL_EXT_copy_texture, 
8    GL_EXT_draw_range_elements, GL_EXT_packed_pixels, GL_EXT_point_parameters, 
9    GL_EXT_rescale_normal, GL_EXT_separate_specular_color, GL_EXT_subtexture, 
10    GL_EXT_texture, GL_EXT_texture3D, GL_EXT_texture_edge_clamp, 
11    GL_EXT_texture_object, GL_EXT_vertex_array, GL_IBM_rasterpos_clip, 
12    GL_SGIS_generate_mipmap, GL_SGIS_texture_border_clamp, 
13    GL_SGIS_texture_edge_clamp, GL_SGIS_texture_lod

I can still play Return to Na Pali without Unreal Gold because I have access to the retail version of it which was designed on version 224 of Unreal. All I really need from Unreal Gold specifically is the "UPak.dll" file, which still binds properly to version 225f of Unreal by pure luck.

Well my playthrough of Beyond Good & Evil ran spectacularly straight into a wall.

The retail version of the game has this fun little suprise in store for you if the DRM decides it's been tampered with and will stop you from getting a certain keycard that is necessary to progress. I knew it going in, I ran into it twenty years ago on my first and only playthrough of the game and found a tool that edited the save file in a way that allowed you to get the keycard so I thought nothing of it. Well, I reached that point of the game and guess what, the fix doesn't work.

I'm using a retail version of the game with a no-cd crack as I've always hated having to mess with discs just to launch them, and clearly the game went "AHA!" just like it did twenty years ago. Except the save fixer worked twenty years ago and now it doesn't, it says it did its job but I still can't get the keycard. To make things funnier twenty years ago when it worked I was using a very illegally obtained copy of the game and now I'm using a very legally obtained retail release and it doesn't work.

So just use the original .exe and launch the game with the disc in, get the keycard, save and continue with the crack? Good idea, except apparently save games are somehow tied to the exe and the original .exe can't read my save files properly. Meaning I'm hosed. Don't know is it because I possibly played the 1.0 version in the past and now I was playing with updated 1.01 version, or because my copy is EU release and the patcher might possibly be US only or is it just karma reaching through the decades and biting my ass for being a dirty pirate twenty years ago.

Best part in this? I'm pretty sure that spot is around 75-80% in the game, I was six hours in and there didn't seem to be all that much left. Thankfully it's a short game and I wasn't having the greatest time with it anyway and was only playing it because I'd had nothing better to do, so I'm not exactly crushed about this. Kinda making me chuckle a bit actually, DRM's, aren't they great.

Use a digital copy or play using the original discs without any no-cd patches if you feel compelled to play the game yourself. Which I wouldn't recommend, it has its charms I guess but overall it's not all that great. Though I'm not into this disney stuff to begin with, so what do I know.

Done with the main campaign of Unreal Gold. It was shorter than I expected. That said, I did run into some trouble with a couple of the mothership levels. They were too convoluted for my taste, and I had to consult a walkthrough on a few occasions. Didn't help that every corridor looked the same, and that most rooms went dark after blowing up the power generator.

Combat encounters got a bit harder during the last quarter of the game, but being an UT veteran, I didn't really mind. It was nice that some enemies started using the same weapons as the player. At times, it almost felt like playing an UT botmatch, which I appreciated. In contrast, the final boss fight didn't seem all that difficult to me.

The ending cutscene with the escape pod was kinda underwhelming. From what I gather, the expansion picks up right after this, so I'll be playing that next.

Sombrero wrote on 2023-04-27, 17:36:

I'm using a retail version of the game with a no-cd crack as I've always hated having to mess with discs just to launch them, and clearly the game went "AHA!" just like it did twenty years ago. Except the save fixer worked twenty years ago and now it doesn't, it says it did its job but I still can't get the keycard. To make things funnier twenty years ago when it worked I was using a very illegally obtained copy of the game and now I'm using a very legally obtained retail release and it doesn't work.

I played the game with a no-CD crack and I haven't hit the wall. Then again I only played through once. Maybe it is a random thing and I was lucky?

I own a copy of each of the original EU and US releases; both came on 3 CDs and as far as I recall checking, the content is completely identical.

dr_st wrote on 2023-04-28, 09:49:

Sombrero wrote on 2023-04-27, 17:36:

I'm using a retail version of the game with a no-cd crack as I've always hated having to mess with discs just to launch them, and clearly the game went "AHA!" just like it did twenty years ago. Except the save fixer worked twenty years ago and now it doesn't, it says it did its job but I still can't get the keycard. To make things funnier twenty years ago when it worked I was using a very illegally obtained copy of the game and now I'm using a very legally obtained retail release and it doesn't work.

I played the game with a no-CD crack and I haven't hit the wall. Then again I only played through once. Maybe it is a random thing and I was lucky?

I own a copy of each of the original EU and US releases; both came on 3 CDs and as far as I recall checking, the content is completely identical.

Could be random, PCGamingWiki says "This error only happens in pirate versions of the game or in the legitimate version if the DRM (TAGES DRM) erroneously detects and makes its version illegal in modern systems" making it sound like it happens if the DRM feels like it.

Note to self, use the GOG version if I ever feel like going back to it.

Just started the Return to Na Pali expansion for Unreal. Having played the main game on original 3DFX and Aureal hardware, I decided to take a different approach here. This time, I'm using the OldUnreal fan patch 227i with its Direct3D 9 renderer and OpenAL audio. No HD texture packs are used, just the original game assets running at 1600x1200 with a locked 60 FPS. I am playing this on my WinXP rig of course.

BTW, I experienced a weird bug with OpenAL in OldUnreal which prevented certain sounds from working. After a bit of googling, it turns out this is an issue caused by the latest drivers for the X-Fi Titanium PCIe card that I'm using. Downgrading to an older driver version from 2010 solved the problem. Positional audio is not quite as awesome as on an Aureal Vortex2, but it's still pretty good.

Anyway, with all that out of the way, I was finally able to play the game. The new Combat Rifle is superb, though it eats through ammo very quickly. Works great against those mini-dinosaur enemies, especially since they hunt in packs. Also, I like the audio narration that plays at the end of certain levels. Makes the game feel a bit more immersive. All in all, it's been pretty fun so far, though I'm only a few levels in.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-04-28, 17:29:

BTW, I experienced a weird bug with OpenAL in OldUnreal which prevented certain sounds from working. After a bit of googling, it turns out this is an issue caused by the latest drivers for the X-Fi Titanium PCIe card that I'm using. Downgrading to an older driver version from 2010 solved the problem. Positional audio is not quite as awesome as on an Aureal Vortex2, but it's still pretty good.

I used to own a X-Fi Titanium HD, if I remember right the chipset was EMU20K2? I ended up having to use Daniel K's "support pack", but I've been thoroughly disappointed with the card and all the beyond idiotic issues I've had with it from the SoundFont hardware synth making clicking noises and failing to use large SF2's properly whatsoever to games crashing when trying to use Creative OpenAL.

Unreal never sounded "right" to me on anything but Galaxy 3D Audio ontop of this. The early days of those "OldUnreal Multimedia Patches" that introduced a OpenAL and FMod based sound subsystems were quite disappointing originally, full of bugs and inaccuracies. The usage of "libxmp" for music playback also disagrees with me, but maybe recent versions of that library have fixed the grievances I've had with it. I once suggested Smirftsch to perhaps go with libopenmpt instead, and I guess I hit some sort of language barrier.

Hopefully you don't end up running into all sorts of troves of problems. I can't stop people from using "227", but honestly standard Unreal Gold works just fine if you have Chris D's UTGLR compiled against Unreal Gold, or kenties Direct3D 10 renderer. "ALchemy" on Creative soundcards can be used to make GalaxyDrv work without sound underrunning. (just don't bother enabling Use3DHardware because EAX is broken in general)