DescentBB

Imo the UT2K3 or UT2K4 engines would lend themselves very much for creating a "Descent" mod which given enough effort is spent on all areas of such a project could well be equivalent to a professionally made Descent 4 game. Ofc it would need a different name.

Advantages:

• We would use a very good graphics programming platform
• Very good level editing tools available
• Very good modding support

So we could concentrate on the substantial parts of the game instead of building yet another gfx engine.

The mod should provide players with the genuine Descent feeling. Gameplay wise I'd love to see it geared towards Descent 2.

We'd need

• Coders (me being one)
• Modellers (to build ship, player, bot, etc. models)
• Graphics Artists (for textures)
• Level Designers
• Sound Artists

I'd love to throw in some episodes where you have to fight your way somewhere on foot. For the purists, such episodes should eventually be optional.

Is there any interest in such a project? I am aiming for a long-time effort enabling us to provide a quality as close to a professional product as possible (like BF42:DC, which imo is a prime example for a fan-made mod of highest quality).

Diedel

Get the ships and everything to work properly, and I'll throw in a map or two.

If I knew anything about programming, sound, graphics or level design, I'd be in. I'm just a lonely tech.

I specifically purchased UT2K4 to research just that. Haven't been able to get to it, though, too busy.

My main concern is the networking architecture, and how variable it would be to what D1/2/3 players are used to.

If networking is your only problem, rest assured that UT2Kx will excel here.

My concern would be if you can make the D3 physics model work -- I doubt that but would love to be proven wrong..

Throw me in as a programmer and occasional photoshopper/modeller. I just don't have time right now but I'll certainly be involved if you plan to go ahead with such a project. In fact, I was discussing it with Vertigo just the other day.

indeed, sounds interesting...

I'll gladly do levels

Grendel wrote:My concern would be if you can make the D3 physics model work -- I doubt that but would love to be proven wrong..

If you used Karma it might prove difficult, but if you did your own physics code (which you can) you could probably get it really close.

I haven't done the coding myself, this is just what my programmer friends tell me.

Well is making a perfect copy the idea? And Karma is one of the coolest things with UT200#, not using it imo loses half the point, but that's just me...

Yeah, I agree on the use of Karma. I mean, who wouldn't want to see a Descent ship spin to the ground and fly apart into little Pyro pieces?

A Descent mod shouldn't *exactly* recreate the original game. I think the idea should be to be to take an old concept and an existing game to make a bit of a new one.

lol, imagine putting a Descent ship in with the other vehicles in Onslaught... Shakers, anyone?

I have an up-to-date game with top-notch graphics, physics, etc. in mind.

Recreating the "feel" of Descent does not mean a one:one copy, imho.

So why not using the Karma engine?

Btw, I never liked D3.

From what my friend tells me, karma is all about data driven physics. You put in variables in equations and then the engine figures out what to do from there. Great for simple things or ragdolls, but you lose precise control.

Ut2k3 had karma, but it didn't replicate over the network. This is why you couldn't have vehicles in ut2k3 multiplayer. The mod I worked on didn't use karma, so we were able to get "vehicles" working in 2k3, and supposedly in order to get the control of the "vehicles" we currently have into karma would prove more difficult than it's worth. However if you start with karma it might be a different story entirely, since you'll be tweaking the controls using that system from the start instead of trying to port a lot of previous work...

And I didn't like D3 either.

Where's the problem with data driven physics?

As long as a player avatar is "alive" and fully under control of ... errm ... the input controls, you have precise controls.

That physics stuff primarily is for real "physics" stuff, like friction, collisions, falling etc.

Ofc I have no clue of UT2K's implementation of vehicles, but from what I think about this currently I cannot see a problem here.

What kind of "precise control" is on your mind Karma is hindering you to take?

Like I said, all my information comes second hand, so I can't exactly make an argument beyond the generalizations I've been told.

Talking with people today I've changed my stance on the karma issue. I was concerned that since you can't control karma actors directly, and that you could only apply a force to them, that there would be more issues than if you coded the ship behavior by hand. It seems, though, that there would be a lot of worked saved. Tricording, for example, would work pretty much automatically as long as you had possible force directions on all six sides of the ship (the vectors should just add together). Also you could get the whole ship being pushed back bit from the larger missles and such. And, when the ship dies, I think you can turn on gravity so it'll be like the antigrav ship thing failed.

Perhaps I'll play around with it on my own later, just as a sort of physics demo.

Remember, in Descent the avatar is the vehicle.

You cannot be a karma actor, so you'd still have to spawn the player "inside" the vehicle.

So after my ship blows up I could hijack that tank ?

Assuming you can change it so that when the vehicle blows you don't die, sure.

Makes for some interesting new concepts: 1. you respawn as a groundpounder and have to get into an empty ship 2. your powersuit allows you to survive certain ship destructions (like anything but mortar, mega etc. napalm will nag on you) 3. you then can try to hijack a ship or have to find a new one 4. if you blow up a ship, better try to squash the guy too before he shots you out of your ship w/ his pistol

Edit: Imagine being able to pick up a fusion cannon as a guy and be able to shoot a single blob. Or fire that mega and do a mega rocket-jump. Get the gauss cannon and feel like Rambo. I'd like that

Let me tell you the one thing that's going to make this quite challenging. As far as I know, based on my inquiries in the Unreal community in the 2003 days, Unreal only supports movement along a given plane. This was true in UT, 2003, and it also seems to be the case in 2004 as well. You can't really tilt your ship upward and climb, or roll left and right. Although they do this in AS-Mothership, that is a one-level mod and it's still not quite the same. I believe the term for this is quaternion physics. You would have to implement something like this.

The closest thing existing in-game is the Raptor. Although the Raptor is a flyer, it doesn't work like a Pyro does. You use the + and - to ascend to a plane, and then WASD translates you along that plane. In other words, it's sort of like having Ship Auto-Leveling on all the time.

If you search the UnrealWiki, you'll find there's actually been plenty of talk about Descent mods, but there has yet to be any action.

On the other hand, if you can pull it off, you'll have access to one of the richest game engines out there capable of rendering almost anything you can think of. You couldn't stop me from making levels for this mod if someone were to do it.

I really doubt they would have made such a inherent limitation in the engine unnecessarily, but you never know...

Guess we'll see.

I think I remember something about that. It was a definite limitation in the cutscenes for Unreal 2, since the flyer would only move along one axis (looked jerky). It was finally removed in either UT2k4 or Unreal Engine 3 (the tech demo was displayed at E3).

That's pretty hard to believe for a game engine as advanced as UT2Kx, and a totally unnecessary limitation. Btw, any movement boils down to setting a certain "direction" and moving along a vector pointing in that direction. Why shouldn't this be possible in UT2Kx?

Optimization?

Yeeaaah... let's use one of the most advanced physics simulators in existence, then impose a totally random restriction on the actual simulation for no good reason. Right.

(There actually is a three-level 'physics details' setting in the UT2K* preferences... that should say it all)

I don't believe there is such a limitation in the UT2K engines. With certain cheat codes, you can fly through the air in any arbitrary direction. All that's lacking is the "wiggling" of a Pyro. So?

The limitation is there, yes, but you'd just use quaternions.

acutally all ut2k4-fighters can be flown in any direction at any time you I have not noticed such a limitation.

The limitation they're talking about has more to do with banking than with vertical position, I think. I can't say I'm sure That's probably the hardest thing to deal with in Descent, is the ability to bank in addition to all the other motions you can have in space. But, like Tet said, any such limitation could be taken care of through the use of quaternions.

Came across this:
http://www.fpscentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=70338

Diedel wrote:I don't believe there is such a limitation in the UT2K engines. With certain cheat codes, you can fly through the air in any arbitrary direction. All that's lacking is the "wiggling" of a Pyro. So?

Actually, if you try to do "fly" in the console, you can see exactly what I'm talking about. You can fly around however you want, but your character is always oriented perpendicular to the ground. In other words, your view cannot rotate or bank (i.e. buttons '7' and '9' in Descent). Now, this may or may not be significant. It depends on how closely you want to truly resemble Descent in such a mod, as opposed to an easy-to-grasp variation of Descent.

I did some more research. The Raptors are similar to fly mode in that they are always oriented toward the ground. + and - will change cruising elevation, but forward/back/left/right movement is limited to that elevation plane. However, the fighters in the AS-Mothership level do seem to have arbitrary banking. Orientation is reset to the plane only when the pilot presses the crouch button. Otherwise, they can fly wherever they want.

The only thing about this is that they were implemented solely in the AS-Mothership level as a mod. I don't think they are even a generic vehicle type you can add to a level - it could well be "hardcoded" into AS-Mothership.

While these vehicles prove it can be done, there is one other problem - weapons.

By default, weapons in Unreal can not float like they do in Descent or abide by zero-gravity rules. From what I understand, it is assumed by the engine that all item pickups are made from a ground surface. You'll notice that the inability to pick up weapons or anything else in the AS-Mothership level while flying is a conspicuous exclusion. So, that's something that would have to be addressed even if you get Pyro physics right. UnrealEd 3 returns the error:

NewWeaponBase0: xPickupBase is floating

There are low gravity levels, right? So no gravity levels should be feasible, with the appropriate physics.

If there were "real" planes in a level, I rather believe they were "modded" than hard coded, so should be feasible in another mod.

It's all a question of trying it out, but I'd have to dig into this, which might take quite a while ... and then it's summer, where there are a lot of nice outdoor activities possible to spend my time with (when wife+son leave me some ).

Low gravity can be created by a ZoneInfo actor, which applies to a zone (analogous to a "room" in D3Edit terminology). It exaggerates jumps, but it doesn't change the item pickup limitations.

An interesting issue is that UnrealEd outright denies you from having floating powerups, which is why I think it is an assumption of the engine.

You can add the vehicles in AS-Mothership to any level (Actor browser: Pawn-> Vehicle-> ASVehicle-> ASVehicle_Spacefighter-> ASVehicle_spacefigher_human), as long as you say it's an assault map. It'll probably explode unless you spawn the players in them (or at least they were in my little test level I was doing, then again I wasn't using the PlayerSpawnManager like they did in AS-Mothership), although I'm sure if you wanted to you could take the code for that vehicle and put it in it's own game mode or whatever the hell you wanted to do with it.

And are you sure you can't put powerups off the ground? I've had unrealed ★■◆● at me about not having playerstarts in the right place (i.e. on movers), but it would still let me do it. Granted none of the levels I've worked on had powerups in them, but I imagine the engine will let you do it, although it may not work perfectly.

By the way, you can't put code inside levels. If it's in the game, it's in a .uc file somewhere for you to look at.

UnrealEd will exclude the xWeaponBase from the game if it is floating. The level will load, just without the xWeaponBase and associated weapon.

This is also true if you put a nonsolid additive brush in the middle of a subtracted brush. It will only work if the brush the xWeaponBase is sitting on is solid or semisolid additive.

I don't have UT2K3.

it wouldn't work in ut2k3 anyway if vehicles were done with karma.