So everything is solely in Papercoffee and GenMoKai's hands from now on when it comes to moderating this place. So any reports, username changes, bans, trouble, forum suggestions, etc, it's all with them, and nothing to do with me anymore.
The main reason for this (for whoever cares):
Spoiler
Having been here since the beginning and doing many times what's supposed to be his duty and cleaning up the mess that would happen times to times around here, I think that the staff deserves at least to stay informed about the status of the whole thing (I don't mind problems taking longer to fix, but I do mind lack of communication as if we had nothing to do with it), so we can also have something to say to the community.
And that's pretty much it and I won't spend more of my time trying to take care of a place that not even the real admin is caring to keep up. It's a disrespect towards the active users who always supported this place and made of it what it is today and also towards the staff (me, Paper, Gen) who made their best efforts to keep the place going as strong and clean from trouble as possible.
Posting good stats is nice and all and to be proud of, but he surely didn't play an active role in them, so I think we all deserve better (both the regular active users as the site staff as well).
Also, I am going to quit any sort of development for UT completely. With the exception of just 1 single mod that I had promised someone to help with before (just code), you won't hear about any further UT content from me:
Spoiler
In practice in my benchmarks this meant passing from a limit of 30.000 polys to around 450.000~500.000 (with better graphic cards this is higher, with worse this is lower, but the order of magnitude of the performance enhancement is about by the same order, at least as it is right now), and on another hand the ability of having true hardware brushes (aka *real* static meshes) and thus also terrain in UT.
I was also working in shaders (GLSL) to later on bring the ability to have normal parallax maps and other good stuff (some of which are not implemented even in later iterations of UEngine).
However, in the past few days I have been thinking heavily in this, and I came to the (perhaps obvious) conclusion that it's just not worth it considering the real world possibilities nowadays.
In the past 3 days, I have been looking more seriously into Unity3D. At first, I stayed away from it due to some reasons which now I know were from pure ignorance of mine. After a second look into it (thanks to an event we have here in Portugal called Codebits), the fact that is the most popular Indie engine around and after I saw what it really is capable of and the whole architecture of that thing, I realized how dumb I was being.
In short (and I never I thought to say this): Unity3D is vastly superior to Unreal Engine in many ways.
I don't mean visually, since UEngine can somewhat beat Unity3D in that sense, but everything else seems to be better and thought out in Unity3D from a general purpose game engine point of view, and it's very easy to do anything there, and it doesn't make my laptop sweat by just having the editor opened, and the most powerful trait of all: it's platform and future proof: supports all the technologies properly, doesn't require that much of a good hardware to run it, and is able to compile for about 12 different platforms, and under 3 different coding languages (C#, JS and something they call Boo, and they are adding more), and have some good tutorials and an extremely simple and effective architecture and interface.
To not mention that the free version has already pretty much what an indie may possibly require (with a license which allows to profit from it without royalties, not that I am planning to but it's always a good safety in case I end up needing to support hosting costs of any kind), and anything more than that would probably be only useful to teams and studios hence justifying the value of buying the "pro" version.
Plus it also allows custom shaders to be built (also GLSL, so anything I wanted to add to UT, I can also do the same in Unity), and a lot of that I would do myself (from rendering and integration point of view), they already did and did it better of course.
So, it would be an incredible waste of time and incredibly foolish of me to continue to do what I want to do in UT itself.
I will also post about some source releases during this week, like NW3, X-Vehicles and the work I did so far in this render for whoever wants to continue any of them (in the case of NW3 and X-Vehicles sources, I just didn't release so far since I have been forgetting about it).
It's been a hell of a ride everyone