Feralidragon wrote:
the fact remains that he did drop it before he really started into it.
I don't want to go into much detail since I don't want dig into an old story, but basically when the best version of U227 was released (with particles, static meshes, and other extremely good stuff), Creavion was apparently told from Smirftsch directly that the same things could be implemented in UT as well, and that he was going to do so (as the engines are very very similar to each other, and well, why not?).
There is a lot more I could quote and although I very much understand where this impression is coming from, I want to say some words about it. Sana and Hellkeeper already explained my reaction and and my reasons, probably better than I could have done, back then after this happened I felt no need anymore to justify myself to anyone here, I took Creavions point of view as the general opinion here, maybe this was a bit shortsighted, but that's the way it was- or is. It wasn't my intention to leave other, "uninvolved" people disappointed behind, although the number of people knowing about the plans should have been limited to a handful of persons at max.
Yet some "technical" view about it
As some of you know, already Unreal 226 was "a rip out of UT", explaining the plenty of bugs in this version, especially in the replication system. Reason for this is, that despite all commonalities UT and Unreal share, a lot of changes have been made in UT. Maybe biggest obvious internal change was skeletal mesh and decal system, not that obvious but very appreciated the different and improved replication system. That alone is rather easy to overview.
The big issues actually really start with UScript (and of course native functions they depend on), because aside the obviously missing Botpack in Unreal there have been a lot of script changes. Where is the problem you may ask? Here is the thing most people don't consider: In a perfect world I'd do it like Epic, make a Botpack, modify the replication system a bit to really fit again and release it as UT470. Little unimportant downside of this would be that probably no mod will be running anymore, but who cares! Let the UT community write some new! - ok sarcasm aside, you get the point.
While changes in Core are rather easy and a quick task, changes in Engine have to be done always in consideration to keep current mod compatibility, if possible to 100%. That 100% ain't possible should be clear I hope, even although I can't count the additional hours we spent in 227 to keep compatibility, yet I can't also count the number of complains. And that although almost everything new is absolutely optional, you can even use UED2.1 and create 226 compatible maps out of the box as long you don't use 227 features (well, I know that's theory because it requires the mapper to be aware about any changes and who really ever read the releasenotes?!?).
Thing is, alone these Engine changes are a very ingrate and extremely time consuming task if not wanting to break anything instantly and to answer straightly to
"the fact remains that he did drop it before he really started into it. " - you had and you have no clue at all how much time I already invested when this happened, that's the same thing Creavion never understood and one of the major things pissing me off when he called me a liar (such a comment still makes me upset even today).
Ironically the rest of the system, like fire, render or editor (including UED2.1) are again "easy going", but even that requires to be extremely careful with changes and hours of testing and fixing the compatibility again and again and again. Not only work for the coder, but also the testers and I know how hard it can be to get useful feedback, Creavion was the very best tester I ever had.
Additionally it always means complains in any case, because certain fixes require changes to some degree, compatibility can't be kept to 100% and I've noticed already the reluctance of the people ONLY to update their UT to newer OpenAL or swFmod just because they are afraid about breaking some anticheat system which has to be updated again (which is why I dropped more or less making new versions for UT).
Aside this, some of these anticheats or probably a big number of random mods can't be updated anymore because the modder is long gone, the code obfuscated and no one willing or able to write a new version of it. That's a lot of pain, also for the community. I went through this all already in 227 and although I support now 227 for YEARS, YEARS LONGER than Epic ever supported their patch versions I still get these complains now and then, the kind of "but this worked in Unreal 224, now its broken, fixitfixitfixit". I think people should think first about what a new patch means and maybe then a couple of them would already vote against it.
That being said, I personally think Shadow does hell of a good job with his SDK.
Red_Fist wrote:I just fired up the 227i editor.
Why are the letters over the top of the checkboxes while looking at actor properties ? makes it look like a confusing mess.
And why won't the viewports stay the way I set them, I had to edit the unrealed.ini to make it work. Not sure if regular unreal did that.
Is this now the long expected and already missed "uh I opened it once and although I am not willing to really check why things are the way they are I closed it again and everything is crap" comment?