new UED 2.2 !

[Carbon]

Well...group hugs, rainbow unicorns, fuzzy pajamas and warm cocoa for all.

Peace is boring.

[Red_Fist]

Well...group hugs, rainbow unicorns, fuzzy pajamas and warm cocoa for all.

Peace is boring.

I aint hugging a piece of freegin carbon.
Damn coal-heads anyway.

Peace is boring
Slime ball turkey munger

[TheDane]

And howcome Anthrax isn't wearing the green outfit?

Well there is no problem if you want to nominate him for green ...

Yes I know m8, but I don't think I'm the one to nominate arround here? But if you would allow me, I'd like to list those already in green - and give my point of view who stays and who goes (repeat: my point of view). And then include a list of those I think is missing from that list - and reasons why.

If that's ok I'll do it in a new topic, to raise a discussion with the single goal to make the list up to date and actualy reflecting honorable members of the ut99 community - and not just to these forums.

This kind of topic will undoabtly cause great emotions and heated debates - which IMO is nescesary to do IF you want us as the viewers to look at the men in green with respect.

[papercoffee]

Do as you wish ...but be aware that not every green member in the past got green status because of his/her contributions to the UT community.

[TheDane]

Do as you wish ...but be aware that not every green member in the past got green status because of his/her contributions to the UT community.

Ahh ok, that explains the missing red line then. And that also leaves little room to revisit it ... I was mistakenly seeing it as a recognition aimed at members of this community.

I'll leave others to nominate anth and Wormbo then.

[Shivaxi]

Whoah lol...did this thread blow up...

My first problem was in the menus to change the viewports, it would never stay, so yesterday I manually edited the unrealed.ini and now they stay.

That would be the fault of Windows, not allowing programs like Unreal or UnrealED to modify files. It's a simple permissions issue which you probably fixed when you manually edited the unrealed.ini file.


Touching on the "UT99 is better out of the box than Unreal", I just want to say that I actually started with Unreal Tournament first in 1999. I had no idea what Unreal was until I got the GOTY edition in 2000 and Unreal Gold came with it. So generally speaking, I should be in favor of UT99. But as most people know, I'm dedicated to Unreal, with mods and mappacks and whatever else I love to do for Unreal. I'm not sure what it was that grabbed me, but it grabbed me and grabbed me hard, and I love it (no homo). And now that I think about it, it's quite strange I never really modded or mapped for UT99. Everything I do is for Unreal, and I just find it overall a better experience. So I think it's just all down to personal opinion, and what really grabs you.


I'll also mention that while talking with Smirf, he did say that most of what Radi mentioned in the first post here, is actually entirely possible. The issue though is time and money. Smirf is just one person, and he has a life to live and take care of with his family, bills to pay, work to work, etc. He's told me straight up that if he did not have to worry about money, he could do a hell of a lot more for Unreal and UT (which I think goes for most of us =P ), things that people wanna see like most of what Radi mentioned in the first post, or a 227-like patch support for UT, etc. Not that I'm saying "let's all throw a bunch of money at Smirf then!", although I don't think Smirf would mind haha...but just the other day we were talking about moving things like Lighting to the GPU, which would be one hell of an improvement for rendering, and would also allow things like real-time shadows everyone dreams about, as we wouldn't have to worry about performance (not nearly as much anyway). But again, time and money and a lack of resources frankly, Smirf being 1 man, are the issue here.

[Hellkeeper]

Then the solution is obvious: clone Smirftsch.

[Feralidragon]

@green members: I must note that a honorary member does not have to necessarily be an active member of ut99.org, and on another hand, we're not actively "in the hunt" of honorary members ourselves, so yeah, there are people who undoubtedly deserve it, but we aren't just paying much attention to it lately.
So as Paper suggested, any members you consider to be worthy of such title, you can suggest them in the honorary members topic and we will look into them.
On the note of Anth and Wormbo for that title, I agree of course, they both made the difference in the community, one mostly in the cheating department, and other in the wiki/dev department.


@UED: I finally tried out UEd2.1 with Unreal Gold, it seems quite solid and more featured than what I thought. 227 has some bugs (some of them severe, and which I reported already at oldunreal), but nothing that cannot be fixed in time of course, specially the stuff that wasn't originally made by Smirftsch and thus are not entirely dependent on him.

@GPU: Today I have been toying with Chris D3D9 and OpenGL sources, and compiled my own versions for UT out of them (each one needed a small tweak of my own or another to match my own configurations, but all went fine). The first thing I made in both was something quite simple: distance fog (although it has 2 glitches I am going to try to figure out). But looking into the UT headers and the ini file, it's easy to conclude that is possible to literally replace the way UT renders and does everything in the game, or at least almost everything, without the need of direct engine modifications (including passing things normally done in Render to the RenderDevice itself so they're then processed in the GPU instead).
The tricky part is to know how the engine does these things internally so our own code makes sense and doesn't break anything, but truth to be told there is always one or another leak of an internal cpp file in the web here and there which ends up answering a good amount of questions, and thus knowing how one should proceed from there.

So if such is possible in UT without direct access to the engine, then I can only imagine when someone does have access, like Smirftsch, so yeah, everything described in the first post is very well possible (well, perhaps except one or another thing there of course, which are paradoxical at most).

[Dr.Flay]

It may be worth asking Smirftsch for the source for his build of the renderers so you can see which fixes he already made.
Shadow also added features to the GL renderer, so he also knows a few tricks the renderers are capable of.

I asked them both (and I will remind them) if they could please add build version info to the DLLs, so that the log files show the info, just like the old D3D version does.
So far there are UT renderers available from 5 different sources (Epic, Chris, Kentie, Shadow, TNSe), and with many iterations,
thinking ahead is good, so Ferali can I ask you to do the same please (I am sure you more than most are aware how helpful this is).

[Shadow]

It's not only the render drivers what many people think. It's the whole thing of having an engine that can't be fully modified. Last days I was trying to add per-Particle dynamic lighting and failed at doing so just because it's hardcoded in the engine that light emission is restricted to actors.

Next hard thing is adding collision for the major static mesh update and/or better implementation of collision bounding volumes (blocking volumes). It's always feeling like digging in a mine without a lamp..

[Feralidragon]

I already thought in asking at least the modified Chris Dohal's OpenGL and D3D9 from Smirftsch, but they probably won't help much considering that those renderers certainly have more severe changes themselves to accommodate the U227 engine changes themselves.
I already checked Shadow's OpenGL with the OpenGL documentation itself opened, mostly to understand the basics of rendering devices and how to add new stuff (as I am now working on both OpenGL and D3D9 at the same time). Fortunately, Shadow barely touched any "critical" code of Chris Dohal himself, and they're mostly the SDK addons and everything is well commented and labeled where his code starts and where it ends.

As for adding a build version, done (or so I think, I just went to the project properties like the msdn docs dictate and setup a version for it, have to test it later, I am a noob at this ). However, the renders I am working on are probably not going to make their way into UT itself, but rather something more powerful, as they will serve a much more specific purpose which may or not eventually be able to run UT stuff itself.
For now I am just focusing in understanding how it all works, how I can implement things and how I can perhaps increase the game rendering performance (as far as I can tell, the way the engine renders mesh polys is more crude than I expected and it probably explains those tests I asked in another topic here some time ago, while the way it renders BSP is as expected and probably won't be touched much). But in case I manage to find something that can improve UT itself with a new render device or so, I can either release new renders myself or post code or do both, but I doubt that anything can be done without adding at least a new render base to make it stop doing some of the heavy work on the CPU, something that I am going to do for something else.

[Shadow]

I already thought in asking at least the modified Chris Dohal's OpenGL and D3D9 from Smirftsch, but they probably won't help much considering that those renderers certainly have more severe changes themselves to accommodate the U227 engine changes themselves.
I already checked Shadow's OpenGL with the OpenGL documentation itself opened, mostly to understand the basics of rendering devices and how to add new stuff (as I am now working on both OpenGL and D3D9 at the same time). Fortunately, Shadow barely touched any "critical" code of Chris Dohal himself, and they're mostly the SDK addons and everything is well commented and labeled where his code starts and where it ends.

That was absolutely necessary to comment that stuff out^^ Otherwise I would have been lost hehe
If you need any help with your attempts I'm there to assist and guide!

I'm thinking about rewriting the driver totally from scratch.. as I now see there's much of wasted, useless and not that elegant code in these drivers (the structure epic and dohnal used)..

[Feralidragon]

Thanks.
Just a quick note (I don't know if you thought about this): I noticed that you render the distance fog in DrawComplexSurface... although I did the same for testing purposes in both OpenGL and D3D9 (and I also tried to call from other places to see the differences), isn't that a bit overkill for the render?
As far as I could check, the engine calls DrawComplexSurface once per BSP surface, and makes 3 render passes, which means if it renders 100 BSP polys, 100 to 300 distance fog calls are made in a single frame when just 1 would work just as fine or at least 1 per render pass, but I guess that a new URender class is needed to guarantee that certain calls are made only once per frame, and luckily that seems to be possible.

On another hand that would probably fix the sprites problem (at least "my" problem atm, didn't check if you have the same in yours), since the z-depth of the sprites are being considered by the fog and thus there are squares in sprites when using it lol

[Shadow]

Yes, you're indeed right. It's left commented out so it's not called in the current/coming version.. I consider distance fog a minor feature and focus on static meshes which are much much much more important, so I left it uncalled in the new release.

[Dr.Flay]

Actually the Oldunreal UT renderers are different, and include some fixes the Unreal version did not get, as they were re-built after some feedback.
eg. an issue was later spotted with transparent textures, so you would want to include that fix.