UT99.org | Unreal Tournament Community

There aren't any players left. I get scattered daily joins on my coop server but it's all people I know and that are long term coop players.

227 isn't a new engine. It's literally the same one you've always used with the exception of just about every time you told me "I don't think that's possible" is now doable. UT 436 scripting is vastly inferior compared to 227. I spent last weekend working with Krullor on making some fire textures for my server and I honestly said this sentence to him:
"These look too good K. Can we 'cartoon' them up just a bit so they fit into the Unreal world?"
I literally had to tone down the flames because they looked way too real. Same with the smoke and little sparks that the torch was giving off. The overall effect was a magnitude better than should ever exist in Unreal. It got even better when I waved the torch around.

Making things was never about getting players. It was/is about doing things that haven't been done.

JackGriffin wrote:There aren't any players left..

Then it's a waste of good time to start up new projects

Yeah, that pretty much sums things up. There's still interest in the development side, after all there was a pretty good participation in the mapping contest. There were some very well done entries and good, rich discussion around them. Strictly speaking my own opinion here I think the biggest issue is the active player base not supporting the guys still cranking things out. I'm not pointing a finger either as I place myself there too. I should be doing more to support newer mappers and help equip them with the tools to become better.

It is what it is though. I still wake up and mess around with my coop mod controller because I find the work fun. At the end of the day it affords me enjoyment so I'll just keep doing it.

TheDane wrote:

JackGriffin wrote:There aren't any players left..

Then it's a waste of good time to start up new projects

They are playing PUGs ...pick-up-games, they gather at discord and arrange matches on different servers. mostly private one.
So there are many players but not many casual players.
The Siege servers and grappling hook + Insta or only Insta and Bunny Track server are still populated.
Some MH server get player on it mostly on weekends.

But the remaining server are silent, yes.

The current UT ecosystem as it is just doesn't offer a good enough compelling reason for players to either come back or try the game for the first time.

I believe that could actually be changed a fair bit, but it requires a lot of work to get there.

JackGriffin wrote:At the end of the day it affords me enjoyment so I'll just keep doing it.

One can only respect that, everybody should do what feels right. And so will I. I must be honest and say that I feel an itch. Not an itch to make mods for the public, but an itch to make something on this old engine again.

I will need help. I have an idea of what I will make, but I've been away for years, so ...... HUD will need new drivers, what are the newest D3D and OpenGL drivers that are whitelisted at whatever antivirus is the most used nowadays?

I've done a lot of coding while I've been away from UT, but all has felt wrong as it was jobs for profit. I'm not happy coding that way, it has too many frames and rules set to aply to, with UT my hands will be free again

Wish me luck

Do you use Discord D? We should meet up and chat some. There's been a lot happening with regard to rendering, especially as it concerns windows 10. It's fairly messy now.

I just installed UT, added v436 patch, upgraded OpenGL to utglr37 and everything looks fine? I see lots of active servers online, so Epic's masterserver must still be up - cool! The gfx looks as "awesome" as it used to look.... I run w10, what am I missing? It apears to work fine, what can go wrong?

Discord? ehm .. nope

If you search "unreal tournament windows 10 opengl" you'll see a lot of issues with darkness, rendering, etc. It's messy and Win10 broke a lot of stuff from working correctly. Smirf is writing a new openGL for Unreal to address the issues. It seems now that everything I've released in the last couple of years has caused at least one person to crash from visual issues. That usually tracks down to me not being able to test with various rendering and why it's so important for people to playtest things even if they aren't interested in using them. It's the main reason I just stopped with BRUT and why I've gone back to my coop server. I get a much better logging of players and issues and I can address anything that might crash or mess up my players.

holy crap, I think see what you mean now. I fiddled with the HUD trying to show a masked texture, didn't work, so loaded one of my old mods where it worked .... back then, but nope, not now ..... so this is win 10 impact on our old game then?

Yeah, you are seeing the heart of the problem. Now when you make something you have to test it across multiple environments because someone is going to have a problem somewhere. We are at the cusp of it just being too old to work right with today's software.

As far as rendering issues go, when it comes to masked and translucent stuff, ensure that you have HighDetailActors set to True in your UnrealTournament.ini file, in the section concerning the render driver you're using (OpenGL, Direct3D, ...).

Not sure if this will address the kind of issue you're having, but since it seems you're installing the game fresh all over again, this is a setting which is off by default in newer renderers for some reason (you can blame Chris).

sadly it's not caused by wrong ini settings, they are default set like this:

TheDane wrote:everybody should do what feels right

Even if what feels right is dressing up a a big fluffy pink french poodle?

whistles innocently

...asking for a friend...

Just to give you an idea D, here is an example map Krullor sent me to help me learn the emitter settings:
lL7UJZPAWes

Turn your YT settings way up to really see the details. And this is the demo, it only gets better as you tweak and improve the textures and settings.