Full "Retirement"

Discussions about everything else
User avatar
Feralidragon
Godlike
Posts: 5489
Joined: Wed Feb 27, 2008 6:24 pm
Personal rank: Work In Progress
Location: Liandri

Full "Retirement"

Post by Feralidragon »

Well, folks, as you may notice I am not "blue" anymore, meaning that I am no longer a moderator here.
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
I wasn't going to talk about this publicly, but since it has come to this: as you may have noticed the site has been under serious issues, and Shade is seemingly simply not doing his job for pretty much 4 weeks straight (he does come here regularly in a daily basis and has read my emails, PMs and posts in the admin section, but doesn't answer any of them nor gives us any info at all on anything, so it's not like he's absent from the scene, so make of that what you will).

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
As some of you might have known, I was developing pretty much a TC or pretty much a whole new game using UT as base. I already integrated some stuff into it, and I was now working in a new renderer with the ability of passing 90~95% of the workload of the rendering pipeline to the GPU (by rewriting the whole mesh rendering stuff and use what in OpenGL are called as VBOs [vertex buffer objects]).
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.
Having that said, I will still be around the forums as a normal user though, maybe answering to some questions/doubts about UT stuff here and there whenever the forum actually works, but probably not nearly as much.
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 :tu: :rock:
User avatar
KeeperUTX
Skilled
Posts: 152
Joined: Tue Mar 15, 2011 11:47 am
Personal rank: Eevee will kill you.

Re: Full "Retirement"

Post by KeeperUTX »

Will miss you, friend. It's been an honor.
Image This is Eevee, a ferocious creature that never relents in tracking its meal. It will lead you to ruin, and when it does, it will finish you.
The way it bobs its head lefty-righty? It's just cracking it's neck so it can get a better grip on you with its jaws.
User avatar
papercoffee
Godlike
Posts: 10443
Joined: Wed Jul 15, 2009 11:36 am
Personal rank: coffee addicted !!!
Location: Cologne, the city with the big cathedral.
Contact:

Re: Full "Retirement"

Post by papercoffee »

Oh ...count me in, in your Unity adventure. :mrgreen:
SC]-[WARTZ_{HoF}
Adept
Posts: 426
Joined: Tue Feb 21, 2012 7:29 pm

Re: Full "Retirement"

Post by SC]-[WARTZ_{HoF} »

I'll have to check out this Unity3D. UT99 has been really slow for HoF and maybe its time for something new.
Image
Image
Image
User avatar
Dr.Flay
Godlike
Posts: 3347
Joined: Thu Aug 04, 2011 9:26 pm
Personal rank: Chaos Evangelist
Location: Kernow, UK
Contact:

Re: Full "Retirement"

Post by Dr.Flay »

Can't really blame you, and you do need to stretch your abilities more than trying to stretch an engine.
Having already weighed-up U-engine vs Unity, I have to agree even from my limited knowledge it seems a better option. Especially for the cross-platform support, it seems you'd almost be stupid not to try it.

I'm sure Shadow, Smirftsch and Dots could make good use of your unfinished work.

*pssst*
Who else thinks Ferali should get the green status of a valued member ?
User avatar
GenMoKai
Godlike
Posts: 2896
Joined: Tue Mar 18, 2008 9:39 pm
Personal rank: Mapper
Location: Netherlands, the land of cheese and weed!

Re: Full "Retirement"

Post by GenMoKai »

Ferali should get a gold status :mrgreen:
Image
EAT THOSE FRIGGIN BANANAS !!!!!
1000 MPH Studios MAY NOT play any ut99.org community mappack 2 map without George W. Bush explicit permission
User avatar
papercoffee
Godlike
Posts: 10443
Joined: Wed Jul 15, 2009 11:36 am
Personal rank: coffee addicted !!!
Location: Cologne, the city with the big cathedral.
Contact:

Re: Full "Retirement"

Post by papercoffee »

SC]-[LONG_{HoF} wrote:I'll have to check out this Unity3D. UT99 has been really slow for HoF and maybe its time for something new.
UT like games are possible ...
http://www.moddb.com/games/gravitron ...the look not the game play.
http://www.moddb.com/games/freefall-tournament
http://www.moddb.com/games/paragonfps
http://www.moddb.com/games/project-nex already mentioned in another thread.
http://www.moddb.com/games/shadowgun-deadzone

Gen ...let's paint him green. :mrgreen: (or do we have gold somewhere?)
Torax
Adept
Posts: 406
Joined: Fri Apr 20, 2012 6:38 pm
Personal rank: Master of Coop
Location: Odessa, Ukraine

Re: Full "Retirement"

Post by Torax »

It's something like sad to hear this...anyways Ferali wanted to leave long time ago, so this was a question of time.

So...no new render devices? Okay, i will forgot about level of details i wanted to implement with my project (UTRP). Only if Shadow will make a miracle through UT Community SDK...
I will not cancel work, but it seems that i will need to reduce a lot of things and decrease my imagination to fit better with possibilities of the engine....
Unreal. Alter your reality..forever...
User avatar
EvilGrins
Godlike
Posts: 9668
Joined: Thu Jun 30, 2011 8:12 pm
Personal rank: God of Fudge
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Contact:

Re: Full "Retirement"

Post by EvilGrins »

So.... no Nali Weapons 4?
http://unreal-games.livejournal.com/
Image
medor wrote:Replace Skaarj with EvilGrins :mrgreen:
Smilies · viewtopic.php?f=8&t=13758
User avatar
papercoffee
Godlike
Posts: 10443
Joined: Wed Jul 15, 2009 11:36 am
Personal rank: coffee addicted !!!
Location: Cologne, the city with the big cathedral.
Contact:

Re: Full "Retirement"

Post by papercoffee »

EvilGrins wrote:So.... no Nali Weapons 4?
Feralidragon wrote:Also, I am going to quit any sort of development for UT completely. ... you won't hear about any further UT content from me
User avatar
Feralidragon
Godlike
Posts: 5489
Joined: Wed Feb 27, 2008 6:24 pm
Personal rank: Work In Progress
Location: Liandri

Re: Full "Retirement"

Post by Feralidragon »

Dr.Flay wrote:Especially for the cross-platform support, it seems you'd almost be stupid not to try it.
My thoughts exactly, that was mostly what pulled me into it. The amount of platforms it supports is absurdly high, and the editor makes it stupidly easy to release to any of those platforms (and to develop as well). At most, one should just have some common sense while doing so and not expecting mobile devices to run the same things a desktop one and as fast, other than that, everything is completely transparent between platforms, all the complexity underneath, even when doing some more hardcore stuff like shaders, is completely abstracted, and the whole engine is future proof (works in WinXP as good as it works in Win8 for example, as well as in Linux [specially good for servers, and Linux players which I didn't forget about], or at least it's supposed to be).

Then, once I started to dig into it, that thing is so easy and straightforward that everything depends ultimately in one's skills to do a good game of any kind there and nothing more. Not even UE4 deal beats Unity all things considered (for an Indie at least, probably UEngine is still the better option for professional teams/studios).
I mean, anyone can literally create a simple quality game there in perhaps about 1 or 2 days, maybe a bit more if you have no programming experience (and which they cover as well in a good extent starting the very basics), that's how easy it is.

Another thing is that although the pro version is 1500$ (or about 70~80$ a month), if you make a good enough game in the basic version, you can simply end up winning enough money to pay off the pro version and enhance the game itself automatically with some nice extra tools they have there (specially when it comes to performance).
In UDK you pay the license first and the learning curve to do anything at all there is rather steep, so it's harder to put a game outside, to not mention that the way it works is actually resource-wasteful (another thing I never thought I would say about UEngine), to not mention the bloatware it loads by default.

Torax wrote: It's something like sad to hear this...anyways Ferali wanted to leave long time ago, so this was a question of time.

So...no new render devices? Okay, i will forgot about level of details i wanted to implement with my project (UTRP). Only if Shadow will make a miracle through UT Community SDK...
I will not cancel work, but it seems that i will need to reduce a lot of things and decrease my imagination to fit better with possibilities of the engine....
I will release the source of what I did so far, which should be a good head start for whoever intends to implement things using the GPU alone in UT or Unreal.
UT for me as a game has become uninteresting for me for a long time already, so I was just using it to develop stuff, that is until I found out what Unity was really capable off (for example: native Blender support for the win! no need to export the .blend file to any other format at all).
UT has still has some nice things I like though and which I will try to implement in my own game (probably something close to Siege when it comes to gametypes, the ability to dodge which was kinda lost in nowadays games, etc), along with some inner concepts of UEngine itself which would complement Unity very well.
But like everything else, I will take my time to do it, and like always I start with the harder stuff: for the first time I will have to model a player. Although I will probably use MakeHuman for that and then do the clothes and modifications I need instead, I am not sure yet.
EvilGrins wrote:So.... no Nali Weapons 4?
Nope. Although in the game I intend to do, some NW3 concepts may actually get recycled and even extended, although it's too early to ensure that to happen (and to even ensure a game to be finished of my own lol :lol2: ).
User avatar
papercoffee
Godlike
Posts: 10443
Joined: Wed Jul 15, 2009 11:36 am
Personal rank: coffee addicted !!!
Location: Cologne, the city with the big cathedral.
Contact:

Re: Full "Retirement"

Post by papercoffee »

Feralidragon wrote:I start with the harder stuff: for the first time I will have to model a player.
You know my e-mail address ...I can help in designing characters. It's part of my occupation anyway.
Btw. Friend of mine is a professional story writer. :wink:
RocketJedi
Inhuman
Posts: 850
Joined: Wed Mar 12, 2008 7:14 pm
Personal rank: I.T Master
Location: New York
Contact:

Re: Full "Retirement"

Post by RocketJedi »

Ferali thanks for everything you do man.
https://www.vulpinemission.com
Image ROCKET-X8 Server
Image MONSTERHUNT w/ NALI WEAPONS 3 + RX8
Image BUNNYTRACK NY
Image SNIPER DEATHMATCH
Image InstaGib + ComboGib + Jailbreak
Image ROSEBUM ROCKET-X RB
User avatar
UnrealGGecko
Godlike
Posts: 2900
Joined: Wed Feb 01, 2012 11:26 am
Personal rank: GEx the Gecko
Location: Kaunas, Lithuania
Contact:

Re: Full "Retirement"

Post by UnrealGGecko »

I wish you all the best on, Ferali. May the powers of game-design smile upon thee :tu:
Thank you!
User avatar
Shadow
Masterful
Posts: 743
Joined: Tue Jan 29, 2008 12:00 am
Personal rank: Mad Carpenter
Location: Germany
Contact:

Re: Full "Retirement"

Post by Shadow »

Fukk.. simply fukk. This is really sad seeing you leaving ut dev O__o My plans were to gather with you in a team after I could've called my sdk "mostly done". Shit you'll leave a big hole in the community!
Image
Post Reply