tim sweeney archive - news archive

Tim Sweeney Archive - News

http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/sweeney

March 18, 2007

http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/sweeney

Contents

1 Prologue 10

2 1998 News 11

2.1 Oct 13, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

2.1.1 Unreal Cheat-Finding Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . 11

2.1.2 UnrealScript Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

2.2 Oct 14, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

2.2.1 Network Objects Follow-Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

2.2.2 AWT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

2.2.3 Cheat Challenge Update . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

2.2.4 Another Public Master Server . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

2.3 Oct 22, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

2.3.1 Linux Unreal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

2.3.2 Hired Guns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

2.4 Oct 24, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

2.4.1 Almost there... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

2.4.2 More discussion on CORBA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

1

Tim Sweeney Archive 2 News

2.5 Oct 25, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

2.5.1 Geting closer... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

2.6 Oct 26, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

2.6.1 Direct3D Drivers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

2.6.2 Known Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

2.6.3 Unreal 218 Gaining Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

2.6.4 PlanetUnreal performance survey . . . . . . . . . . 20

2.6.5 More about 3D API’s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

2.6.6 Unreal 218 Patch is ready! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

2.7 Oct 28, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

2.7.1 Latest Happenings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

2.7.2 Status of Direct3d - All Drivers . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

2.7.3 Riva TNT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

2.7.4 Riva 128 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

2.7.5 Intel i740 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

2.7.6 ATI Rage Pro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

2.7.7 3dfx Voodoo2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

2.7.8 S3 Savage 3D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

2.7.9 Matrox G200 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

2.7.10 Rendition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

2.7.11 Permedia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

2.7.12 Drivers we consider playable, in best-to-worst order 25

2.8 Oct 30, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

2.8.1 Unreal 218 patch information (RTFM!) . . . . . . . . 25

CONTENTS


2.8.2 Resources for Server Administrators . . . . . . . . . 26

2.8.3 Unreal Multiplayer Ramp-Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

2.8.4 Other Servers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

2.9 Nov 01, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

2.9.1 Unreal Grows... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

2.10 Nov 02, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

2.10.1 Unreal 219! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

2.10.2 The testing is going well . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

2.10.3 Testing 219 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

2.11 Nov 10, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

2.11.1 Latest News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

2.11.2 The Roadmap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

2.11.3 Server Administration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

2.12 Nov 19, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

2.12.1 Unreal 220 Internet Improvements . . . . . . . . . . 31

2.12.2 Unreal Editor Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

2.12.3 Web Site Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

2.12.4 Unreal mod notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

2.13 Dec 10, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

2.13.1 No News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

2.14 Dec 11, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

2.15 Dec 12, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

2.16 Dec 14, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

2.16.1 Hard at work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

CONTENTS


2.16.2 That’s UnrealEd.net . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

2.17 Dec 15, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

2.17.1 Unreal Networking Code: Status . . . . . . . . . . . 38

2.18 Dec 18, 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

2.18.1 Unreal Tournament notes for mod authors . . . . . 41

3 1999 News 43

3.1 Jan 01, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

3.1.1 Happy New Year . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

3.1.2 Other Updates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

3.2 Jan 28, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

3.2.1 Unreal 221 Development Update . . . . . . . . . . . 49

3.2.2 Unreal Tournament . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

3.3 Feb 10, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

3.3.1 Latest News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

3.3.2 What we’ve been programming . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

3.3.3 Linux Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

3.4 Mar 19, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

3.4.1 Latest News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

3.4.2 Level-Of-Detail Texture Mapping . . . . . . . . . . . 54

3.4.3 Future of Programming Languages . . . . . . . . . . 54

3.4.4 Visible Surface Determination . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

3.4.5 Commentary on Cool Stuff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

3.5 Apr 14, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

CONTENTS


3.5.1 3dfx Voodoo3 Totally Rocks! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

3.6 Apr 15, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

3.6.1 Important Unreal 224 Note To Mod Authors . . . . . 60

3.6.2 Maps, Textures, Sounds, Music are backwards com-patible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

3.6.3 Latest News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

3.6.4 Cool Stuff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

3.7 Apr 19, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

3.7.1 Getting closer... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

3.7.2 Network Cross-Compatibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

3.8 May 01, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

3.8.1 224 Progress Continued . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

3.9 May 02, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

3.9.1 STAT NET: Diagnosing your connection to the server 66

3.9.2 Server Alert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

3.9.3 Unreal 224v C++ headers released! . . . . . . . . . . 69

3.9.4 Unreal 224v Released to the public! . . . . . . . . . . 70

3.10 May 03, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

3.10.1 Known Bugs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

3.10.2 Future Patch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

3.10.3 Check out the Unreal news sites . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

3.10.4 OpenGL UnrealEd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

3.11 May 05, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

3.11.1 Maps that broke since 220 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

CONTENTS


3.11.2 Quick Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

3.12 May 08, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74

3.12.1 Latest progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74

3.13 May 19, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

3.13.1 Unreal 225 musings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

3.13.2 ”Make Something Unreal” Contest . . . . . . . . . . 76

3.13.3 Things That Are Cool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

3.14 May 29, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

3.14.1 For server administrators only: Unreal 225e Patch . 77

3.14.2 On engine licensing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

3.14.3 UnrealEd ”Runtime Error 20005” Experimental Fix . 78

3.15 May 31, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

3.15.1 Latest News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

3.15.2 Holiday? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

3.15.3 New 225f Patch for server administrators only . . . . 80

3.15.4 Server 225e Patch Feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

3.15.5 UnrealEd Experimental Fix 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

3.16 Jun 01, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

3.16.1 UnrealEd Follow-Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

3.16.2 Server Cheats? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

3.16.3 UnrealEd for 3dfx Voodoo3 bundle owners . . . . . 82

3.17 Jun 06, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

3.17.1 Direct3D Improvements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

3.18 Jun 19, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

CONTENTS


3.18.1 Unreal Direct3D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

3.18.2 Summary of things I learned about Direct3D . . . . 84

3.19 Jun 30, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

3.19.1 Direct3D Is Happening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

3.20 Jul 01, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86

3.20.1 226 Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86

3.20.2 Recommended Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

3.21 Jul 03, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

3.21.1 On Our World Domination Plans . . . . . . . . . . . 87

3.21.2 What’s really happening here? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

3.21.3 The Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

3.21.4 The Result: General-Purpose Solutions Win . . . . . 90

3.21.5 Where we go from here . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

3.22 Jul 10, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

3.22.1 The AMD Athlon Rocks! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

3.23 Jul 12, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

3.23.1 New Downloads & Links Pages . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

3.24 Aug 14, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

3.24.1 DirectX7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

3.25 Aug 16, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

3.25.1 Unreal Tournament development note . . . . . . . . 94

3.26 Sep 14, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

3.26.1 Unreal Tournament demo schedule . . . . . . . . . 95

3.26.2 DirectX7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

CONTENTS


3.27 Sep 22, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

3.27.1 DirectX7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

3.27.2 What about OpenGL? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

3.27.3 Experiencing poor Internet play on your Voodoo33500TV? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

3.28 Sep 29, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

3.28.1 More Hardware Troubleshooting . . . . . . . . . . . 100

3.28.2 Direct3D Anomalies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

3.28.3 Athlon In The House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

3.29 Oct 01, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

3.29.1 TNT Users, Try This! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

3.29.2 Latest Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

3.29.3 Links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

3.30 Oct 02, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

3.30.1 Unreal Tournament players overtake QuakeWorldat #5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

3.31 Oct 06, 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

3.31.1 Windows 2000 RC2 Rocks! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

3.31.2 Windows 2000 Internationalization . . . . . . . . . . 106

4 2000 News 108

4.1 Feb 22, 2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

4.1.1 Common Questions I’m Asked . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

4.1.2 Programming Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

4.1.3 Also... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

CONTENTS


4.2 Feb 28, 2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Prologue

This is a collection of (almost) all the news posts by Tim Sweeney fromthe original Unreal Technology archive. Posts not by Tim Sweeney ornot really having anything engine-related may have been left out. Thearchive continues to 2003, but Tim Sweeney unfortunately stopped post-ing in early 2000.

10

Chapter 2

1998 News

2.1 Oct 13, 1998

2.1.1 Unreal Cheat-Finding Challenge

I’ve seen two reports that people have found a way to cheat in Internetplay. One person reported seeing a little tiny 1-inch tall player walkingaround named ”LilTinyChessPiece”, and another reported a player whonever took damage. I’ve been scouring the code, and haven’t found anyholes which would enable this kind of cheating, but I’d love to hear ifanybody has found a way.

If you find a way for players to cheat or crash servers over the Internetin Unreal, please email mailto:[email protected]. The first person toreport a particular security hole in Unreal will receive credit and thankshere for helping to protect the Unreal community from cheaters.

People who cheat in Deathmatch are lamers, but people who are moti-vated by simply discovering ways to cheat are doing valuable research.

Note: I don’t consider the following things Unreal cheats:

• Server administrators cheating on their own server. Since the ad-min is in control of the server, there are many ways he could dis-

11

mailto:[email protected]


advantage players (in any game, not just Unreal), but fortunatelypeople who go to the effort of setting up their own server tend to behonest and respectful of the community.

• Any of the standard TCP/IP tricks people can use to confuse Web& FTP servers, such as SYN flooding, packet flooding, DNS spoof-ing, and so on. These aren’t Unreal-specific cheats, and I can’t stopthem.

2.1.2 UnrealScript Notes

There was recently a ”to script or not to script” debate about the merits ofUnrealScript vs pure C/C++. In this debate, several misconceptions wereput forth, which I want to correct:

1. UnrealScript replicated functions (described in the http://unreal.epicgames.com/Network.htm) indeed return instantly, rather thanblocking execution while waiting for network acknowledgement.Function calls are sent across the network using an asynchronousRPC-like approach, and are executed upon reception. They can ei-ther be sent wih guaranteed delivery and sequencing (by using the”reliable” keyword), or without sequencing (using ”unrelible”). Un-reliable replicated functions are most efficient, and should be usedfor non-vital events like hearing sounds.

If one were to assume UnrealScript functions were synchronousand blocking, one would indeed draw incorrect conclusions suchas this statement: ”That must make AIs in multiplayer games reallyfun, they fire at you and do an RPC, then freeze until they get a pingback from the client.”

2. As our licensees know, UnrealScript classes and C++ classes fullyinteroperate. You can derive C++ classes from UnrealScript classes,and vice-versa. For all actor classes, running ”Unreal.exe -make”automatically parses the UnrealScript classes, and generates C++stubs for them, including:

2.1. OCT 13, 1998

http://unreal.epicgames.com/Network.htm



• C++ variable declarations mirroring the UnrealScript ones, al-lowing variables to be accessed identically in either language.

• C++ -> UnrealScript calling stubs, enabling C++ functions tocall into UnrealScript functions.

• UnrealScript -> C++ calling stubs, enabling UnrealScript func-tions to call into C++.

Indeed, we invested a lot of effort into providing dual programminginterfaces, enabling seamless sharing of objects and code betweenthe two languages. Among other things, I studied COM, MFC/VB/ActiveX,CORBA/IDL, and JNI in order to determine the most efficient andleast error-prone methods of cross-language programming. Thereis a lot of great research material on the net, for those who are in-terested.

I suspect that people who have a low opinion of mixed-languageprogramming have likely drawn their conclusions from JNI and CORBA/IDLwhich do indeed involve a lot of messy handle/id references anderror-prone redundent declaration of objects. It doesn’t have to bethis way. For an example of ”cross-language programming doneright”, check out the ActiveX support in Microsoft Visual J++ andVisual Basic – they’re ultra-clean, automatic, and they involve noredundency. MFC also does a pretty good nearly-automatic job ofcross-language ActiveX object handling. Mixed-language program-ming can be very fruitful, if it’s implemented properly.

3. Unreal performs all file loading and saving using serialization. Se-rialization is automatic for objects defined in UnrealScript. For ob-jects and structures defined only in C++, such as the following func-tion that serializes a vector.

friend FArchive& FVector::operator<<( FArchive& Ar, FVector& V ){

return Ar << V.X << V.Y << V.Z;}

For programmers just learning about object-orientation, a must-read is: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201633612/o/

2.1. OCT 13, 1998

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201633612/o/qid=908310340/sr=2-1/002-5033601-8164246



qid=908310340/sr=2-1/002-5033601-8164246 (Addison-Wesley Pro-fessional Computing) by http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/Author=Gamma,%20Erich/002-5033601-8164246, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/Author=Helm,%20Richard/002-5033601-8164246,

2.2 Oct 14, 1998

2.2.1 Network Objects Follow-Up

I’ve chatted with several people lately who have added insight to the dis-cussion of multi-language programming and networking. One interest-ing topic mentioned was using the CORBA protocol to coordinate net-work games. CORBA is a high-reliability protocol with a fairly high amountof overhead and latency, due to its exacting nature and use of TCP. I seeCORBA as a very suitable protocol for network game backbones. Forexample, if you were doing an Ultima Online style world with multipleservers that stay in synch, CORBA would be good for linking servers to-gether in a high-reliability, non performance-critical way. But, CORBAisn’t suited for an actual realtime modem-based gameplay protocol, sinceit’s TCP based (which adds terrible lag under lossy conditions), and theprotocol has enough overhead that it’s not going to be able to handlelarge amounts of data over the modem.

2.2.2 AWT

http://unrealscript.net/AWT/ is a graphical user-interface layer for Un-realScript, which has been making some cool progress lately.

2.2.3 Cheat Challenge Update

I’ve received a bunch of tips from two Unreal enthusiasts. Congratula-tions go to Mek @ PlanetUnreal and RisingSun for discovering and veri-fying two holes in Unreal, and to Mike Lambert for suggesting a potential

2.2. OCT 14, 1998



http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/Author=Gamma,%20Erich/002-5033601-8164246

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/Author=Gamma,%20Erich/002-5033601-8164246

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/Author=Helm,%20Richard/002-5033601-8164246

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/Author=Helm,%20Richard/002-5033601-8164246

http://unrealscript.net/AWT/


third one. Also, thanks all the players who provided observations theysaw of potential cheating online. I’ll write more about these techniquesafter the next patch has been released, and the holes plugged.

In the meantime, if you too have figured out how to cheat in Unreal,pat yourself on the back, you outsmarted me! But also, please resist thetemptation to cheat on the public deathmatch servers...it spoils the fun.

2.2.4 Another Public Master Server

This just in:

How about a mention of the OGN Public Unreal Master Server?It’s been available for almost two weeks and has no access re-strictions, bandwidth or otherwise. The server is running @master.ogn.org:27500. Server lists can be retrieved @ http: //

master. ogn. org: 6669/ list/ game/ unreal . A page describ-ing how to link to it can be found @ http: // www. ogn. org/

UnrealMaster

– sky G.http: // www. qhunter. com/

http: // www. golightly. org/

http: // www. aurorablue. org/

2.3 Oct 22, 1998

2.3.1 Linux Unreal

http://www.linuxgames.com/ has reported a way to run the existing ver-sion of Unreal under Linux, using the Wine Windows emulator for Linux.They’ve included a screenshot and more information at this http://www.sgic.fi/~tj/unreal.html page.

2.3. OCT 22, 1998

http://master.ogn.org:6669/list/game/unreal

http://master.ogn.org:6669/list/game/unreal

http://www.ogn.org/UnrealMaster

http://www.ogn.org/UnrealMaster

http://www.qhunter.com/

http://www.golightly.org/

http://www.aurorablue.org/

http://www.linuxgames.com/

http://www.sgic.fi/~tj/unreal.html

http://www.sgic.fi/~tj/unreal.html


2.3.2 Hired Guns

Want to see something cool and unique that’s being done with the Un-real engine? Check out the http://www.gagames.com/news/bits/9+22+

98/13:01:36.html preview. The http://www.devilsthumb.com/ team isreally pushing the engine, and has implemented a beautiful user-interfacedesign featuring multiple game windows. I look forward to playing thisgame. (Thanks http://www.planetunreal.com/ for pointing out the pre-view).

2.4 Oct 24, 1998

2.4.1 Almost there...

The latest Direct3D support is now integrated into the Unreal codebase.It will be in the upcoming 218 patch in ”public beta” form. It hasn’t gonethrough wide testing yet, but we and our partners have been testing ita lot internally on Windows 95 and 98. It’s looking good on the next-generation 3D cards (Riva TNT, Matrox G200, Savage 3D), though high-level optimizations are planned that will boost performance further.

The Voodoo2 multitexture code is in, thanks to the efforts of Jack Math-ews at 3dfx.

I’m doing some final Internet play testing and tweaking on the patch. My”torture test” environment is an ISP connection at 24.4K with 400 msecping. If it’s playable on that, it should be playable on anything. :) Yes-terday’s testing revealed a few last-minute problems that I’m working onnow.

2.4.2 More discussion on CORBA

mailto:[email protected] this insight into CORBA with respect torealtime apps:

2.4. OCT 24, 1998

http://www.gagames.com/news/bits/9+22+98/13:01:36.html

http://www.gagames.com/news/bits/9+22+98/13:01:36.html

http://www.devilsthumb.com/

http://www.planetunreal.com/



In general, CORBA causes too much overhead and latency tobe a server/clients gaming protocol. This is due to IIOP’s (thedefault inter-ORB protocol) use of TCP/IP, and the use of largepacket sizes (compared to the dedicated bit-tuned gaming pro-tocols being used in, for example, Quake2 and Unreal). Thoughsupport for IIOP is mandatory, an ORB vendor can deploy moreefficient (or more secure) protocols between ’his’ ORBs, option-ally using other network protocols. By default, CORBA calls aresynchronous (that is, the calling object is blocked until a re-sponse is received from the called object). Such a connection-oriented call is best implemented using TCP.CORBA also supports so-called ’one-way’ operations, that en-able the caller to continue processing immediately after mak-ing the call - the call is non-blocking. Here, it might make senseto use UDP as an underlying protocol, provided you deal withthe unreliability at the application level (the ’call’ might notarrive at the client). Some specialized high-performance ORBs,such as Nortel’s RCP-ORB, < http://www.nortel.com/RCP-ORB/> ,use other transport protocols than TCP for one-way calls. MostORBs implement optimized mechanisms for ’intra-server’ and’intra-process’ communication (not that relevant for multi-playergaming).

I’ll post more thoughts on the topic in the future. With Unreal, distributedobject models are already playing a role in multiplayer gaming, but onlyin a ”tip of the iceberg” sort of way. This kind of technology will expandvery interestingly in the future.

2.5 Oct 25, 1998

2.5.1 Geting closer...

We’re gearing up for a big internal test session with 218 right now. Therelease date of the 218 patch will depend on the outcome. Note that 218

2.5. OCT 25, 1998


is not network-compatible with 217, so if you see our 2 test servers inGameSpy, please don’t try to join (you won’t be able to).

2.6 Oct 26, 1998

2.6.1 Direct3D Drivers

To use Unreal’s Direct3D support, you must have http://www.microsoft.com/directx/download.asp installed. You also need the latest Direct3Ddriver from your 3D hardware maker. Because Unreal uses many new Di-rect3D features, many hardware makers had to update their drivers forUnreal to work. Therefore, some of the drivers distributed with DirectX6.0 have problems with Unreal (crashes or visual anomalies). Here aredriver download sites for various brands:

• http://www.3dlabs.com/drivers/ Permedia

• http://www.3dfx.com/developers/drivers.html Voodoo, VoodooRush, Voodoo2, Voodoo Banshee

• http://support.atitech.ca/drivers/drivers.html Rage

• http://developer.intel.com/design/graphics/drivers i740

• http://www.matrox.com/mga/drivers/home.htm G200

• http://www.nVidia.com/home.htmlRiva 128 (known problems), RivaTNT

• http://www.rendition.com/download.html Verite

• http://www.s3.com/bbs/0main/topindex.htm Savage 3D

• http://www.trid.com/trident/html/DRIVERS.HTM (untested, prob-ably doesn’t work)

• http://www.nine.com/support/drivers/index.html (untested, prob-ably doesn’t work)

2.6. OCT 26, 1998

http://www.microsoft.com/directx/download.asp

http://www.microsoft.com/directx/download.asp

http://www.3dlabs.com/drivers/

http://www.3dfx.com/developers/drivers.html

http://support.atitech.ca/drivers/drivers.html

http://developer.intel.com/design/graphics/drivers

http://www.matrox.com/mga/drivers/home.htm

http://www.nVidia.com/home.html

http://www.rendition.com/download.html

http://www.s3.com/bbs/0main/topindex.htm

http://www.trid.com/trident/html/DRIVERS.HTM

http://www.nine.com/support/drivers/index.html


Please keep in mind that Unreal’s Direct3D support is an early beta andisn’t yet working reliably on all 3D hardware.

2.6.2 Known Issues

I’ve update the list of http://unreal.epicgames.com/Bugs.htm, summa-rizing the problems people have found with 219. There are a bunch ofitems, but most are non-showstoppers. I’m working on them now. Over-all, though, 218 is by far the best-received version of Unreal to date! Newservers are popping up rapidly (50% increase in the past 18 hours), withplayer counts rising even faster.

2.6.3 Unreal 218 Gaining Support

After releasing the patch at midnight Sunday night, it was amazing tosee how many Unreal servers had it up and running in less than an hourminutes.

It will be interesting to watch new Unreal servers spring up on the netnow that our Internet play quality is under control. In the not-too-distantfuture, we’ll have many more improvements in Unreal network play: per-formance enhancements, new features requested by the community, andseveral cool upcoming surprises. GameSpy currently shows 27 Unrealservers, and a couple thousand for Quake. Clearly, we got off to a veryslow start while we learned the the ins-and-outs of Internet game pro-gramming; now Unreal is on a solid footing and we’re really beginning topick up the pace!

Level designers in the Unreal community have already started producingsome great Deathmatch maps (see http://www.freshmeat.org/unreal/

for downloads), so we expect to see things accelerate in this area, too.

2.6. OCT 26, 1998

http://unreal.epicgames.com/Bugs.htm

http://www.freshmeat.org/unreal/


2.6.4 PlanetUnreal performance survey

If you’re using the new 218 patch, please fill out http://www.planetunreal.com/ Unreal performance survey. We’ll be watching Unreal players’ feed-back in the survey, and looking at all the 218 bug reports sent to themailto:[email protected] account. Everyone’s feedback will betaken into account for future improvements to the Internet play and otherfeatures.

2.6.5 More about 3D API’s

In an interview on http://www.voodooextreme.com, I gave my opinion inthe ongoing OpenGL vs Direct3D debate, and I wanted to add some moreinformation here.

First of all, both our DreamForge partners working on the OpenGL sup-port, and our Direct3D partner have both done a very high-quality job,given the constraints of Unreal and the 3D card drivers available. Myfeelings on the two 3D standards are based completely on their API’s andthe quality of drivers available.

Next, I wanted to give some more detail on the code.

API support layer Lines of C++ code3dfx Glide 1711Direct3D 3123NEC PowerVR 4049OpenGL 5697

Now, the Glide is the simplest, because it’s aimed at the Voodoo familyof 3D cards, which are very standard and straightforward to support. Forprogramming to 3dfx cards, Glide is the ideal API. For people thinking”If Glide is so great, why don’t other 3D cards support it?” The short an-swer is, if Glide supported other manufacturer’s 3D cards, it would pickup all the complications involved in real-world Direct3D and OpenGLprogramming: Testing for core capabilities, working around driver bugs,etc.

2.6. OCT 26, 1998




http://www.voodooextreme.com


The Direct3D code is next in simplicity. It began as a working 1600 linedriver, then expanded as it was optimized and support was added for3D cards that lack key features. The Direct3D API follows the traditionalMicrosoft model of being not very beautiful code, but dealing with real-world hardware robustly, by providing a capability-querying mechanismand well-tested drivers.

The PowerVR code is large because the PCX2 chip’s rendering approachis very different than what Unreal was designed for. This makes the im-plementation fairly complex, though the next-generation PowerVR, cur-rently on-hold in the PC market while NEC focuses on the Sega Dream-Cast, is a great chip that’s more traditional in its architecture, and moreoptimal for Unreal.

The OpenGL code is large because of optimizations and support for lotsof real-world hardware. If reduced to plain-vanilla OpenGL, this wouldprobably be the simplest and most stable driver of them all, because theOpenGL API is very straightforward.

2.6.6 Unreal 218 Patch is ready!

You can read the release notes and download the patch from the http:

//unreal.epicgames.com/Versions.htm! Our test session went well, andthe participants (including a lot of modem players, and even some over-seas modem players) reported major success with the performance im-provements.

Epic’s two deathmatch servers have been upgraded to 218: unreal://

208.212.53.39:7777 and unreal://208.212.53.39:7787. However, sinceour T1 line is going to be very saturated with people downloading thepatch, performance probably won’t be very good on our server for thenext several days.

2.6. OCT 26, 1998

http://unreal.epicgames.com/Versions.htm


unreal://208.212.53.39:7777

unreal://208.212.53.39:7777

unreal://208.212.53.39:7787


2.7 Oct 28, 1998

2.7.1 Latest Happenings

Since the Unreal 218 patch was released, the number of Unreal serversshowing up in GameSpy has increased by 225%. A huge thanks to every-one who is running Unreal servers now. It’s awesome to see the commu-nity grow and begin to reach critical mass.

At any time, about 20% of the servers listed in GameSpy are shown as”Not Responding”. I’ve been looking into this, and there are three reasonsfor this.

One, the server has been shut down or crashed but hasn’t timed out andbeen removed from the list. Two, the server is switching levels, whichprevents it from responding to GameSpy queries for 5-20 seconds. Third,the server is shown in GameSpy because a user running a LAN server(dedicated or non-dedicated) enabled the ”DoUplink” option to publi-cise their server to the world without realizing the consequences, but ei-ther exited or is on a LAN blocked off by a firewall. We’ll work with theGameSpy guys to adjust the timeouts so that fewer ”Not Responding”servers are listed.

2.7.2 Status of Direct3d - All Drivers

Some issues across-the-board with switching between fullscreen and win-dowed mode, and switching resolutions during gameplay. We’re lookinginto theses issues.

2.7.3 Riva TNT

Has lots of potential, but there are major problems with their Direct3Ddriver: rainbow colors, time-lag, w-buffering issues, missing textures. Weare hoping nVidia will issue an updated driver soon. The ball is in theircourt now.

2.7. OCT 28, 1998


2.7.4 Riva 128

Their latest driver should run Unreal OK. The framerate isn’t very good,and there will be a lot of ”stuttering” since texture downloads are veryslow on this hardware. Some users are reporting that creature polygonsappear corrupted. Hopefully nVidia will fix thie error in their driver.

2.7.5 Intel i740

There are some problems with their currently-available Direct3D driver,but they have an internal beta driver which fixes many problems. Hope-fully this will be ready for the public soon.

2.7.6 ATI Rage Pro

They have a beta Direct3D driver which runs Unreal pretty well (thoughit doesn’t appear to be available for public release yet). Multitexturingcurrently isn’t working with Unreal, because of a hardware limitation (itcan’t multitexture a paletted base texture map along with a non-palettedlight map).

2.7.7 3dfx Voodoo2

There isn’t any reason to use Direct3D for Voodoo2, since we supportGlide natively and that tends to be more stable and faster, but their latestDirect3D driver does run Unreal pretty well. Their detail texture blend-ing (D3DBLEND DIFFUSEALPHA) doesn’t work, which breaks detail tex-tures. There are reports of missing lightmaps in some areas (not surewhat’s wrong). 3dfx could get a performance increase here by imple-menting subrect Blts and hardware triangle-fan setup.

2.7. OCT 28, 1998


2.7.8 S3 Savage 3D

Works well with their internal beta Direct3D driver. Not sure when thiswill be available via the web.

2.7.9 Matrox G200

Works pretty well.

2.7.10 Rendition

Works pretty well.

2.7.11 Permedia

Only supports monochrome lighting due to blending limitations. Explo-sions are displayed with a black background (due to a bug in the currentUnreal code). Fairly slow texture downloading – performance isn’t great.

2.7.12 Drivers we consider playable, in best-to-worst or-der

• Voodoo2: Fastest of all.

• Savage/G200: Reasonable performance. Not as fast a fill rate asVoodoo2, but texture downloads are fast, and they support palettes,making for a steady frame rate.

• Rage Pro/Rendition: Reasonable performance. High display qual-ity in truecolor mode.

The others should be playable pending public release of improved Di-rect3D drivers for their hardware.

2.7. OCT 28, 1998


On Permedia, Riva 128, and Rendition, you may get better performanceusing Unreal’s software renderer, especially if you have a Pentium II classprocessor. This isn’t such a bad thing, because the software renderer sup-ports all of Unreal’s key features, including truecolor lighting and volu-metric fog.

2.8 Oct 30, 1998

2.8.1 Unreal 218 patch information (RTFM!)

If you downloaded the 218 patch, please http://unreal.epicgames.com/

versions.htm. If you’re still experiencing problems with Unreal on yourmodem connection, you need to use the NETSPEED command describedthere, so that Unreal doesn’t try to use more bandwidth than you haveavailable.

2.8.2 Resources for Server Administrators

Here are some resources to aid new Unreal server administrators in get-ting up and running:

• http://unreal.epicgames.com/Master.htm: How to get listed in Game-Spy and other querying tools (new).

• http://unreal.epicgames.com/ServerTips.htm: Basic informationabout running an Unreal server.

• http://megaboard.epicgames.com/: New ”Server Administration”forum. Steve Polge, Brandon Reinhart, and I will be answering ques-tions from server administrators and people writing server-queryingtools.

2.8. OCT 30, 1998

http://unreal.epicgames.com/versions.htm


http://unreal.epicgames.com/Master.htm

http://unreal.epicgames.com/ServerTips.htm

http://megaboard.epicgames.com/


2.8.3 Unreal Multiplayer Ramp-Up

A lot of news sites have been picking up on Unreal’s multiplayer improve-ments:

• http://www.next-generation.com/

• http://www.bluesnews.com/

• http://www.voodooextreme.com/

The number of public Unreal servers listed in GameSpy is now up to 51as I write this, and has been growing at a rate of over 20% daily. Whileworking on the upcoming 219 patch, I’ve been spending a couple hourseach day playing Unreal online, especially on the servers running user-created levels. The community has made some really impressive levels,and I’m glad to see that a lot of servers are now making use of download-able levels, textures, sounds, and music.

2.8.4 Other Servers

In addition to the public servers listed in GameSpy, there are 14 extremelyhigh quality, public servers on http://www.won.net/unreal listed in theirown web-based ”server finder” site.

I should also mention our other online partner, http://www.mplayer.com/action/games/unreal/, and the http://www.mplayer.com/action/unreal/news site on MPlayer.

-Tim

2.8. OCT 30, 1998

http://www.next-generation.com/

http://www.bluesnews.com/

http://www.voodooextreme.com/

http://www.won.net/unreal

http://www.mplayer.com/action/games/unreal/

http://www.mplayer.com/action/games/unreal/

http://www.mplayer.com/action/unreal/


2.9 Nov 01, 1998

2.9.1 Unreal Grows...

More public servers keep popping up every day. Awesome!

I noticed that the percentage of servers shown as ”not responding” hasgone up, though I’m not sure whether that’s due to server crashes, or peo-ple accidentally having their LAN server listed in GameSpy when it’s notmeant to be public. Server admins, if your server crashes unexpectedly,please email your Unreal.log file to mailto:[email protected] sowe can investigate it.

A reminder, server administrators can get help in the new ”Server Ad-ministration” forum on the http://megaboard.epicgames.com/.

According to the feedback we receive, and in http://www.planetunreal.

com/’s survey, 218 has fixed the past network problems and made Un-real playable on the Internet for the large majority of people. Still, wehave lots of improvements in the works, which will further increase thegame’s smoothness and responsiveness during network play, as well as afew new features that I’m not allowed to announce yet. :) The next patch,219, will be purely bug fixes to 218 (no speed difference). After that, 220will contain some more high-level improvements to many areas of thenetwork code.

Currently, there seem to be two sets of people who are still having someproblems with Unreal on the Internet. One set has 28.8K-33.6K modemconnections that experience an unusally high amount of packet loss. 220should improve this a bit, but when you have upwards of 20% packet loss,gameplay is bound to suffer. The other set of problems is being reportedby people with some unusual connections we haven’t been able to teston internally: people with dual simultaneous modem connections, peo-ple with connections that receive via satellite and send via modem, andsome similar configurations. I haven’t determined what’s going wrong inthese cases yet, but I suspect packet-order problems.

2.9. NOV 01, 1998


http://megaboard.epicgames.com/




2.10 Nov 02, 1998

2.10.1 Unreal 219!

It’s now available for download http://unreal.epicgames.com/Versions.

htm. The Epic Deathmatch servers will be shut down for the night, to pro-vide more bandwidth for downloads.

2.10.2 The testing is going well

Ok, ok, you can stop now, that’s enough testers. :) Server performancehas definitely improved since I last benchmarked it. My dual-processorPentium II-300 is serving a 20-player game, copying 600 megs across thenetwork, and running a 3dfx Unreal client at 800x600. The server is keep-ing up a steady 15 fps. I have more optimizations planned, though.

On my 28.8K connection, gameplay has remained pretty smooth until Iget into a firefight with 5-6 people, at which point the movement of otherplayers starts to become unsmooth. We should be able to improve thissignificantly further in 220, with two protocol improvements. First, I’ll beimproving the scheme for managing temporary objects like projectiles,which should reduce their bandwidth usage by around 30%. Second,Steve Polge and I working out a new variable priority predictor/correctorscheme for transmitting the movement of other players.

2.10.3 Testing 219

I have an Unreal 219 server up and running at unreal://208.212.53.3/in case a few people want to help test. You can join in and play with 218;it’s fully compatible. 219 should be available soon, unless new bugs arediscovered.

2.10. NOV 02, 1998



unreal://208.212.53.3/


2.11 Nov 10, 1998

2.11.1 Latest News

The latest http://www.planetunreal.com/ survey shows a significant gainin gamers’ satisfaction with the latest 219 patch, compared to the previ-ous ones. We’re now hammering on version 220, which includes signif-icant new Internet play improvements, plus some core game improve-ments that the rest of the team has been working on. 220 won’t be outthis week, but should be ready soon after.

There seems to be one Internet problem in 219 that is affecting 10-15%of players. I haven’t figured out the cause yet, but the symptom is a pingtime (visible with STAT NET) that swings around wildly, going from 200 to1000 or more over the course of several seconds. Many of these playersreport that other games like Quake 2 don’t exhibit the problem–whichindicates it’s not just a bad connection or ISP. I suspect packet-orderingproblems, though I haven’t been able to duplicate it here.

2.11.2 The Roadmap

In the remainder of 1998, we will be releasing:

• Unreal 219: Latest version. Download http://unreal.epicgames.

com/Versions.htm.

• Unreal 220: Further Internet improvements, core game improve-ments, bug fixes.

• Unreal 221: Incremental fixes

• Unreal 222: Offical (non-beta) patch; shareware version will be re-leased.

• Additional patches as necessary.

2.11. NOV 10, 1998





We also have some cool things in the works for 1999. Since Unreal firstshipped, I’ve been working on Internet improvements and bug fixes, whilethe rest of the team has been working on a top-secret project we are re-ferring to as ”Unreal Tournament”. There have been a lot of rumors andspeculation about what this project will be. Some of the rumors are com-pletely incorrect. For example, we are not

using any alien technology recovered from crashed spaceships on Tour-nament. (We’re saving that for our next project).

I’m also working on the new, enhanced UnrealEd, with lots of new fea-tures, improved stability, a plug-in interface, and other goodies. We don’thave a date for this, but I’m expecting a public beta around new years,with final release early in 1999.

At some point, we’ll be publically releasing Unreal’s C++ interface so thecommunity can start on .dll plug-ins for Unreal and UnrealEd. This willhappen no later than the new UnrealEd public beta. It might be possibleto release it sooner, however there are changes in the works which won’tbe binary compatible, so user-created .dll’s would break and need to berecompiled.

What can you do with Unreal .dll’s? Lots. Here are some examples:

• Define new kinds of algorithmic textures that can be created in Un-realEd and used in levels.

• Expose anything you can do in C++ to UnrealScript, for example thefile system, ActiveX, more Internet functionality, etc.

• Write performance-critical game support routines, such as AI.

While it’s also possible to write game code directly in C++, the preferableway to do that is UnrealScript, since there is already a lot of game supportinfrastructure built into the language.

2.11. NOV 10, 1998


2.11.3 Server Administration

Remote server administration isn’t working in 219, but will be addressedshortly. 219 does have a few new features for local server administration.While running a server, click on the Unreal server icon and choose ”Showlog window”. In the log, you can type:

• SERVERTRAVEL < levelname> : Jump to a new server.

• SAY < message> : Broadcast a message to all users.

-Tim Sweeney

2.12 Nov 19, 1998

2.12.1 Unreal 220 Internet Improvements

I’m now down in Raleigh, North Carolina with the rest of the Unreal team.Things are really coming together for the top-secret project we’re workingon, and Unreal 220 is starting to solidify. We don’t have a release date yet,but it could be as early as next week.

The Internet play improvements in 220 are quite noticeable. Steve and Iare using a new physics prediction scheme based on motion compen-sation. This improves the smoothness of other players’ movement indeathmatch games, especially in large, open levels like DmDeck16, wherelots of players are visible.

Steve has redesigned the moving brush code so that moving brushes noware now handled client-side. Platforms and doors are very smooth now.Finally, I’ve created a new scheme for managing temporary actors likeprojectiles, which reduces their bandwidth by about 30%.

Steve and Brandon have also added a lot of other improvements, suchas showing ping times, server name, and level name in the player list,showing the name of opponents when you point the crosshair at them in

2.12. NOV 19, 1998


a network game, a beep when chat messages come in, and color codingof messages.

2.12.2 Unreal Editor Progress

I’ve also been working on the new Unreal Editor, featuring a user-interfacerewrite (moving over to C++ from Visual Basic). It’s now more than half-way done. Architecturally, the new editor code is far more general thanthe old UnrealEd. The editor itself is very abstract, and almost all func-tionality is implemented through plug-ins. There are plug-in interfacesfor brush builders, views of objects (like 3D scenes and the 2D editor),view controllers, import tools, export tools, browsers, and operations onarbitrary kinds of objects. Plug-ins can even define their own sub plug-ininterfaces, etc.

This new approach will provide a more solid foundation for Unreal 1 edit-ing, but the big gains will come in the next-generation engine. A ma-jor bottleneck in creating the Unreal 1 engine was the complex couplingbetween the rendering engine and the editor, which made it difficult tomodify the renderer. The new approach generalizes the concept of edit-ing, and will make it easier to add cool new features which require editorsupport.

I plan to start releasing public betas of the new UnrealEd as soon as it’sreally stabilized, with the first beta in the first week or two of 1999 if allgoes well.

We have long planned to release the editor as a full retail product throughGT Interactive after it has been cleaned up and finalized, but there doesn’tseem to be enough mainstream retail interest to justify it. So, unlesssomething changes real soon, we’ll plan to release the final version freely,with the manual provided in HtmlHelp format rather than printed.

2.12. NOV 19, 1998


2.12.3 Web Site Notes

A request of web sites providing collections of Unreal related files, such asthe cool http://www.freshmeat.org/unreal/ page: Please link to the of-ficial http://unreal.epicgames.com/Versions.htm page for the Unrealpatches, rather than mirroring specific patch versions locally. A bunch ofweb sites have old Unreal patches in their download sections (as old asthe 1.01 patch), which are no longer relevent. If everyone links to the cen-tral http://unreal.epicgames.com/Versions.htm page, users are morelikely to get the latest patch. Thanks!

Cool Unreal related things I’ve seen recently...

• http://unrealnation.com/unloaded/, a great ”overhead

view” mod including some custom levels. It feels a lot like the clas-sic arcade game Gauntlet.

• http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~cloewe/unreal/, a totally cool statstool for server administrators.

• http://www.unrealed.com/ has grown to contain more and moreuseful UnrealEd resources.

2.12.4 Unreal mod notes

Mod developers who get the cryptic ”sandbox” error when trying theirmods in network play: This error means you have a .upkg file that saysserver-side-only because you copied the one from IpDrv.u (which is SUP-POSED to be server-side-only). This usually prevents the mod from work-ing, but sometimes just causes actors defined in the mod to not be visibleto players. If you don’t have a .upkg problem, you won’t have a problem.If you do have a .upkg file, it should read:

[Flags]AllowDownload=FalseClientOptional=FalseServerSideOnly=False

2.12. NOV 19, 1998




http://unrealnation.com/unloaded/

http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~cloewe/unreal/

http://www.unrealed.com/


-Tim Sweeney

2.13 Dec 10, 1998

2.13.1 No News

We’re still testing and tweaking Unreal 220. It’s getting closer...

http://www.loonygames.com/has a cool http://www.loonygames.com/content/1.16/bent/ that compares, contrasts, and critiques some next-generationgame development tools, and focuses on the strengths and weaknessesof UnrealEd and 3D Studio Max. The author makes a lot of good pointsabout features that would improve UnrealEd, many of which are alreadyplanned for the upcoming C++ UnrealEd rewrite.

2.14 Dec 11, 1998

Here is the http://unreal.epicgames.com/ReadMe220.htm file from theupcoming 220 patch.

We’re doing some final testing on it now. If that goes well, 220 will be re-leased Saturday. Otherwise, we’ll spend a few more days fixing and test-ing.

2.15 Dec 12, 1998

The team played a huge coop game through all the levels of Unreal, and220 is looking good – ”almost there”. Here’s the list of bugs we found dur-ing the test session, which we’re fixing now:

tim’s issues:

2.13. DEC 10, 1998

http://www.loonygames.com/

http://www.loonygames.com/content/1.16/bent/

http://www.loonygames.com/content/1.16/bent/

http://unreal.epicgames.com/ReadMe220.htm


• ”brightness” txt isn’t shown

• brightness setting not saved

• alt-enter loses menu in w95 glide but ”advanced options” doesn’t

• verify ipdrv not loaded for normal play

• avoid losing savegames! (firstrun detect *.usa)

• no music when enter dig coop

• spinning death anim plays superfast

• ”connecting” msg shows current level name not next

• ”netspeed” setting doesn’t persist across level switches in lan game

• cliff says screenshot crashing

• make sure all mover subclasses are bAlwaysRelevent

• text wrap: additional lines have leading spaces

steve issues:

• no pickup sound for kevlar vest

• dude in chair isn’t screaming

• sparking wire anim in vortex rikers isn’t showing

brandon:

• coop scoreboard needed, to show who’s in the game

2.15. DEC 12, 1998


2.16 Dec 14, 1998

2.16.1 Hard at work

We’re hard at work putting the finishing touches on Unreal 220. It’s look-ing good, but the extent of the changes and improvements has requiredquite a lot of testing and refinement. It won’t be ready for public con-sumption this week or over the weekend, but hopefully early next week.

A lot of mod authors have emailed asking for early access to Unreal 220 sothey can get their stuff is up and running in the new version. The answerright now is ”maybe”...if the code comes together over the weekend, I’llpost a public ”for mod authors only” version. 220 will break compatibilitywith most UnrealScript mods, but I’ve modified UnrealEd so that modscan still be loaded (this is a change: 219’s UnrealEd gives a fatal errorwhen loading an incompatible .u file).

Upgrading most mods will be easy; the most significant changes are func-tion parameter changes all over the place, and splitting off the network-related variables in Pawn into a new PlayerReplicationInfo class, to makescoreboard-programming simpler and more expandable. In terms of modsupport, the week following 220’s release will be chaotic, with mods be-ing repaired and re-released. Sorry, we would have liked to avoid this, butthe improvements we wanted to make were just too cool to stick with fullbackwards-compatibility.

Levels, sounds, texture files, music files, and audio files remain backwards-compatible.

Shortly after 220, I’ll be releasing the C++ headers required for users towrite C++ add-ons. I’m planning on throwing together a very simpleSampleTexture package showing how to make algorithmic textures, anda SampleActor package showing how to write intrinsic C++ functions foractors. This stuff should give mod authors a very significant amount ofnew stuff to play with, though the more exciting C++ stuff will come ina later release with the UnrealEd plug-in interface. It will be interestingto see the response to the C++ headers, because the Unreal engine’s C++architecture is very, very different than what people are used to in Quake

2.16. DEC 14, 1998


and other engines. It’s very much a framework rather than an API.

Jack ”Mek” Porter has come here from Australia for a few months to helpwith the Unreal Tournament programming, and is currently working onsome cool new mouse-based user interface code. He is a big Linux fan,and is talking with Brandon Reinhart about cooperating on a native Linuxport of the Unreal server.

2.16.2 That’s UnrealEd.net

The cool independent Unreal editing site I mentioned is actually http:

//www.unrealed.net/, not UnrealEd.com.

2.17 Dec 15, 1998

2.17.1 Unreal Networking Code: Status

Unreal 220 incorporates the majority of the low-level bandwidth opti-mizations I’ve been planning for Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament. I wasjust looking back at the initial shipping version of Unreal and comparingpackets, and realized that we’ve achieved a bandwidth usage improve-ment of over 250% in both directions.

This doesn’t mean we’re going to stop now...there are some minor proto-col improvements planned, and also high-level game play optimizationsthat Steve and Brandon are working on, moving more logic to the client-side to reduce lag and save bandwidth. But, the foundation is now verysolid, and the rest of our work mostly consists of building on that foun-dation.

The cool thing about Unreal’s networking support is that we brought thereal-world Internet play performance up to the state-of-the-art withoutsacrificing generality. When I first posted the http://unreal.epicgames.

com/Network.htm, it was simultaneously praised for being a powerful andvery general framework, and flamed because Unreal’s initial Internet play

2.17. DEC 15, 1998

http://www.unrealed.net/

http://www.unrealed.net/




performance was below gamers’ expectations. The critics were delightedto claim, ”this networking engine is a Grand Scheme that will never per-form well in the real world”. They sure were wrong! Iit turned out that allthe performance bottlenecks were in the low-level protocol, and were allcompletely fixable given sufficient R&D time.

It took a lot of hard work to identify all of the inefficiencies in the proto-col and come up with solid, general solutions. The key problems in gamenetworking are data compression, error correction, and latency reduc-tion. They turn out to be mutually opposing:

• Standard data compression schemes (i.e. Huffman and arithmeticcoding) work best when you have a large, well-known compres-sion window, and large symbol tables. Sending symbol tables isn’tpractical when you have a low-bandwidth, high-latency connec-tion, and when your window history is questionable due to trans-mission errors.

• Error correction schemes are tough to implement when you havelow-bandwidth, high packet loss conditions (for example., most gamers’modem-based Internet connections!) I went through 6 separate er-ror correction schemes in Unreal, 5 of which all fell apart in variousconditions. One big trap is getting into a feedback loop that sapsaway bandwidth and increases ping times. Another trap is retrans-mitting time-sensitive data when it gets lost, causing lag. These is-sues are tricky in bandwidth-intensive action games, because youneed to support multiple tiers of reliability in packets, and somelevel of sequencing between them.

• Latency reduction is another tricky issue, because of the way modemsqueue data: The larger a packet is sent, the more latency is inducedin the buffering scheme. So, you want to send small packets to keeplatency down. But, UDP packets have significant built-in overhead,so you want to send large packets to keep bandwidth up.

In the end, I opted to go with several a custom bit-encoding compres-sion scheme, which adapts itself to the type of data being sent, and intel-ligently crams it into the least amount of bits possible. This has worked

2.17. DEC 15, 1998


very well, because the previously large overhead present in packet head-ers (which identify the game objects being updated) was reduced verysignificantly.

My initial attempts at error correction were based on sliding-window schemes.These are still supported in the protocol, because they are great for send-ing latency-insensitive data, for example when you download a map uponentering an Unreal server. However, for the far majority of game data, Iuse an asynchronous scatter-gather data replication scheme which guar-antees that game objects will all be updated correctly under all packet-loss conditions, sacrificing guaranteed ordering of updates in order toimprove bandwidth usage.

To trade off latency and bandwidth, I adjust packet sizes based on thebandwidth available, and hand-tuned the factors to get an acceptabletradeoff.

Behind the scenes, we’ve also optimized a lot of the prioritization logic.Visible objects are now updated based on a priority queue that is weightedaccording to a viewing probability, and a predictor/corrector algorithmwhich updates the objects which ”need it most” (based on extrapolatedposition error and gameplay priority).

To test everything, I wrote an ”ISP From Hell” simulator into Unreal thatlets you toy around with various packet loss, variable packet lag, andpacket disordering combinations, and the ”STAT NET” display. There’salso an option built in (C++ source required) which writes an extremelydetailed network traffic analysis to the log file. Having and using thesevisualization tools turned out to be invaluable. Without the tools, thewasted bits, complex feedback loops, and race conditions in the proto-col would have never have been found.

So, where do we go from here? The majority of the network-related im-provements coming in the Unreal Tournament timeframe (still unan-nounced) are high-level, in areas like gameplay rules, client-side predic-tion, ease of use, and user interface.

Further off in the future, there are a lot of new possibilities that can bedirectly extrapolated from the http://unreal.epicgames.com/Network.

htm document. Unreal 1 networking can be described simply as ”a small

2.17. DEC 15, 1998




number of game clients connected to a single server”. However, the pro-tocol’s low-level design is peer-to-peer rather than client-server. You mightsay that Unreal just looks like a client-server engine, because our Un-real 1 game code favors the server’s logic over the client’s. For the next-generation engine, I’m going to experiment with a lot of new networkingconfigurations. For example, the protocol could be used for a server-to-server backbone, enabling servers to be clustered together with objectsmoving seamlessly between them–can you say Ultima Online 3D? Thereare also other interesting possibilities for servers, such as a spanning-treechat backbone similar to IRC, or UnrealScript application servers (forexample, managing user accounts on one machine, chatting on a sec-ond, skin repository on a third, supporting a cluster of dedicated gameservers). These aren’t promised features at this point, just possibilities...butto me, very exciting possibilities.

-Tim

2.18 Dec 18, 1998

2.18.1 Unreal Tournament notes for mod authors

I’ve had several inquiries from mod makers about how hard it will be to”port maps and mods from Unreal 1 to Unreal Tournament”. The answeris, port? What’s this talk of porting? This stuff just works.

Steve Polge put a lot of effort into updating the Unreal 220+ game codeso that it integrates seamlessly with Unreal Tournament. Both productsinstall into the \Unreal directory, and are mutually compatible. So, youcan install one, the other, or both – and existing maps and mods whichare compatible with the latest version of Unreal, will be fully compatible.

For convenience, Unreal Tournament ships with all of the script pack-ages from Unreal 1 (including UnrealShare.u and UnrealI.u), all of the.utx files, and all of the .uax files. Unreal Tournament is a superset of theUnreal 1 with the exception of the Unreal 1 maps and music. All new UTcontent (lots of scripts, textures, sounds, game types, and new actors) are

2.18. DEC 18, 1998


designed to interoperate with the existing ones in Unreal 1.

The new player code is implemented in a subclass of UnrealIPlayer, whichmeans that Unreal Tournament players will work in user-created death-match maps for Unreal 1.

However, the new UnrealTournamentPlayer classes and meshes includenew features and animations, so you can choose to take advantage of this(and require UT), or not. The new game types are GameInfo subclasses.The new weapons and pickups interoperate with the old ones.

UnrealEd supports Unreal Tournament maps without any modifications.This ”just works” in the same way that most of the licensees use UnrealEdwithout modifications.

One huge Unreal Tournament feature that script programmers will be in-terested in is the all-new user interface code. While Unreal 1’s menus arefunctional, the ”look and feel” is basically derived from Doom’s menus,which were derived from Wolfenstein 3D’s menus, which probably dateback to some even earlier id Software game.

The new game UI is a cutting-edge redesign, and continues our traditionof creating code and tools which licensees and mod makers can endlesslycustomize and tweak. I can’t say more about it yet, but the ongoing jokeis that we’re going to rename it UnrealOS (it’s just a joke, but the anal-ogy will become clear later). Maybe we’ll release UI screenshots at somepoint.

-Tim Sweeney

2.18. DEC 18, 1998

Chapter 3

1999 News

3.1 Jan 01, 1999

3.1.1 Happy New Year

The team is now getting back together from the holiday and we’ll get backto Unreal 221 development first thing tomorrow (Saturday). We were onthe verge of releasing the patch right before Christmas, but we’re nowback to being a few days away, since I added some new features that needre-testing, and some additional bugs have been found.

For me, the holidays were fun and productive. I hauled my computer upto Maryland for a one-week visit with my parents, and that provided agood excuse to work on engine improvements and new R&D in a zero-distractions environment. Without getting to deep into the details, hereare some of the things I worked on:

• Unicode Unreal. I finished up 16-bit Unicode support; now theUnreal code base can be recompiled for the ANSI (8-bit) or UNI-CODE (16-bit) character sets. This has several advantages. First ofall, localizing a game for non-Roman languages (such as Japanese,Chinese, Korean, Hebrew, Arabic) is easy with Unicode. Second,we’re really interested in Windows CE, and that is a pure Unicode

42


OS. Windows CE is the native operating system of the Dreamcast,so Unicode is a natural stepping-stone along the Dreamcast port-ing path which we’re exploring. Windows CE is also used in tons ofpalm-top computers. Now, none of these palm-top computers arecurrently interesting from a gamer’s perspective, but if you extrapo-late their grown–in terms of video resolutions, RAM, and processingpower–along a Moore’s Law curve, they’re not that many years awayfrom being comparable to low-end Pentium II PC’s today. I like tothink that the GameBoy’s of the future won’t be a closed platform,but rather run a standardized OS like Windows CE.

All Unreal data files are ”character set neutral”, meaning they cancontain any mix of ANSI and Unicode characters, and they’re auto-matically converted/truncated at load time. Network play similarly”just works” between the Unicode and non-Unicode versions.

Regarding Unicode font issues (”who’s going to paint all those Japanesecharacters?”), Jack Porter has built a TrueType font importer intoUnrealEd, which converts any Windows TrueType font to an Unreal-compatible font bitmap. This is an essential part of our Unicode ef-forts, but also ties into the new user interface he and Brandon arebuilding for Unreal Tournament. There are lots of Unicode fontswith support for nearly all Windows-supported languages, so local-izing games into all languages should be fairly painless.

• Data compression. I spent a couple days experimenting with vari-ous compression schemes and found some interesting results. Firstof all, it’s fairly easy to achieve PKZIP-quality compression–the al-gorithms are well documented and easy to implement. Second,it’s nearly impossible to beat PKZIP by much of a margin. Beyondthe standard algorithms (Huffman and LZH compression), I exper-imented with many variations, including:

– ”Double” Huffman-compressing each character in a file thenrecursively merging compressed regions together into spans,with the goal of compressing ”different types of data” with dif-ferent encoding tables. This approach came out neutral: therewere huge gains in compression, but they were offset by hav-ing to store lots of Huffman tables.

3.1. JAN 01, 1999


– Trying Huffman compression in bases other than 2 (such as 3,5, and 7): no overall gains.

– ”Infinite sliding window”: An LZH-style scheme that spendsa huge amount of CPU time on compression by analyzing anentire file for differences. Here, the gain was typically 10%, butit was unbearably slow to work with.

– Arithmetic encoding. This is a Huffman-style scheme that em-ploys some basic number theory to generate a compressiontable using arbitrary bases (other than base 2). This gets realgains of around 10% compared to Huffman, but is much slowerto decode because it relies on arbitrary-precision integer math.

I didn’t get the compression code into the Unreal master source (itwas standalone R&D). I’m considering supporting compression forclient-downloadable files in Unreal Tournament, to make it easierto go onto servers running custom maps. My most usable compres-sion scheme got 4:1 compression on .unr and .u files (nice!) but nosignificant compression on textures and sounds.

Unreal’s textures compress poorly for an interesting reason: theyare already stored using palettes, which are a form of compression.Furthermore, the process of generating an optimal palette for animage yields an array of bytes which are distributed near-uniformly,which is the worst possible case for variable-code-word compres-sion. I think the state-of-the-art in texture compression will be S3’sreal-time S3T/DXT scheme, which is fairly lossy, but optimal forreal-time decompression while rendering. And it’s 6:1 for all pos-sible kinds of data.

One interesting technique I played around with for texture com-pression is wavelet compression. The 2D wavelet scheme for tex-tures is quite similar to mipmaps: to oversimplify a lot, you repre-sent an nxn image as a sequence of 1x1, 2x2, 4x4, 8x8 ... nxn. Eachbitmap is stored as ”signed differences” relative to the lower-res ver-sions of the bitmap. Wavelets are a good starting point for lossycompression schemes, because the ”most visually noticeable” de-tails are in the low-res bitmaps, and in the high-frequency portionsof the high-res ones. So, it’s fairly easy to filter out unimportant de-tails and compress what remains. Wavelets are also nice because

3.1. JAN 01, 1999


you can generate all your texture’s mipmaps from a single waveletwithout any overhead. While I don’t think wavelets will play a rolein our future texture-mapping plans, they look more useful as a wayof storing and manipulating height maps and displacement maps.Wavelets provide a very efficient, ”level of detail”-aware form ofstoring 2D surface geometry.

• 3D API’s. I spent a few days learning the basics of curved surfacerendering, which turned out to be very interesting. I was goingto do my research with Direct3D (under Windows NT 5.0 Beta 3RC0) but the 3D hardware support isn’t quite there yet, so I tookthe opportunity to learn OpenGL using the software rasterizer and3dfx’s OpenGL minidriver. Both renderers were extremely stableand easy to use. To my amazement, I never experienced a ”bluescreen of death” or had to reboot–quite a difference from my pastwork with Glide and Direct3D! (Note: I haven’t been very closelyinvolved in the Unreal Direct3D and OpenGL support, which hasbeen developed by our partners, so this is my first really in-depthexperience).OpenGL’s approach to window management turns outto be extremely simple and reliable. I went from zero to havinga spinning cube up and running in under 30 minutes. The toolsGL provides for polygon drawing are extremely simple and power-ful. For just drawing a few lone polygons, glVertex() and its associ-ated functions are super-easy. For drawing complex meshes, GL’sapproach to providing separate client-side arrays for vertices, col-ors, and texture coordinates is very easy and efficient for multi-passrendering, since you can swap out one table (say, texture coordi-nates) without affecting the others.

OpenGL’s texture approach (glTexImage2D and glBindTexture) arealso very simple and powerful. I remember back under DirectX5,trying to upload a texture to hardware. I spent 4 hours trying to fig-ure out the code and rebooting my computer as it repeatedly lockedup. I spent less than 15 minutes figuring out OpenGL texturingand implementing it. Comparing both API’s texturing approaches,OpenGL’s texture management is absolutely the right way to go.

– It’s extremely foolproof–you call 3 textures to create, upload,and delete textures. Nothing can possibly go wrong!

3.1. JAN 01, 1999


– There is no bizarre/mysterious emulation going on. For exam-ple, in Direct3D you can modify a texture by Lock()ing it andwriting to ”video memory” directly. But, on some hardware(like the Riva TNT), the hardware stores textures internally in a”swizzled” format you can’t access directly. So some emulationthing has to go on behind the scenes where multiple copies ofthe textures are maintained and copied around.

– OpenGL hides the inner details of texture management fromthe app, enabling the driver to be optimized for whatever styleof texture management is best for a particular 3D card. In OpenGL,a driver writer has total control over texturing and can opti-mize the hell out of it. In Direct3D, the API hides the appli-cation from the hardware and vice-versa, which makes it im-possible for a game or a hardware driver to implement goodtexture caching.

Here’s a link to http://www.opengl.org/ and http://www.microsoft.

com/directx.

• Curved Surfaces. I became familiar with a bunch of different tech-niques. Curved surfaces pose the same kind of dilemma I felt whenwriting Unreal’s software renderer: there are lots of mutually in-compatible approaches to choose from, but no really clear favorite.Each technique has some desirable strengths, but no technique com-bines them all.My first experimentation was with bicubic bezier patches,which are a great primitive for building curvy shapes without holesbetween patches (as with polygons, continuity can be guaranteedby having adjacent patches share vertices and control points). How-ever, they require a fair amount of math for tessellation and, thoughcontinuity can be guaranteed, it’s hard to join patches together smoothly(with a continuous normal vector across adjacent patches), espe-cially during animation. I’m pretty sure these will be a key primitivein the next-generation engine. Beziers are very intuitive to modelwith.

The tensor-product math for bicubic bezier quad patches can eas-ily be modified to enable ”bicubic bezier triangles”, which can shareedges continuously with quads. I haven’t been able to find any ref-erences on this, but I derived the math, and it seems to work.

3.1. JAN 01, 1999

http://www.opengl.org/

http://www.microsoft.com/directx

http://www.microsoft.com/directx


Then, a totally different approach can be used to generate smoothlycurved surfaces of arbitrary topology, using a technique known as”subdivision surfaces”. This looks promising: approximately thesame overhead as Beziers, but a bit more general.

All of the above approaches can also be modified to support dis-placement maps, for creating more organic geometry. While it willbe a long time before 3D hardware supports sufficient triangle den-sities for displacement maps to be practical for fine surface detail(such as rocks and bricks in walls), they’re very applicable to terrainand coarse surface detail.

There are two even wilder curved techniques I experimented withand found to be quite promising, but I don’t want to get too far offon that tangent.

No, Unreal Tournament will not contain any curved surfaces. Whilecurves are cool and we’d love to have them, we’ve been totally fo-cused on core game play, networking, and user-interface enhance-ments for UT.

One thing that has become extremely clear in my curved-surfacerendering research is that editing tools will be a make-or-break fac-tor in the success of next-generation level design. UnrealEd is apretty feature-filled polygon based editing tool, but we’re going toneed a lot more than that for the next generation. So many featuresthat were trivial with polygon engines–such as texture alignment,light map placement, primitive building tools, object alignment,and freeform object editing–become more complex when curvesare involved. The editing tools will need to be more powerful andintuitive in order to compensate. Editing tools will be a huge focusfor us going into the next project.

-Tim Sweeney

3.1.2 Other Updates

• We updated and coolified the http://unreal.epicgames.com/Partners.htm page, which lists all the announced Unreal engine licensees.

3.1. JAN 01, 1999

http://unreal.epicgames.com/Partners.htm



• Alexander Brandon updated the http://www.epicgames.com/alex/

music.htm.

• Dave Carter’s http://www.nervedamage.com/ contains lots of coolresources for Unreal modelers and animators.

3.2 Jan 28, 1999

3.2.1 Unreal 221 Development Update

Unreal 221 development continues, with quite a lot of new features slip-ping into this version.

Right now, Mark Poesch (the lead programmer of Wheel of Time) is visit-ing us here in Raleigh, merging in some of the improvements the Legendteam has added into the Unreal engine for WoT and Legend’s upcomingUnreal level pack.

I’m working on Unreal’s OpenGL support, and will soon get a version ofthe code to the 3D hardware makers who have some driver issues to workout. The Riva TNT is currently the fastest and most stable card, with theATI Rage 128 looking very promising, especially in 24-bit color.

I’m also extending the Unreal installer which shipped with the 220 patch,turning it into a full-blown installation program for future patches, share-ware versions, and retail versions. I’m also contemplating extending it tosupport Unreal mods, which could then be distributed in a self-containedformat (.uzip?) which Unreal automatically knows how to install. Thiswould put cool mods just 3-4 mouse clicks away from users who arebrowsing mod sites like http://www.freshmeat.org/unreal/, a great im-provement over the current process of ”download a file, run PkZip, ex-tract the .utx files to the Unreal\Textures directory, extract the .unr filesto the Unreal\Maps directory, run Unreal, then try to figure out how tolaunch the mod”. This has the potential to bring mods to a much wideraudience.

While I don’t enjoy the painful and redundant task of writing an install

3.2. JAN 28, 1999

http://www.epicgames.com/alex/music.htm

http://www.epicgames.com/alex/music.htm

http://www.nervedamage.com/



program, I see it as worthwhile because it’s such a critical piece of a game–especially one which is supported by an online community and third-party licensees.

3.2.2 Unreal Tournament

The rest of the team is hard at work on Unreal Tournament, and we’rereally happy with the way the game is shaping up. Unreal was such ahuge, multi-faceted project that we weren’t able to focus on deathmatchas much as we would have liked. Unreal Tournament, with its identicalgameplay style between single-player and multiplayer (the only differ-ence being bots vs. human opponents) has given us a far more opportu-nity to polish the gameplay and the look-and-feel.

-Tim Sweeney

3.3 Feb 10, 1999

3.3.1 Latest News

Progress on Unreal 221 and Unreal Tournament continues. We are mak-ing changes and improvements at such a fast pace that it has been hard/impossibleto stabilize the code for the 3-5 days required to fully test a new patch. Iapologize for the earlier false start we had with 221.

3.3.2 What we’ve been programming

I’ve been juggling work on the installer, OpenGL, and some core Unre-alScript improvements. The installer is coming together, and is com-plete in terms of installing the retail game and patches, but more workremains to be done on uninstallation issues, and improved support forinstalling/distributing mods. Some of the latest UnrealScript improve-ments include a command-line script compiler, which can be used from

3.3. FEB 10, 1999


any programmer’s editor (or Visual C++) with standard output of errormessages; UnrealScript execution optimizations; and support for dynamicstrings.

UnrealScript’s string support has been pretty solid all along, as a result ofusing BASIC style functions (Left, Right, Mid, InStr, Chr, Asc...) instead ofC’s error-prone string handling functions (strcpy, strcat, strcmp, sprintf).The one annoying limitation, which has been the source of some bugsin the past, is that strings were fixed length. 221 supports dynamicallysized strings with no practical size limitation (just available memory).This makes it easier to write text-processing routines, which the new in-game server browser is really stressing.

Steve Polge has been improving the AI and the flexibility of the gamecode. Because Unreal Tournament’s gameplay can be far more complexthan Unreal 1’s (from a bot’s perspective) as a result of team play and Cap-ture The Flag, Steve has been teaching the bots a lot of new techniquesfor coordinating together and better understanding the environments.It’s sooo cool watching Cliff and Myscha playing CTF with a few bots ontheir teams.

Jack Porter is hammering away on the new user interface code and the in-game server browser. In the past, first-person action games haven’t beenknown for having good user interfaces. We’re hoping to change that, andgo for the quality level of an EA Sports interface. Sticking to our general-purpose roots, Jack isn’t just creating user-interface code for Unreal Tour-nament, he’s creating a flexible, object-oriented UI framework which willbe very suitable for licensees and mod makers.

Brandon Reinhart is working hard, implementing a lot of the Unreal Tour-nament game code, the single-player progression, stats tracking, and muchmore. The stats tracking is going to be a very cool feature for Internetplay; perhaps I can convince Brandon to write a note about it here.

Erik de Neve, who created Unreal’s algorithmic fire and water effects andoptimized much of the rendering code, is working on a next-generationproject that will make its debut in Unreal 2.

3.3. FEB 10, 1999


3.3.3 Linux Notes

We now have a command-line (windowless, console based) script com-piler and server for Unreal, which has minimal dependencies on Win-dows. This is a first step towards a Linux port, and it also runs very wellunder Wine, with minimal overhead. This might be a good interim so-lution for Linux server administrators, before the full port is done. I justnoticed in GameSpy that the top server on the list is titled ”CHiX UnrealNT Server (220) PORT UNREAL TO LINUX”. Hint taken. :)

We actually have the Unreal 221 Core source compiling under EGCS 2.90.29,C++ templates and all. Getting the thing linking and running successfullywill require a lot more work, which we won’t be able to focus on until UTships, but the experience thus far has been very positive.

-Tim Sweeney

3.4 Mar 19, 1999

3.4.1 Latest News

We’ve been going through many iterations of internal testing and im-provements on the upcoming patch, which is now known as 223. Here isthe latest http://unreal.epicgames.com/ReadMe223.htm. The story be-hind the version number is that each time we make a new version forinternal testing, we give it a new version letter (for example, 221a, 221b).Between the previously released 220 patch and the current one we’re work-ing on, we’ve gone through more than 52 internal versions. We’ve beta-tested two release candidate patches, but each one has required morework. I don’t have a release date for this patch yet, but we’re workinghard to get it finished.

One unfortunate side-effect of the recent UnrealScript improvements (dy-namic strings, multi-skin support, other engine enhancements) is that223 will have to break mod compatibility with previous versions, and re-quire at least a recompile (and code changes in many cases). We hate

3.4. MAR 19, 1999

http://unreal.epicgames.com/ReadMe223.htm


breaking mods, because we understand how much pain it causes for modmakers and the community to get back in synch with the latest version,but sometimes it’s a necessary evil, as a side-effect of progress.

One bonus we’re putting into 223 to help compensate for the pain andsuffering is Jack ”Mek” Porter’s windowed GUI code, the high-level Unre-alScript windowing framework we’re using for Unreal Tournament. Thisincludes the graphical ”server browser” for finding good servers to playon – sort of an in-game GameSpy. The windowing code will give the com-munity a chance to experiment with windowing well before Unreal Tour-nament ships.

3.4.2 Level-Of-Detail Texture Mapping

I finally got the chance to write a rendering optimization I’ve been think-ing about for a long time now, level-of-detail texture mapping.

Unreal’s biggest performance problem in OpenGL has been texture man-agement overhead, which causes frame rates to vary a lot (for example,jumping from 30+ fps down to 15 fps for a frame or two when new tex-tures come into view). This is especially noticeable on on the Riva TNT,which has a very good fill rate and can handle large polygon counts, butis around 4X slower transferring textures to the card than Voodoo2.

Solution: I create redundant versions of textures, scaled down 4X (inmemory usage), 16X, 64X, and 256X. When an object being rendered isfar away, I use a lower resolution version of the texture – which doesn’tcause visual problems (since the texture would be mipmapped anyway)but requires less texture data to be transferred.

This has enabled us to boost the Unreal Tournament player models’ tex-ture usage to 256K of texels per model. More info about additional level-of-detail features later...

3.4. MAR 19, 1999


3.4.3 Future of Programming Languages

Lately, I’ve been doing research on programming languages, in the inter-est of gaining new ideas to implement in the successor to UnrealScriptfor our next-generation (after Unreal Tournament) engine. Some of thetopics I’ve been formulating are:

• Garbage collection (see the http://www.iecc.com/gclist/GC-faq.

html for background). UnrealScript uses a simple recursive mark-and-sweep garbage collector which is only executed when chang-ing levels, along with some special-case code to garbage-collect de-stroyed actors during gameplay. Most implementations of Java usea background thread to run a generational garbage collector. Java’sapproach is more general, but can cause pauses during executionas large amounts of garbage are purged, which is bad for frame-rateconsistency.

Java garbage collection presents a problem for object finalizers (theequivalent of C++ destructors), because the finalizer is executed atsome random time after the object in question effectively becomesgarbage, and finalizers of multiple objects are executed in randomorder. This limitation makes finalizers dangerous and not terri-bly useful. One work-around is to not support finalizers. Anotherwork-around is to support them, but publish a list of ”things thataren’t safe to do from within a finalizer” (such as cause finalized ob-jects to become rooted again, make assumptions about finalizationorder, etc). UnrealScript’s current solution is a mix of the two; final-izers must be native (implemented in C++) and are subject to thosesafety guidelines.

Another general conceptual problem I have with garbage collectionis that, often, the physical lifetime of an object (as defined by thegarbage collector) often exceeds the ”practical” lifetime of an ob-ject (as defined by the semantics of the program you’re writing). Forexample, a window object in a windowing system is only meaning-ful when the window is open on screen; after the window has beenclosed, the object becomes meaningless even though it still existsand other objects might still be referring to the window. The generalproblem is that programmers often would like a ”way of explicitly

3.4. MAR 19, 1999

http://www.iecc.com/gclist/GC-faq.html

http://www.iecc.com/gclist/GC-faq.html


destroying an object and removing any other objects’ references toit”. C and C++ avoid this problem by making all memory manage-ment the program’s responsibility. Java avoids it by making the pro-gram responsible for determening whether an object you’re refer-ring to is meaningful (for example by calling Window.IsOpen()). Itwould certainly be nice if object lifetime management and notifica-tions became the full responsibility of the programming language,enabling programmers to instead focus on higher-level problems.

The garbage-collection strategy that would be ideal, from the stand-point of predictable code and memory usage, is to finalize and de-stroy objects the exact moment they become garbage, i.e. whenthe last variable still referencing it changes. I’ve tried, very unsuc-cessfully, to find efficient approaches to manage such as systemby tracking multiple reference counts, doubly-linked lists of two-way references between objects, etc etc etc, and haven’t been ableto find an approach more efficient that performing a brute-forcemark-and-sweep pass every time a reference to an object changes(plus optimizations such as reference counting to collect objectswithout cyclic references). Stated in graph theory, the question boilsdown to ”Given a graph and a particular directed edge of the graph,does removing that edge break the graph into two disjoint pieces?”Does anybody know if there is a graph-theory algorithm for deter-mining this, which enables you to add a directed edge to the graphin constant time, and also remove an edge and determine disjoint-edness from that removal in constant time?

• LISP defines a new kind of object called a ”function closure” whichbasically represents a pointer-to-a-member-function with severalof its parameters bound to specific values (for example, bindingthe implicit ”Self”/”this” parameter to a particular object. This isa great object-oriented generalization of function-pointers, but thesyntax becomes fairly complex in a statically-typed language (someissues you run into are recursively-defined closure types, and cyclicclosure types). Microsoft’s Java extensions in Visual J++ include asimpler and more limited type of object called a ”delegate” which isa pointer-to-a-member-function bound to a specific instance of anobject. I plan to experiment with these possibilities and implement”something along these lines” in the next engine.

3.4. MAR 19, 1999


• Inner classes, as defined by Java, are a great feature for attachingobjects together hierarchically. This is definitely a feature I want forthe future. One example area where inner would simplify and gen-eralize the code is Unreal’s actor lighting support. Currently, theActor class has a bunch of variables related to lighting (LightBright-ness, LightHue, LightSaturation, LightEffect, etc), and an enumer-ation LightType that describes the light’s overall mode of opera-tion. While this is an improvement over past engines, and generalenough for 1998-1999 games, it could be much better. Actors couldinstead reference a separate Light object which describes the light-ing in a more general way. Instead of having a hardcoded enumera-tion for light effects (such as LE TorchWaver, LE Cylinder, LE Spotlight),all the different light types could be represented by separate classes(TorchWaverLight, CylinderLight, SpotLight) with the class supply-ing the appropriate spatial and volumetric lighting math.

Additionally, the lighting objects could be made hierarchical, so youcould modulate a cylinder light by a spotlight, and add a torch wa-vering effect on top. New light classes could be defined modu-larly to supply new lighting functions without modifying the enginesource.

While my plan for the next scripting language is gaining more clarity,there are still a lot of wide-open issues. For example, whether Java-styleinterfaces are necessary (since most of the same functionality can be ob-tained from inner classes), what the final garbage-collection strategy is,how similar do we want to make the language to Java, etc.

3.4.4 Visible Surface Determination

One of the biggest next-generation challenges for 3D programmers willbe in solving the ”visible surface determination” problem for complexscenes. Doom basically used a densely portalized BSP scheme; Quakeused a BSP in conjunction with precomputing the visibility from eachBSP leaf in the world to every other leaf, trading off precomputation timein exchange for rendering performance. Unreal uses a sparsely portal-ized BSP tree and performs a software span-buffering pass to determine

3.4. MAR 19, 1999


which polygons are visible prior to actually rendering them. None ofthese approaches are clearly superior to the others; they each have strengthsand weaknesses. Unreal’s tradeoff enables us to render more complexmulti-pass surfaces (very high-res textures, detail textures, light maps,and fog maps) but limits our polygon counts, since rendering perfor-mance grows approximately as ”n log n” with polygon counts, comparedto Quake’s basically linear ”n” scaling.

The visuals of Unreal Tournament vs. Quake 3 Arena will provide a veryuseful equal-footing comparison between the two techniques, with idSoftware is pushing the limits of polygon counts, and us pushing the lim-its of texture detail.

After this generation of games, I think we’ll all have to fundamentallychange the way we approach the visibility problem. As 3D worlds growlarger, more seamlessly interconnected, and more vibrant in terms of dy-namic and procedural geometry, we’ll need more of a no-tradeoffs ap-proach than precomputed visibility or BSP’s. Portal and anti-portal clip-ping schemes look promising. Hardware-assisted visibility tests (such asHP’s http://www.opengl.org/Documentation/Version1.2/HPspecs/occlusion_test.txt) look promising. Even the good old DFE scheme becomes morepractical with increased 3D hardware performance. After Unreal Tourna-ment, I’ll be experimenting again with all of these techniques.

3.4.5 Commentary on Cool Stuff

I just wanted to point out the following cool technical things.

• OpenGL http://www.opengl.org/Documentation/Version1.2/EXTspecs/

fragment_lighting.txt and http://www.opengl.org/Documentation/

Version1.2/EXTspecs/light_texture.txt extensions. These exceed-ingly clear, general, and well thought-out rendering capabilities aregoing to be the next quantum leap in 3D hardware acceleration ac-celeration, enabling true Phong/Blinn bump mapping and a tremen-dous variety of other features. My reaction to seeing this spec forthe first time is reminiscent of first experiencing 3dfx’s Voodoo ac-celerator and the Glide API–it’s ”I can’t believe how powerful yet

3.4. MAR 19, 1999

http://www.opengl.org/Documentation/Version1.2/HPspecs/occlusion_test.txt

http://www.opengl.org/Documentation/Version1.2/HPspecs/occlusion_test.txt

http://www.opengl.org/Documentation/Version1.2/EXTspecs/fragment_lighting.txt

http://www.opengl.org/Documentation/Version1.2/EXTspecs/fragment_lighting.txt

http://www.opengl.org/Documentation/Version1.2/EXTspecs/light_texture.txt

http://www.opengl.org/Documentation/Version1.2/EXTspecs/light_texture.txt


simple this is to work with”.

• http://teach.belmont.edu/ht/applet/htbu.html: This is the firstgenerally useful new GUI control I’ve seen in years. Imagine thepossibilities for using hyperbolic trees to browse the actor lists andserver interconnectivity of huge interconnected online worlds.

• http://dogma.net/markn/articles/bwt/bwt.htm: A new, unpatentedapproach to data compression; trivial implementations can easilybeat PKZIP.

-Tim

3.5 Apr 14, 1999

3.5.1 3dfx Voodoo3 Totally Rocks!

I just picked up a carload of the new Voodoo3 3000’s; we’ve put them togood use, as the team is now testing the upcoming 224 patch.

The performance and graphical quality of the Voodoo3 are simply amaz-ing. Though we’ve had a board for over a month, beta drivers and pre-release board problems prevented us from realizing just how far ahead ofthe pack this hardware is.

On the PC, most technological improvements come in little incrementalimprovements, such that we seldom have a chance to experience a sin-gle major leap. Back when 3dfx introduced the Voodoo 1, that was oneof those rare leaps. Since I’ve been off working on ”OpenGL land” on theRiva TNT, ATI Rage 128, and other accelerators, I haven’t had a 3dfx cardin my machine since soon after Unreal shipped. So, for me at least, get-ting a Voodoo3 and being able to play at those ultra high resolutions at agreat frame rate, is another one of those leaps.

While the Voodoo3’s fill rate is outstandling, where the card really clob-bers all others is its texture management performance. This is a very

3.5. APR 14, 1999

http://teach.belmont.edu/ht/applet/htbu.html

http://dogma.net/markn/articles/bwt/bwt.htm


important characteristic, because it determines how smooth the perfor-mance is from frame-to-frame. Unreal, though it shipped nearly a yearago, still pushes texture limits harder than other 3D action games, andUnreal Tournament pushes them even harder.

Unreal 224 performance is also being helped by some new lighting opti-mizations, and a major new engine feature, which Erik de Neve (Unrealoptimization and algorithmic texture guru) has been working on. But I’mnot allowed to talk about that since Mark Rein is writing a press releaseabout it now.

Note: Unreal 220 is incompatible with Voodoo3’s due to some changesthat were made to Glide; people who have Voodoo3 2000’s will need theupcoming 224 patch.

-Tim Sweeney

3.6 Apr 15, 1999

3.6.1 Important Unreal 224 Note To Mod Authors

Unreal 224 .u files aren’t backwards compatible with past versions of theengine. So you’ll need to take special steps to upgrade your .u files.

To upgrade mods to 224, you’ll first need to export your scripts to *.ucfiles. You can do this in all versions of UnrealEd like this:

1. Bring up the UnrealEd class browser on the right side of the screen.

2. Click on the ”Load” button and load your mod’s .u file.

3. Click on the ”Export All” button and have UnrealEd export all of theloaded scripts to .uc files (including yours and the engine’s), creat-ing a directory structure for all the .uc files: for example, the filesfrom the Core package are in \unreal\core\classes\*.uc. If yourmod is named XYZ, your .uc files will be exported to \unreal\XYZ\classes\*.uc.

3.6. APR 15, 1999


In Unreal version 221 and earlier, you can rebuild your mod named ”XYZ”from the command line by typing:

cd \unreal\systemdel XYZ.uunreal -make

You can do that now, prior to the release of 224, to verify that your modhas been safely exported and can be rebuilt from the command line. Ihighly recommend doing this now, because if you install 224, you will nolonger be able to load your old .u files, so you’ll have to downgrade backto 220 in order to export them. Some developers prefer to edit scripts inUnrealEd, but many of us actually edit scripts in an external editor (likeVisual C++) and use the command-line interface for all production work.

In Unreal 224, we have a new command-line compiler with a slighly dif-ferent syntax:

cd \unreal\systemdel XYZ.uucc make

-Tim

3.6.2 Maps, Textures, Sounds, Music are backwards com-patible

...so there shouldn’t be any problem with existing user maps built withpast versions of UnrealEd. I checked this by downloading a bunch ofmaps from http://www.freshmeat.org/unreal/ and http://www.planetunreal.

com/nalicity/ and testing them. The one ”gotcha” is that some usermaps being distributed contain .u files, and those aren’t backwards com-patible, so they will refuse to load until the .u files they depend on areupgraded.

3.6. APR 15, 1999


http://www.planetunreal.com/nalicity/

http://www.planetunreal.com/nalicity/


3.6.3 Latest News

I’ve been awake for way too long, so please forgive my spelling and gram-mar!

Internal testing of 224 continues. Things are looking pretty good, thoughwe need to go through a couple more iterations before everything’s inperfect shape.

The http://avault.com/ has a good article on the latest http://avault.com/news/displaynews.asp?story=4141999-221754. They spill the beanson the major new feature I alluded to below:

Another major enhancement to be included in 224 is continu-ous level of detail,which varies polygon counts on objects suchas player characters and power-ups relative to their distancefrom the camera, or player’s perspective. In Unreal Tourna-ment, this will enable the engine to place more characters andobjects on the screen and still maintain a consistent and fluidframerate. Rein said this is an important feature not just forUnreal and Unreal Tournament but also for engine licenseessince it also opens the engine to new game types, such as real-time strategy titles, that were not previously obvious choices forthe engine.

3.6.4 Cool Stuff

While I wait for 200,000 lines of Unreal code to recompile, I wanted topoint out some more cool things that seem to be under-appreciated.

• http://www.winamp.com/ is a great MP3 music player for Windows;and its companion, http://www.shoutcast.com/ is a streaming ”In-ternet radio” companion. While I know MP3’s and Internet radiohas been around for a while, WinAmp really deserves credit for itsgrassroots following and overall coolness factor.

3.6. APR 15, 1999

http://avault.com/

http://avault.com/news/displaynews.asp?story=4141999-221754

http://avault.com/news/displaynews.asp?story=4141999-221754

http://www.winamp.com/

http://www.shoutcast.com/


• Windows 2000 internationalization support. This pure Unicode OSwill mark the first time Microsoft ships a single binary worldwide,which will be a great leap forward in making it easy to develop games(and applications, and websites...) for the international market.

• http://www.plh.af.mil/ddvpc/melp.htm 2400 bits-per-second phone-quality voice compresion. Speech compression research has beenmaking major leaps and bounds lately, as quality voice compres-sion ratios skyrocket. The latest set of algorithms analyze an audiostream and (to simplify things a bit) transform it backwards to vocalcord excitation. The resulting compression ratio is in the neighbor-hood of 100-to-1. This is a research subject Carlo Vogelsang (Unrealsound engine programmer) and I have been looking into lately, andit turns out to be very complex and math intensive.

-Tim

3.7 Apr 19, 1999

3.7.1 Getting closer...

But we’re not quite there with 224 yet. The guys have been beating oninternal test versions for the past few days, and we’ve been polishing thecode. It’s both a blessing and a curse that the Unreal code is evolvingby leaps and bounds, gaining major new features all the time. This ap-proach makes testing each new patch a major effort. Though, 224 willbe especially worth the effort because of the in-game server browser andlevel-of-detail optimizations.

224 will probably happen late this week.

Here is a http://www.next-generation.com/jsmid/news/6387.htmlwhereMark Rein shamelessly plugs the patch.

3.7. APR 19, 1999

http://www.plh.af.mil/ddvpc/melp.htm

http://www.next-generation.com/jsmid/news/6387.html


3.7.2 Network Cross-Compatibility

(warning: nitty-gritty technical info)

An interesting technology feature in 224 is a new method of evolving .ufiles in a way that is backwards-compatible for network play.

One of the things that has always bothered me about past versions ofUnreal is that clients and servers had to have exactly-matching .u files inorder to play together. This has meant that every recent Unreal patch hasbroken network compatibility, leaving some players orphaned. The rea-son behind this is that Unreal’s network code (described in detail http://unreal.epicgames.com/network.htm) uses the positions of objects within.u files as a ”common point of reference” which clients and servers useto map objects between each others’ address spaces. Some scheme ofthis nature is necessary when network code is generalized like Unreal’sis, with the same scripts executing on the client and server, passing ar-bitrary data back and forth, with the network code transparently coordi-nating the game world.

I’ve been aware of some solutions to this problem all along (such as ”sendall object names as strings”), but they all sacrificed bandwidth.

Recently, I found a no-compromises way to enable .u files to evolve incre-mentally without losing compatibility. Now, when we release a new ver-sion, we copy the .u files into a new developers-only subdirectory \Unreal\SystemConform.Then we can make minor changes to our scripts and recompile new ver-sions that are network-compatible with the old ones. When recompilingand saving a .u file such as \Unreal\System\Engine.u, the script com-piler now examines the existing file \Unreal\SystemConform\Engine.u,and makes the new version ”conform to the layout of the original”. Inaddition, when a client connects to a server, they both negotiate to fig-ure out who has the earliest version of each .u file, and both talk aboutobjects ”in relation to that old .u file”. This enables compatibility withoutany loss in performance or bandwidth usage.

Really major updates will always break code assumptions and requiredownloading an update. This approach just makes minor incrementalupdates possible, enables us to test spot-fixes on the net, and generally

3.7. APR 19, 1999

http://unreal.epicgames.com/network.htm

http://unreal.epicgames.com/network.htm


makes our programming lives easier.

3.8 May 01, 1999

3.8.1 224 Progress Continued

The team found about 10 bugs in Unreal 224t that are significant andmerit fixing before release, so I’m just wrapping up fixes for them now,and we’ll have another release candidate (224u) in internal testing thisafternoon. Thanks for the patience...we’re almost there.

http://www.bluesnews.com/ posted a huge http://www.bluesnews.com/

screenshots/ut/utshot1.shtml of a bunch of Unreal Tournament char-acters. These are the actual meshes (same poly count as the game), buttextures of this resolution will only be available on cards that supportS3TC texture compression such as the Savage4 (though other cards willhave support soon). Current 3D cards will have to make due with four256x256 textures per player. Our new skinning method enables playermeshes to be mapped with four textures, so we can have separate facesand armor. This Ultima Online inspired approach lets players customizetheir look more than past 3D action games.

-Tim Sweeney

3.9 May 02, 1999

3.9.1 STAT NET: Diagnosing your connection to the server

When playing a multiplayer game of Unreal, press TAB and type STATNET to bring up the network stats display. You’ll see something like this:

(IN/OUT):137 PING

3.8. MAY 01, 1999

http://www.bluesnews.com/

http://www.bluesnews.com/screenshots/ut/utshot1.shtml

http://www.bluesnews.com/screenshots/ut/utshot1.shtml


38 CHANNELS0 0 UNORDERED/SEC

12% 14% PACKET LOSS11 32 PACKETS/SEC126 32 BUNCHES/SEC1395 2031 BYTES/SEC2600 2600 NETSPEED

The numbers on the left represent incoming statistics (for example, howmany packets from the server to you were lost), and the right outgoingstatistics (for example, how many packets from you to the server werelost). There interesting stats are:

• PING: Round-trip time between you and the server, in milliseconds.Modem users will typically see 200-350 for in-country gameplay.ISDN/T1 users will be in the 50-200 range. Playing overseas resultsin enormous times, 600-1000 or more. This number represents thequality of the connection between you and the server, and reallyshould be 300 or less for good gameplay performance. A bad con-nection on either end can hurt the ping time.

• CHANNELS: Roughly, the number of objects that the server is ac-tively updating to you. Proportional to how much combat is hap-pening around you.

• PACKET LOSS: Percentage of packets lost between the client andserver. The higher the packet loss, the worse the performance willbe, and the more you’ll see objects skipping around rather thanmoving smoothly. High packet loss can be caused by:

– Using too aggressive a network speed on the client side. Trytyping ”NETSPEED 2600” on the console to reign in bandwidthusage.

– The server’s connection is overtaxed. This will result in heavypacket loss and a bad gameplay experience for everyone. Serverswill limited bandwidth available need to set their play limitconservative (expect 5000 bytes per client per second), and alsolower the MaxClientRate variable in Unreal.ini. A value of 5000should be good for everyone.

3.9. MAY 02, 1999


– A bad connection anywhere between you and the server.

– A bad connection between you and your ISP.

• PACKETS/SEC: Number of packets being sent per second. The num-ber on the left should be 13 or higher. If it’s significantly less, thatmeans the server is either running too slowly, or experiencing highpacket loss. Gameplay will be bad at 10, and unbearable at 5. Thenumber on the right is proportional to your frame rate and youdon’t need to worry about it.

• BUNCHES/SEC: Number of objects being updated per second. Notimportant for tweaking.

• BYTES/SEC: Bytes being sent per second.

• NETSPEED: The network speed setting you set using the consoleNETSPEED command. Recommended settings are:

– 2600 for a typical modem connection.

– 2400 for a poor modem connection.

– 5000 for an ISDN connection.

– 20000 for a T1 connection.

3.9.2 Server Alert

Unreal 224 servers are popping up very rapidly, and becoming filled tocapacity rather quickly. From the last couple hours of cruising the netand playing on various servers, we’re seeing wildly varying performance.As with all games, the quality of Unreal netplay is a function of how wellthe server is performing and how good your connection is (bandwidth,packet loss, and latency).

If you’re having a bad experience, please try out a few other servers. Thiscan affect performance hugely. In my game sessions here, I had somegreat performance with a 300 msec ping and 28.8Kbps bandwidth, andsome astronomically bad performance with a 100 ping and 50Kbps band-width. The bad performance fell into two categories.

3.9. MAY 02, 1999


Some servers have more users than bandwidth available, so they are drop-ping packets, experiencing 50%+ packet loss and escalating ping. Someare just running very slowly, around 5 fps (I’m not sure why, perhapsother processes were running?). This tends to happen whenever we re-lease a patch, as people rush to get into gameplay, flooding the serversthat have upgraded, users setting up servers on cable modems out ofdesperation to get into a game... It can get chaotic. In the future, thenew backwards-compatible network code should mean there are alwayslots of servers available when a patch is released.

So, bottom line: Please don’t bitch if netplay performance is erratic overthe next couple days as servers get set up and stabilized. If netplay per-formance sucks after a couple of days, THEN commence bitching. :-)

-Tim

3.9.3 Unreal 224v C++ headers released!

For hardcore mod authors who want to experiment with Unreal’s C++ in-terface, here it is! This code requires Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 with no ser-vice packs or SP1. Read the http://unreal.epicgames.com/ReadMeSrc.

htm for more information and distribution terms.

Now it’s time for a disclaimer about the C++ code. For mod authors, Un-realScript is the best way to write game code. The fact that 100% of theUnreal 1 and Unreal Tournament game-specific code is in UnrealScriptillustrates our strategy here, that UnrealScript is a fully-featured languagedesigned to simplify game programming compared to C++. The C++code is significantly more complex than UnrealScript, and is only neces-sary for programming things that just aren’t possible under UnrealScript,such as algorithmic textures, performance-critical AI decision making,and that kind of low-level work. Furthermore, our distributing just theheaders (and not the C++ engine source), means that many key aspectsof the engine are hidden in implementation details, so it’s going to behard to understand what’s happening ”under the hood”. Another majordownside to C++ is that C++ mods will break with almost every upcomingpatch, whereas UnrealScript is more stable (having broken only 3 times

3.9. MAY 02, 1999

http://unreal.epicgames.com/ReadMeSrc.htm



in 11 months and approximately 12 public betas released). Summary:This C++ code is for very, very hardcore mod makers only.

That said, there is some cool stuff here. I’ve included all of the core andengine header files and .lib link libraries in this release, so you can com-pile your own DLL’s and link them to Unreal. I’ve also included the C++code for some modules which we don’t feel are confidential: Unreal’sOpenGL support layer (OpenGLDrv), the engine startup code (Launch),and the installer/uninstaller (Setup).

The OpenGL code will be of interest to OpenGL driver writers who wantto see what we do in Unreal, in order to optimize their drivers, and pos-sible to enthusiasts who want to experiment with rendering.

We will probably be able to publically release the Direct3D driver codesoon too, also to aid driver writers and experimenters, but our Direct3Ddevelopment partner is going to first spend some time cleaning up thatcode.

This code is provided as-is: we don’t have much time for answering ev-eryone’s questions about it, so you’re mostly on your own.

The http://unreal.epicgames.com/UnrealPubSrc224v.zip. Unzip it intoyour \Unreal directory, and the proper subdirectories will be created (de-scribed in the http://unreal.epicgames.com/ReadMeSrc.htm). The C++code compiles there and links to DLL’s in the \Unreal\System directory,read to run. Enjoy!

-Tim Sweeney

3.9.4 Unreal 224v Released to the public!

The Unreal 224v patch is now available for download from our http://unreal.epicgames.com/versions.htm, along with the release notes.

-Tim Sweeney

3.9. MAY 02, 1999

http://unreal.epicgames.com/UnrealPubSrc224v.zip





3.10 May 03, 1999

3.10.1 Known Bugs

Having a problem with Unreal? Please visit the http://unreal.epicgames.com/Bugs.htm page to see if we know about it and are addressing it, andif there any any workarounds.

3.10.2 Future Patch

There will be another Unreal 1 patch. It will be 225. It will contain fixes forthe significant bugs reported that are under our control (3D card driversare dependent on the hardware makers). By popular demand, our focuson future Unreal 1 patches will be making bug fixes and small, incremen-tal improvements. So, we’ve split off the Unreal 1 code base from the Un-real Tournament code base, and won’t be major new features added tothe Unreal 1 code base, just fixes.

This code split gives the server community some room to get back to-gether and grow healthily. The server community was fragmented inthe past because of our Unreal 224 delays, at one point having 4 ma-jor versions available (220 for the PC, 219 for the Mac, 222 for U.S. 3dfxVoodoo3 users, 223 for European 3dfx Voodoo3 users. From here on, we’llkeep network compatibility between versions, and keep code changes toa minimum. And we’ll keep Unreal 1 script compatibility (but not UTscript compatibility).

The split also gives us more flexibility in releasing future patches. In thepast, we’ve been adding so many new features to the engine for UnrealTournament, some necessitating architectural changes, that we’ve had along internal testing cycle for each patch. From now on, the Unreal 1changes will be simple and localized.

The split is also something our Unreal tech licensees have wanted. Fromhere on, our partners who want to ship games soon (before or soon afterUnreal Tournament) will prefer to stay on the 224 track to gain stabilityand minimize changes, and those with further-off products may want to

3.10. MAY 03, 1999




move forward with the Unreal Tournament code track, to keep up to datewith the latest features.

-Tim

3.10.3 Check out the Unreal news sites

• http://www.planetunreal.com/has lots of news and tips about 224.

• http://www.unrealengine.com/ is a news site dedicated to the Un-real engine.

• http://www.unreal.org/ is a master index of Unreal resources onthe Internet, and has tons of cool Unreal related links.

I’ll be making a summary of reported bugs, workaround, and relatedfeedback from the community later tonight.

3.10.4 OpenGL UnrealEd

Thanks http://www.planetunreal.com/ for pointing out this feature I addedmonths ago but basically forgot about. :)

Though it theoretically works, the consumer OpenGL drivers I’ve triedaren’t yet stable enough for it to work reliably on real-world hardware.But for people who like experimenting, if in-game OpenGL support worksflawlessly, you can try editor OpenGL support by changing the Windowe-dRenderDevice= line in Unreal.ini to WindowedRenderDevice=OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice.Problems I’ve experienced on my Riva TNT and ATI Rage Pro (2 monthsago) include crashing in the display driver when resing windows, failureto create HRC’s when opening windows, and texture corruption.

If there is enough demand, perhaps we can pressure 3D hardware mak-ers to test with UnrealEd. Hopefully this will be easier now that we’vereleased Unreal’s OpenGL source code to the public.

-Tim

3.10. MAY 03, 1999


http://www.unrealengine.com/

http://www.unreal.org/



3.11 May 05, 1999

3.11.1 Maps that broke since 220

Some user maps such has http://www.planetunreal.com/dl/dl.asp?nalicity/dmhellshrap.zip broke with version 224. This was caused by a little bugin the file backwards-compatibility code, that I’ve fixed for 225. Map au-thors don’t need to do anything, this will automatically be fixed with 225.The specific problem I fixed was an exit with an assertion:

Assertion failed: Field [File:..\Inc\UnClass.h] [Line: 139]

If there are any user maps which don’t require .u file mods, and the mapsrefuse to load with a different error message than this, please email themap (or a URL where we can download the map) to mailto:unreal224@

epicgames.com.

-Tim

3.11.2 Quick Notes

We’ve been going through the Unreal 224 bug reports and addressing lotsof issues people have pointed out. Here’s the latest status.

• Creative Labs EAX 3D sound support is fixed for 225.

• We’re working with Aureal to get A3D 2.0 support into 225, which isvery likely to happen.

• I fixed the cause of the ”out of memory” errors that tended to hap-pen when the console was pulled down on some machines. Therewas a problem in UnrealScript with switch statements operating onstrings, which caused this and some similar problems reported bylicensees. Thanks to Mark Poesch of http://www.wheeloftime.comfor tracking this one down.

3.11. MAY 05, 1999

http://www.planetunreal.com/dl/dl.asp?nalicity/dmhellshrap.zip

http://www.planetunreal.com/dl/dl.asp?nalicity/dmhellshrap.zip



http://www.wheeloftime.com


• Under some conditions, alt-tabbing between fullscreen and win-dowed play would cause the in-a-window game window to be col-lapsed to zero size. Fixed.

• I optimized the network visibility code by about 25%. Server ad-mins are reporting notably more CPU usage per player with 224than 220. I haven’t tracked this down, but I’m going through a lotof code to measure and improve the server performance.

Many other fixes, tweaks, and incremental improvements are in the works.See the http://unreal.epicgames.com/Bugs.htm page for more info.

-Tim

3.12 May 08, 1999

3.12.1 Latest progress

All the known server-crashing problems in 224 have been fixed and arein internal testing now. Stability has improved quite a bit. There is stillsignificantly higher server CPU usage in 224 compared to 220 on heavilypopulated servers, and I’m still tracking this down.

The Direct3D code has been cleaned up and optimized a bit, giving a fewFPS improvement on the Riva TNT, with support for detail textures nowenabled. 225 will include the new D3D driver, and the 225 public sourcerelease will include the source.

-Tim

3.12. MAY 08, 1999



3.13 May 19, 1999

3.13.1 Unreal 225 musings

The recent work on 225 has been focused on improving server perfor-mance and stability, and it has been paying off really well. It turns outthat 224’s server code was noticeably slower than 220, as a result of somecode improvements I made but didn’t test and time rigorously. The twobottleneck routines in the server are the visibility tracer and the actorreplicator. I’ve been making the visibility tracer faster by processing allactors simultaneously and optimizing the code for a pure ”yes/no” vis-ibility test, rather than using the more general (and slower) line traceroutine built into the engine. The actor replicator has gained signifi-cant speedups from a combination of low-level optimization (to the bit-stream writer, and replication condition caching code), and a new time-stamping system that speeds up replication by up to 50% on servers withhigh player counts.

Now, the 225 server is faster than all previous versions, and I’m workingon some further improvements over the next few days.

As many server admins have pointed out to us, if we can double Unreal’sserver performance, admins will be able to run twice as many servers ontheir machines!

3.13.2 ”Make Something Unreal” Contest

Check out the http://www.unrealcontest.com/ site for the latest info andnews on the contest for Unreal map makers, mod authors, artists, and TCdevelopers!

3.13.3 Things That Are Cool

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/ssafe/: Anybody who is programmingon a large project without using a source-control system is nuts!

3.13. MAY 19, 1999

http://www.unrealcontest.com/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/ssafe/


SourceSafe provides a central repository for all code, and enablesprogrammers to check out files and work on them without theirchanges ”colliding” with those of other programmers. SourceSafealso tracks all changes to all files since the beginning of a project,which has been incredibly useful in developing Unreal, because itenables us to examine our past code changes when tracking downbugs. Finally, SourceSafe is excellent for managing ”branched”

projects: when we split Unreal 224 apart from the Unreal Tourna-ment codebase, SourceSafe managed the files’ shared history auto-matically.

• http://www.glsetup.com/: Now that Microsoft has publicly com-mitted to dropping the ball on 3D hardware driver distribution withDirectX7, GLsetup is the only hope for game developers who wanttheir game to work on users’ computers out-of-the-box. The PCis already plagued by driver problems, and the classic symptomis users having to go to the web and download new drivers to getnew games working. The world would be a much better place ifMicrosoft took a leadership role in driver updates, by keeping theDirectX redistribution continually refreshed with new QA-certifieddrivers, thus assuring that new games always work ”out of the box”– if that happened, PC gaming would be a lot closer to the levelof reliability of console games. But Microsoft isn’t doing that, andGLsetup is a grassroots effort to solve the problem.

-Tim

P.S. Check out http://www.unrealnation.net/, the cool in-depth Unrealnews site.

3.13. MAY 19, 1999

http://www.glsetup.com/

http://www.unrealnation.net/


3.14 May 29, 1999

3.14.1 For server administrators only: Unreal 225e Patch

This is a test version incorporating all of the latest server-side stabilityand performance improvements. It’s backwards compatible with Un-real 224 clients. If you’re running a 224 server and are experiencing per-formance or stability problems, please upgrade. If you experience anyserver problems or server crashes with 225, please email your Unreal.logfile to mailto:[email protected] so we can investigate the prob-lems. The results on our test server here at Epic indicate that this ver-sion is significantly faster (i.e. supports more players) than 224, and ismore stable but I don’t expect it to be perfect, because I rewrote abouta thousand lines of server code to improve performance, and there willprobably be some bugs to shake out.

Only download this if you are running an Unreal server: http://unreal.epicgames.com/Files/UnrealPatch225e.exe.

The general Unreal 225 patch for everybody including users will be avail-able in a few days.

-Tim

3.14.2 On engine licensing

In this http://www.msnbc.com/news/274561.asp#BODY, I think John Car-mack hit the nail on the head on the ”build vs. buy” decision that goesinto licensing an engine:

”If you want to aim for something that’s 100 percent propri-etary and you’re willing to take 18 months longer on the projectto develop the technology while running a significant risk ofabject failure, you make your own game engine. If you’ve beento a few E3’s, you’ve probably seen a dozen instances of some-body making a really, really cool demo that’s showing off somenew technical direction - then the game never comes out.”

3.14. MAY 29, 1999


http://unreal.epicgames.com/Files/UnrealPatch225e.exe

http://unreal.epicgames.com/Files/UnrealPatch225e.exe

http://www.msnbc.com/news/274561.asp#BODY


Though game engine licensing was occuring over two years ago, we’restill very much in the early days of this rapidly growing and evolving mar-ket: Game developers are learning what an engine can and can’t do forthem, and engine developers are still learning the ropes of the businessmodels, engine modularity, support, and version management.

I’m happy to see the press treating engines level-headedly: everyone seemto recognize that an engine is a useful tool that can speed developmentand enable a developer to focus on game development rather than tech-nology; but also that an engine is just a tool and isn’t a miracle solutionfor game development. When an exciting new technology is evolving,there’s always a danger of it being massively overhyped and pushed asa cure-all solution (see Java), but engines seem to have received a fairshowing, not unrealistically positive or negative.

-Tim

3.14.3 UnrealEd ”Runtime Error 20005” Experimental Fix

People who are getting the infamous ”Runtime Error 20005” or otherproblems when UnrealEd is initializing, please install this http://unreal.epicgames.com/Files/UnrealEdFix.exe, then try running UnrealEd again.Does this solve the problem for you?

Please email mailto:[email protected] and let us know eitherway. Note: This is a feedback email address, not tech support.

Webmasters: Can we please not post this on big general gaming sites?I want to get feedback from users on the effectiveness of the fix beforewidely publicizing it. I’ll post the results here in a couple of days. Thanks.

-Tim

3.14. MAY 29, 1999

http://unreal.epicgames.com/Files/UnrealEdFix.exe

http://unreal.epicgames.com/Files/UnrealEdFix.exe



3.15 May 31, 1999

3.15.1 Latest News

• 4 out of 5 users have reported success with the experimental Un-realEd fix – it made those nasty ”Runtime Error” messages go away.If you’re having problems with UnrealEd not starting up, grab thisfile!

• The other one reported an error message relating to Threed32.ocxwhich I fixed in http://unreal.epicgames.com/Files/UnrealEdFix3.

exe.

• There was a master server outage/problem today. If you weren’tseeing servers in Unreal’s new server browser or GameSpy today,don’t worry, the problem was at the master server and it has beenfixed.

• Aussies, check out the http://www.unrealed.net/ozunreal/ for Aus-tralian level designers!

3.15.2 Holiday?

Here at Epic HQ, we suspect today is some type of holiday. The tell-talesign is that the parking lot was empty when we all came to work thismorning. That usually gives it away. However, we haven’t figured outthe identity of the occasion – it seems too warm outside for Easter, andour publisher isn’t calling us three times a day about shipping our gameso it’s probably not Christmas.

3.15.3 New 225f Patch for server administrators only

This should fix the UActorChannel::ReplicateActor crash and some smallerproblems.

3.15. MAY 31, 1999

http://unreal.epicgames.com/Files/UnrealEdFix3.exe


http://www.unrealed.net/ozunreal/


It’s backwards-compatible with Unreal 224-225 clients. If you have anyserver crashes, please email your Unreal.log file to mailto:unreal225@

epicgames.com.

Only download this if you are running an Unreal server: http://unreal.epicgames.com/Files/UnrealPatch225f.exe.

-Tim

3.15.4 Server 225e Patch Feedback

Server admins are reporting much better performance, but 90% of thebug reports point to a crash in UActorChannel::ReplicateActor. I’ve beenfixing this (and a few other things) and will have a new server-only patchlater tonight. Thanks for everyone’s feedback!

3.15.5 UnrealEd Experimental Fix 2

Based on feedback, Saturday’s experimental UnrealEd fix solved the prob-lems for only about 20% of users (wild guesstimate) who were previouslyunable to run UnrealEd. On further investigation, we’ve found a set ofVisual Basic runtime DLL’s that are more likely to work for most users. IfUnrealEd still isn’t working for you, please try http://unreal.epicgames.com/Files/UnrealEdFix2.exe. Please let us know what happens by email-ing mailto:[email protected]

with a subject of ”Experimental Fix 2”.

IMPORTANT: After installing the fix, reboot your machine before runningUnrealEd. The proper files won’t be refreshed until you reboot.

Webmasters: Please only post this info on Unreal news sites. I don’t wantit to go on general gaming sites until we have feedback on patch suc-cess/failure from users.

-Tim

3.15. MAY 31, 1999



http://unreal.epicgames.com/Files/UnrealPatch225f.exe

http://unreal.epicgames.com/Files/UnrealPatch225f.exe





3.16 Jun 01, 1999

3.16.1 UnrealEd Follow-Up

If UnrealEd is crashing at startup and you are getting an error messageregarding ”UEditorEngine::FinishAllSnaps < - WM USER EXEC < - Vb-WindowProc < - glxDetectOutput”, that is a separate problem that seemsto be caused by some sound card drivers.

You can avoid this crash by running ”UnrealEd -nosound”. You don’t getany sound, but UnrealEd otherwise works fine for editing.

3.16.2 Server Cheats?

A few server admins have been reporting a cheat that enables clientswithout administrative rights to change the speed of the server’s game(as if typing ”slomo 0.5” from the console in a local game). What’s thetrick? First person to give the exact steps to duplicate the cheat gets afree signed copy of Unreal Tournament as soon as it ships. Send reportsto mailto:[email protected]

with a subject ”SLOMO CHEAT”. Include your shipping address.

Are people seeing any other cheats occuring on the public Unreal servers?If so, let us know, mailto:[email protected] (no prizes for this,we’ll just fix the security holes!)

3.16.3 UnrealEd for 3dfx Voodoo3 bundle owners

The version of Unreal that shipped with 3dfx’s Voodoo3 bundle didn’t in-clude UnrealEd.

So, we now have the http://unreal.epicgames.com/Files/UnrealEdFix4.exe which installs UnrealEd.exe and all of its DLL’s into the appropriatedirectories. For this to work, you must have Unreal installed, and youmust point the UnrealEd installer to the same directory Unreal is in (for

3.16. JUN 01, 1999






example c:\Unreal). Then just run c:\Unreal\System\UnrealEd.exe tostart editing.

-Tim

3.17 Jun 06, 1999

3.17.1 Direct3D Improvements

Since Riva TNT users are reporting that Direct3D is more than 30% fasterthan OpenGL on their cards, I’ve been spending some more time improv-ing the D3D code, adding better support for video mode switching, andoptimizing the texture management code a bit more.

Another motivation for the Direct3D improvements is the Matrox G400.I just received one, and it’s an awesome video card–fast fill rate, greatgraphics quality, and decent texture management performance. The G400has a great Direct3D driver, but their OpenGL is hideously bad.

One interesting new feature I managed to implement in Direct3D is re-cursive, fractal detail textures. With this feature enabled in Direct3D, younever see any individual texels, no matter how close you get to a surface.It’s a really interesting contrast to the blurry bilinear filtering you see nearsurfaces in most games. Considering how fast current 3D hardware hasbecome, there’s no reason for games to reveal any individual texels any-where.

-Tim

3.17. JUN 06, 1999


3.18 Jun 19, 1999

3.18.1 Unreal Direct3D

Our Direct3D performance and stability have increased significantly sinceversion 225. For the past few days, I’ve been swapping 3D cards in andout, tuning Unreal’s Direct3D performance on all of them. I’m not in thebenchmarking biz, so I’m just going to give my personal reaction fromplaying, and say that the Riva TNT, TNT2, Matrox G400, and ATI Rage128 are all very nice for playing Unreal now!

(Don’t ask about the Riva 128, Rage Pro, and Permedia 2, they are worsefor gameplay than Unreal’s software renderer).

Everyone’s complaint with Direct3D support in past versions of Unreal,on good cards like the TNT, has been ”the average frame rate and bench-mark numbers are fine, but there is major hitching and pausing duringgameplay”. This was due to several factors, which I tracked down andfixed with help and advice from some driver writers. The key improve-ments are:

1. Dramatically less memory usage. My Direct3D code wasted tons ofhidden, ”behind the scenes” memory while swapping textures intovideo memory, leading to lots of virtual-memory swapping.

2. New texture management code, better optimized for Unreal’s tex-ture usage patterns. I had been relying on Direct3D’s built-in tex-ture manager, which is slowed down by its generality.

The next patch (”when it’s done”) will incorporate the new Direct3D code.This will be out before Unreal Tournament ships, and we’ll be looking forfeedback from players on its performance and stability.

I’d like to thank Ben de Waal, Sim Dietrich, and Doug Rogers at NVidia;Sameer Nene at Microsoft; and Eric Le at Matrox for providing cool ad-vice and performance tips.

3.18. JUN 19, 1999


3.18.2 Summary of things I learned about Direct3D

Never ever Lock() a video memory surface. That is amazingly slow, espe-cially on TNT cards. When I went to a pure Blt() based texture handlingscheme, my worst-case frame rate went from 8 fps to 20 fps.

Games that use large amounts of textures, palettized textures especially,should not use DDSCAPS2 TEXTUREMANAGE. Write your own texturemanager, and optimize it around your game’s usage patterns. You canget much better performance than using the general-purpose one that’sbuilt in.

Realize that DDSCAPS2 TEXTUREMANAGE makes system-memory copiesof all your textures as backing-store for the ones cached in video memorytemporarily. If your native textures are palettized and the 3D card doesn’tsupport paletted textures (a very common case with Unreal), realize thatyou’re going to end up with major memory waste. Unreal 225 and earlierkept around (a) its own 8-bit copy of each texture, (b) the D3D texturemanager’s 16-bit copy of each texture, and (c) the 16-bit video memorycopy. In Unreal in some cases, this wasted 40+ megs of system RAM!When I dumped DDSCAPS2 TEXTUREMANAGE, I went down to about12 megs of system RAM. Better yet, a lot of cool new cards like the TNT2and G400 have 32 megs of video memory, so you can effectively store allyour textures there, and free the system memory copies (which I do), tobring the waste down to 0. This improves smoothness very significantlyby reducing virtual memory usage.

Realize that DDSCAPS2 TEXTUREMANAGE can potentially do evil stuffto your frame rate, for example if it tries to free many small textures tomake room for a big texture.

(It’s totally general-purpose, so it has to handle all the bizarre inputs youmight throw at it).

Never allocate or free video-memory textures during gameplay in Di-rect3D. This operation is slow. Do it at init time. I do this in Unreal now,caching all textures into fixed-size bins in video memory. I swap texturesinto the bins in realtime, but never reallocate the bins.

Don’t be afraid to constrain your engine, texture formats, texture sizes,

3.18. JUN 19, 1999


etc to get optimal Direct3D performance. GENERAL==SLOW, especiallywhen dealing with texture management, where you are already pushingRAM and memory bandwidth limits.

Overall, Direct3D has come a long way. The API and drivers are quitestable now. In my 100 hours of rewriting the Direct3D code and testingit on 10+ different 3D cards under Windows 98, I had 5 lockups. This isabout the same as my experience with OpenGL on Windows NT.

-Tim

3.19 Jun 30, 1999

3.19.1 Direct3D Is Happening

We’re testing 226a internally now. The results of are good so far. If nosignificant ”non-driver” problems are found, we’ll have Unreal 226a outlater this week. Here is the kind of feedback we’re seeing on D3D Unrealperformance.

First client impressions, after zonking it with a couple of reallynasty, detailed, clippy, high polycount maps: incredible im-provement! I got through DMDowntown, my personal Unre-alRavager(tm) with nary a clip, pop or tick. Switching resolu-tions works well now, but you have to have the latest Herculesdriver (now using 1.70, dated 6-28-99) for it to work, or you geta critical error. ALT-ENTER works fine too, thanks Tim (nowI can get multiple screenshots without exiting and restartingUnreal). DMBreakfast, a new map which uses a great deal ofUnrealEd rendered graphics, played very well too.This is a quantum leap for the ’in game’ video speed on the Her-cules TNT2. Most impressive. I’ll try to get this patch on theNali City game server (unreal://207.53.187.28) tomorrow so wecan all beat it up.-Pete, http: // www. planetunreal. com/

3.19. JUN 30, 1999



This isn’t a miracle improvement, but TNT, G400, and Rage 128 ownersshould see clear speed and smoothness gains. Just make sure you get thelatest drivers available for your card.

-Tim

3.20 Jul 01, 1999

3.20.1 226 Progress

Testing of 226a brought in mixed results: Direct3D performance improvedfor most testers, but some had crashes and other weirdness. I’m lookinginto all of this now; I think most of the problems are driver/hardware re-lated, but I should be able to work around most of them in the code. We’lldefinitely go through a couple more internal test versions before releas-ing 226 though.

I’m also adding a new ”wizard” based user-interface for switching 3Ddrivers and changing ”safe mode” settings, to improve the user-friendlynessof the Direct3D/OpenGL/Glide/Software switching.

3.20.2 Recommended Reading

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0387947752/002-3430157-9555648

is an excellent book for people trying to design object-oriented program-ming languages (or just learn the theoretical background of OOP). It doesget pretty technical, defining a lambda-calculus variant in terms of ob-jects, and analyzing OOP concepts within that framework. But it shedsa lot of light on the general language-design problems that UnrealScriptfaced.

After writing a big piece of code like the UnrealScript compiler, it’s cool toexamine some of the design decisions that I made without really know-ing what I was doing, only to discover there’s a well-developed theoreticalfoundation for what I basically hacked together until I felt it worked right.

3.20. JUL 01, 1999

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0387947752/002-3430157-9555648


For example, it turns out that UnrealScript’s type-compatibility checking(the rules for determining whether a variable is compatible as an assign-ment parameter or function call parameter), exactly follow the rules oftype covariance, contravariance, and invariance.

3.21 Jul 03, 1999

3.21.1 On Our World Domination Plans

Ok, the headline is exaggerating a bit. Still, there are some cool thingshappening with the Unreal engine that we find very exciting–uses of thetechnology that we never dreamed would exist a couple years ago.

For example, as the latest http://www.planetunreal.com/ news story de-scribes, the http://www.digitalo.com/ team is building a ”virtual recon-struction” of the http://www.planetunreal.com/index.asp?images.asp?interviews/images/vrnd1big.jpg. And it looks jaw-droppingly amaz-ing!

The team here, busy working on Unreal Tournament, is very jealous aboutthe polygon counts these guys are using (the lucky bastards don’t have toworry about the CPU impact of 12 players deathmatching in their cre-ation!)

Also, the rapidly-growing independent news site, http://www.unrealengine.com/, is covering lots of other Unreal engine projects that fall way out-side the ”first person action” stereotype, such as Hasbro’s http://www.

unrealengine.com/pic/pic_990701Big.jpg (see http://www.avault.com/news/displaynews.asp?story=6301999-102335) – as well as the other well-known projects from our http://unreal.epicgames.com/Partners.htm.

There are other interesting things happening with the tech, behind thescenes. A number of schools (ranging from high schools to universities)are using UnrealScript to each real-time object-oriented programming.Several university masters-degree thesis projects are centered around projectsinvolving the engine. Some architects are using the editor to generatereal-time architectural walkthroughs. At least two Silicon Valley startups

3.21. JUL 03, 1999


http://www.digitalo.com/

http://www.planetunreal.com/index.asp?images.asp?interviews/images/vrnd1big.jpg

http://www.planetunreal.com/index.asp?images.asp?interviews/images/vrnd1big.jpg



http://www.unrealengine.com/pic/pic_990701Big.jpg

http://www.unrealengine.com/pic/pic_990701Big.jpg

http://www.avault.com/news/displaynews.asp?story=6301999-102335

http://www.avault.com/news/displaynews.asp?story=6301999-102335



are pitching completely non-game projects incorporating the Unreal en-gine to investors.

3.21.2 What’s really happening here?

What we’re seeing is part of a larger trend that will continue to grow. Re-member ten years ago, when PC’s were very weak compared to the state-of-the art: SGI workstations, and the Unix workstations from HP, Sun,and Apollo?

Now, a $2000 Pentium III PC with a Voodoo3 or TNT2 card eclipses theperformance of a $30,000 SGI for real-time rendering. The CPU is faster,the fill rate is faster. When I first saw an SGI Reality Engine, my impres-sion was, ”Holy cow, I can’t believe how much better this is than my ’286!”But nowadays, the best 3D games look far cooler than anything you seerunning on a Reality Engine.

That entire segment of the high tech industry, the one containing non-PCworkstations, SGI’s high end hardware, simulation tools vendors, and soon, is falling off a cliff and disappearing. One-time leaders like SGI andIntergraph are turning into niche players, who are losing out badly to thenew guys like Dell, Gateway, NVidia, and 3dfx who were born and bred inthe consumer, high volume, low-price PC era.

The result is that projects, like the Notre Dame reconstruction, architec-tual walkthroughs, and training simulations–which were once the realmof high-end SGI’s–are now coming to the PC in droves. Soon, they’ll allbe here.

3.21.3 The Economics

What we’re seeing in processors, 3D accelerators, and games is a funda-mentally different level of technological progress than happens in othermarkets. Industrial era businesses, like car manufacturing, and limitedby raw materials and labor. Most of what you pay for a car goes to materi-als, labor, and the other economic components of the industrial pipeline

3.21. JUL 03, 1999


(like transportation, insurance, and so on). Years of tweaking the processhave made manufacturing near optimally efficient, so future progressgoes very slowly, gaining perhaps 2%-3% productivity per year. That’swhy there is no Moore’s law for car performance.

But in our business, the cost of raw materials is insignificant, so innova-tion is driven by volume and R&D investment. A 500 MHz Pentium IIInow costs the same to manufacture as a 60 MHz Pentium cost in its day,or a 386-16 long ago. A retail game contains around $2.50 of raw mate-rials (box and CD) and sells for around $49.95. So, manufacturing isn’t alimiting factor here.

Still, games, processors, and 3D cards require a tremendous up-front in-vestment in R&D and facilities. It takes lots of people and a lot of capitalto develop a game, design a chip, or design and build a manufacturingplant. The difference is, this investment is a fixed cost–you pay it once,then you have the ability manufacture as many games or chips as youdesire at an (approximately) insignificant cost.

The remaining piece of the puzzle is the ”winner take all” nature of tech-nology markets. Since manufacturing costs are small, price differencesare minor, leadership goes to the companies that have the best high-volume products. Therefore, everyone invests heavily in R&D, and at-tempts to produce the best product in hopes of selling tons of chips orgames or engines. When they do this successfully, they make a profit andplow it back into the business to get further ahead.

Most R&D and capital-investment hungry markets work this way; it’s whyyou only see a handful of prominent CPU makers, 3D card makers, andengine developers. The ones who delivered were successful early on andreinvested in their continued growth; and those who didn’t deliver eitherout-of-business or are falling apart now.

3.21.4 The Result: General-Purpose Solutions Win

The result is that high-volume general-purpose hardware and softwareis quickly gaining the lead in absolute performance. This trend will onlyaccelerate as the PC market becomes larger and the R&D investments

3.21. JUL 03, 1999


grow. The ramifications are:

• Specialized software and hardware loses out to general-purpose.The company that focuses on generality (for example, a CPU, ora 2D+3D graphics accelerator, or a general-purpose game engine)has the expectation of higher sales, and can make so much more ofan R&D investment that special-purpose solutions can’t compete(for example, 3D-only accelerators, or a once-off engine poweringa single game).

• Volume and increasing R&D investment enable 3dfx and NVidia tosell millions of $150 graphics cards that outperform SGI’s $50,000solution which sells 1000 units. That has the effect of crushing SGI’sbusiness model, even though companies like 3dfx aren’t even con-sciously trying to compete with SGI.

• When a company like Epic or id Software builds a 3D engine, we doit with the expectation of it powering games that sell a few millioncopies, between our games and licensee projects. We make moneyfrom each one, and that realization drives investment in makingmore and better tools. This gives our engines a price, performance,and feature advantage over ”in-house” engines made specificallyfor one game, and over less-capable engines designed for niche mar-kets. We amortize our R&D investment over ~10X more units sold.This licensing model has already proven successful with mainstreamgame developers, but now it’s starting to overflow into non-gamemarkets too. We have this great 3D engine, why not use it for yourarchitectural walkthrough?

• As a result of widespread interest, thriving ecosystems develop aroundsuccessful general-purpose products. For example, there are hun-dreds of web sites dedicated to 3dfx hardware, and lots of develop-ers optimizing their games for 3dfx. There are many hundreds ofweb sites covering Unreal and licensee projects; thousands of kick-ass aspiring level designers building maps and making them avail-able online; many licensees building games; and lots of other cool

3.21. JUL 03, 1999


projects that tie into the engine, such as mods and TC’s, and the re-search projects like Notre Dame. The community has a multiplica-tive effect on growing the platform.

3.21.5 Where we go from here

When you look at the big picture, what’s happening now with 3D graphicson the PC is just the tip of the iceberg. In the past, we’ve been limitedto the realm of hardcore gamers, but now 3D acceleration is becomingmuch more mainstream, and 3D engines are becoming recognized as aviable development tool for a wide range of projects. The coming yearswill be interesting.

-Tim

3.22 Jul 10, 1999

3.22.1 The AMD Athlon Rocks!

My new 550 MHz http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/athlon/index.html(K7) just clocked a jaw-dropping 68.5 Unreal timedemo at 1024x768, run-ning on a Voodoo3 3000 card. Even more telling, at no point did the framerate ever drop below 38.0 fps. That’s astounding, considering the intenselightmap and geometry usage in the timedemo level. Even while play-ing Unreal Tournament’s most texture and polygon intensive level (ShaneCaudle’s DmGothic), the frame rate hardly ever went below 60 fps.

The Athlon’s 128K L1 cache is awesome for memory-intensive games likeUnreal.

Operations like visibility determination, which thrash on the PentiumIII’s 32K cache, now run at full speed on the Athlon. This CPU truly showsa generational performance improvement, like going from my old 486 tomy first Pentium.

3.22. JUL 10, 1999

http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/athlon/index.html


When I saw AMD’s K7 spec, I was pretty skeptical. The K6 had been hypedup, but in reality it was slower for Unreal than a Pentium II of comparableclock rate, due to its poor non-SIMD floating point performance. The K7claimed to fix all of that, and debut a new architecture with 3 executionpipelines. I decided to wait and see, without getting my hopes up.

Bottom line: I waited, and now I have seen! The Athlon is clearly thefastest x86 CPU at any clock speed.

Congratulations go to AMD.

My wish list:

• I want to be able to buy dual-processor Athlon workstations frommajor manufacturers like Dell and Gateway.

• I want MMX, 3DNow! and SSE code generation support in VisualC++, with native SIMD C/C++ datatypes like float2, float4, and short4,making the compiler manage all register allocation and code gen-eration.

• I want http://www.kryotech.com/sgindex.asp! 8-)

-Tim

3.23 Jul 12, 1999

3.23.1 New Downloads & Links Pages

By popular request, the links on the tech page have been updated andcleaned up. I added:

• New http://unreal.epicgames.com/Downloads.htmpage: An indexof all the official files here on the tech page, plus links to dedicatedUnreal download sites. If you’re looking for the latest PC or Macpatch, UnrealEd patch, Fusion maps, or whatever, look here.

3.23. JUL 12, 1999

http://www.kryotech.com/sgindex.asp

http://unreal.epicgames.com/Downloads.htm


• New http://unreal.epicgames.com/Links.htmpage. Links to someof the major ”hub” web sites related to the Unreal community, Epic,our partners.

I also wanted to mention the supercool new download site, http://www.unrealfiles.com/, check it out.

-Tim

3.24 Aug 14, 1999

3.24.1 DirectX7

Some people have been asking about our plans for supporting the up-coming DirectX7. Unreal Tournament will ship with DirectX6 support,and will be compatible with (but not optimized for) DirectX7. As soon asMicrosoft has released DirectX7 and we’ve had a chance to optimize thecode for DX7 and test it across a wide range of cards, we’ll release an Un-real Tournament patch with complete DirectX7 optimizations. This hasbeen the plan all along.

DirectX7 has lots of cool new features. The ones which Unreal Tourna-ment will exploit are:

• Improved texture management.

• Hooks to enable 3D card drivers to perform their own texture man-agement to improve performance.

• Optimized polygon path for significantly faster polygon rates.

• Windows 2000 support.

-Tim

3.24. AUG 14, 1999

http://unreal.epicgames.com/Links.htm

http://www.unrealfiles.com/

http://www.unrealfiles.com/


3.25 Aug 16, 1999

3.25.1 Unreal Tournament development note

In response to the pirate punk who has been claiming to have a ”final”version of UT...

Unreal Tournament isn’t finished yet, so there isn’t a final version. We’restill polishing, fine-tuning, and optimizing the game and will ’till it’s done.

Believe me, when UT goes gold, we’ll be announcing it here prominently.

Until the demo and release version are available, any copy of UT you seeis an unfinished beta version; unless you’re a reviewer who received sucha copy direct from Epic or GT, having such a copy is illegal. These versionsare clearly labeled ”confidential beta version” or ”release candidate - notfor distribution” in at least 5 places in the program. In addition, theyhave time-bomb logic which will cause them to stop functioning after acertain amount of time. So if anybody gets hold of a version of UT beforerelease, it should be pretty clear that it’s not legitimate.

3.26 Sep 14, 1999

3.26.1 Unreal Tournament demo schedule

To quote http://www.voodooextreme.com/ quoting me :), here’s the Un-real Tournament demo release plan:

• Windows 3dfx demo this week.

• Windows Direct3D/OpenGL next week.

• Linux Glide/OpenGL soon after.

• Mac timing not figured out yet.

3.25. AUG 16, 1999



3.26.2 DirectX7

Microsoft’s new DirectX7 API will be released soon. I’ve already portedUnreal Tournament’s Direct3D code to DirectX7 and have noticed a nicespeedup on the TNT2 and GeForce256, primarily due to improved tex-ture management.

The API’s simplicity has also improved, which is something you don’t of-ten see: usually code just gets more complex as it evolves. Porting UnrealTournament’s code from DirectX6 to DirectX7 only took 3.5 hours, andmostly consisted of deleting now-redundant code and changing func-tion calls and interfaces. I’m very glad to see the IDirect3DTexture, IDi-rect3DViewport, and IDirect3DLight interfaces gone, and replaced by muchsimpler state-setting code. Direct3D’s abuses of object-oriented program-ming are now gone.

With DirectX7, Microsoft did something I welcome, and would like to seemore of: they designed the new Direct3D interfaces to not be backwards-compatible with the old ones. This enabled them to remove from view abunch of the old baggage that obfuscated Direct3D: execute buffers aregone, unnecessary intermediate objects are gone, and much less weirdCOM QueryInterface stuff is necessary.

Ripping out old code and replacing it with new, better designed code is agreat practice which too many software developers are afraid of.

-Tim Sweeney

3.27 Sep 22, 1999

3.27.1 DirectX7

Microsoft has released DirectX7. You can read about it and download itfrom http://www.microsoft.com/DirectX and download it on their http://www.microsoft.com/directx/homeuser/downloads/default.asp.

Now that DirectX7 is available, we’re doing final testing and tweaking

3.27. SEP 22, 1999

http://www.microsoft.com/DirectX

http://www.microsoft.com/directx/homeuser/downloads/default.asp

http://www.microsoft.com/directx/homeuser/downloads/default.asp


on the upcoming Unreal Tournament demo with Direct3D and OpenGLsupport, coming in the next few days.

One thing we’ve found on DirectX7 is that NVidia TNT2 performance isnot fill-rate limited until you get to very high resolutions. During testing,performance at 640x480 seemed a bit slow, but as we increased the res-olution, the frame rate was hardly impacted at all. So 1024x768 seems toyield the best overall experience on this card.

I’ve enabled support for 32-bit color textures under Direct3D, which sig-nificantly improve the graphical quality, with a 10-15% frame rate im-pact.

The Direct3D code now uses vertex buffers, which speeds up mesh andtext drawing a bit.

3.27.2 What about OpenGL?

We’re still maintaining OpenGL sypport, though it’s not as much of a pri-ority at the moment because texture management performance in GLon Windows is significantly behind Direct3D. It’s still useful in NT4 andLinux of course. I’ve been advocating a GL extension which would en-able the fine-grained control over texture management that has led tosuch an improvement in Unreal performance under Direct3D. Here is asuggestion I sent to the OpenGL ARB.

I’ve been maintaining the Unreal / Unreal Tournament render-ing code under both Direct3D and OpenGL simultaneously fora while. They used to have approximately equal performanceback when I was using Direct3D’s ”driver-managed textures”(similar to the one and only OpenGL option for texture man-agement, which is transparent to the application). Unfortu-nately, the performance wasn’t very good, and the memory us-age was nuts because our game uses a huge amount of tex-tures, and the automatic texture management in Direct3D andOpenGL had to keep duplicate copies around as ”backing store”to the copies in video memory.

3.27. SEP 22, 1999


However, I recently rewrote my Direct3D code to manage tex-tures explicitly. I create a limited number of textures of all pos-sible sizes, forced to be in video memory, and then at runtimeswap my actual game textures into those ”video memory tex-tures”. This way, I have complete control over texture manage-ment, and can make optimal decisions about where to put tex-tures, based on the constraints of my app, such as:

• Texture usage patterns.

• Decompressing textures at glTexImage2D time using myown internal formats.

• Having a background thread load them off disk specula-tively and stick them in video memory when needed.\

• Other nonlinear, possibly time-variant priority factors.

When I replaced D3D’s default texture manager with my owncode, Unreal’s performance and memory usage under Direct3Dimproved very significantly, to the point where it’s not worthbothering playing the game in OpenGL anymore.So, my question is, does anybody have plans to add an ”ex-tended version of glBindTexture” which lets the application tellthe OpenGL driver, ”allocate this texture in video memory, keepit there, and never swap it out”? If an option like this existed,I could do the same kind of high-level optimizations as I didin Direct3D, and probably get a comparable increase in perfor-mance. Obviously, video memory is a limited resource, so atsome point those glBindTextures will fail if video memory fillsup, and have to return an error code.This is a bit lower-level than GL’s existing glBindTexture mech-anism, but I think it’s justified by the need to support apps whichuse huge quantities of textures and have to manage them care-fully in order to maintain realtime frame rates.For example:If the GL EXT BIND TEXTURE 2D VIDEOMEMORY string is ex-posed, then you can replace a call to glBindTexture( GL TEXTURE 2D,MyBindId ) with glBindTexture( GL TEXTURE 2D VIDEOMEMORY,MyBindId ) and the texture is guaranteed to be allocated in

3.27. SEP 22, 1999


video memory and never moved around by the GL driver’s tex-ture manager.For my application, glPrioritizeTextures(?) isn’t a viable solu-tion, because it still requires extra backing-store copies of tex-tures to be kept in system memory so they can be swapped inand out. In addition, implementing my own texture manageron top of the existing, unextended glBindTexture isn’t at all effi-cient, because I don’t have any way of knowing how many tex-tures I can allocate before they start spilling out of video mem-ory, and in addition most GL drivers do lots of extra internalmemcpy’s in the process – and with big textures, having lots ofunnecessary 256K memcpys (for 256x256x32-bit textures) justkills performance.Such a solution would benefit Unreal engine games on Win-dows, Linux, and possibly Mac such as Unreal Tournament,Duke Nukem Forever, Deus Ex, Wheel of Time, etc etc etc. Aswell as other developers’ texture-intensive games that use OpenGL,such Starsiege: Tribes (the developers have been running intothis same issue).

3.27.3 Experiencing poor Internet play on your Voodoo33500TV?

As http://www.voodooextreme.com/ reports, the Voodoo3 3500TV’s WebTVinstaller does some evil things to your Internet setting, causing manygames (including Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena) to experiencepoor Internet play:

Hello, We are aware of the problems that the Voodoo3 3500TVis experiencing with online games. Many of these problems canbe cured by removing WebTV, however that will disable the Vi-sual Reality software. The problem usually can also be curedby removing the Internet Explorer 5 upgrade from Windows98.While these are just a work around, and not really fixes, bothoptions usually will cure the problem until 3dfx releases a realfix. We are currently working with Microsoft to try and figure

3.27. SEP 22, 1999



out whether the problem is due to Microsoft software (WebTVand IE5) or 3dfx software (3500TV drivers and Visual Reality).Thank you for your patience,Aaron D. Patton3dfx Interactive Email Support

-Tim

3.28 Sep 29, 1999

3.28.1 More Hardware Troubleshooting

• We received some more confirmations of Unreal working better onTNT’s with the Creative Labs unified drivers using Glide than Di-rect3D. If you have a Creative Labs TNT card and have having per-formance problems, try that. Especially if you have under 128 megsof RAM.

• Lots of reports of slowdowns from users with Monster Sound’s whohave enabled the ”Advanced Options / Audio / Use3DHardware”. Ifyou’re having this slowdown, disable Use3DHardware and try again.Then please email mailto:[email protected] and let us knowwhether that helped. I’ve seen three confirmations from users thattheir problems (huge slow down) went away after disabling this.

• Jack and I have been tracking down the performance problems withthe TNT on 64-meg (and lower) machines. To our great surprise, itappears that the TNT is keeping duplicate system memory copiesof all our textures–we saw system memory grow and shrink in al-most exact proportion to our ”supposed” video memory texture al-locations. Thus the game uses an extra 12-26 megabytes of systemmemory–a very inefficient allocation of resources. This is a big sur-prise, because the NVidia guys has always told us this isn’t the case.

Problem in http://unreal.epicgames.com/files/Direct3D7.cpp?I don’t think so, but I’d love to be proven wrong. I’ll follow up with

3.28. SEP 29, 1999


http://unreal.epicgames.com/files/Direct3D7.cpp


our henchmen at NVidia and Microsoft and see if we can track thisdown...

3.28.2 Direct3D Anomalies

We’ve been looking at the feedback on Direct3D performance and inves-tigating some strange reports. Recently, we’ve mainly been testing on96-meg and 128-meg machines (I have a Celeron 400, Jack Porter has aK6-2 450). On these machines, TNT1 performance is good – average 28fps at 648x480, 25 fps at 800x600. The TNT2 performance is significantlybetter.

However, upon removing some RAM and testing Direct3D on a 64-megK6-2, the ”precache” time increased by about 5X, and performance droppedto a few frames per second. These performance drops don’t occur in thesoftware renderer, and don’t occur in Glide. Something is going wrongbetween Unreal, Direct3D, and the TNT’s Direct3D driver, and we’re in-vestigating.

Overall, the feedback indicates a very wide variance in performance amongTNT users, much more so than with any other card. Our internal testinghas indicated this too; for example, we’ve found (and worked around) alot of driver bugs that only happen on one machine, and not others withotherwise similar configurations.

Don’t Try This At Home Dept.: Some TNT users have reported that tweak-ing their BIOS’s ”AGP Aperture Size” improves performance on 64-megmachines. We have tried this and couldn’t find any differences on our64-meg test machine. Others report that the Creative Labs unified drivers(with TNT Glide support) outperform Direct3D on their cards. If anybodyfinds definite improvements or workarounds, or has insight into what’shappening, please email mailto:[email protected]

and let us know.

Thanks.

3.28. SEP 29, 1999



3.28.3 Athlon In The House

Mark Rein walked into Best Buy and picked up a 650 MHz Athlon off theshelf – an IBM Aptiva with a TNT2 Ultra bundled in. Fastest off-the-shelfmachine we’ve ever seen! Click http://unreal.epicgames.com/Kickass.

wav for our in-depth Athlon review.

-Tim

3.29 Oct 01, 1999

3.29.1 TNT Users, Try This!

Tweaks:

• Play in 16-bit color, which is significantly faster than 32-bit color.

• Turn the detail options down in the Preferences/Video menu.

• Use the ”-” key to reduce the HUD size.

• In Preferences/Game, turn off the display of your weapon.

• If you have enabled Advanced Options / Audio / Use3DHardwareaudio support, TURN IT OFF for now! Big driver performance prob-lems.

Experimental improvement for the brave:

• Try http://www.geforce-fr.com/drivers/win9x_nv3.34.exe (thanksto http://www.anandtech.com/ site for the link).

• Try putting this new http://unreal.epicgames.com/D3DDRV.DLL intoyour \TournamentDemo\System directory. Please back up your ex-isting one first!

3.29. OCT 01, 1999

http://unreal.epicgames.com/Kickass.wav

http://unreal.epicgames.com/Kickass.wav

http://www.geforce-fr.com/drivers/win9x_nv3.34.exe

http://www.anandtech.com/

http://unreal.epicgames.com/D3DDRV.DLL


These two downloads are beta and haven’t been rigorously tested yet, butin our gameplay sessions here, they’re a huge improvement on low-RAMmachines with the TNT, TNT2, and GeForce256.

Please let us know how these work for you, by emailing mailto:utbugs@

epicgames.com

3.29.2 Latest Findings

We’ve been benchmarking UT performance and memory usage on many3D cards, and we’ve found the source of the performance problems on64-96 meg machines with TNT/TNT2 cards.

Our measurements indicate that the TNT/TNT2 drivers consume up to25 megabytes of page-locked system memory with UT, while other Di-rect3D cards don’t. On machines with 64-96 megs, that kills performance,as one would expect. The game runs, but data is swapped to the harddrive so frequently that playability is compromised. We’ve been compar-ing with other 3D cards and aren’t seeing the issue on the Rage 128 orVoodoo3 under Direct3D.

System-wide memory allocations measured with SYSMON.EXE on a 64-meg Celeron running Windows 98 SE:

• TNT D3D: 51 MB baseline, 122 MB playing UT in 16-bit color, 134MB playing UT in 32-bit color.

• Rage 128 D3D: 55 MB baseline, 107 MB playing UT in 16-bit color,109 MB playing UT in 32-bit color.

• Voodoo3 D3D: 51 MB baseline, 100 MB playing UT in 16-bit color.

We’re working with the NVidia guys to track down the source of the extra25 megabytes of memory consumption. I’m going to hold off on postingour benchmarks till we’ve had a good chance to deal with the memoryconsumption issue, so everyone is on a level playing field. The NVidiacards already perform well on PC’s with lots of RAM, so they should be ingood shape once the memory issues are solved.

3.29. OCT 01, 1999




3.29.3 Links

Unreal Technology in the news:

• http://www.msnbc.com/news/318085.asp?cp1=1#BODY - MSNBC

• http://www.newsday.com/plugin/ccov0929.htm - Newsday

Cool Sites:

• http://www.unreality.dk/ - Cool Unreal site & community host inDenmark.

• http://www.gamespy.com/ - The GameSpy empire’s new portal site.Check out their http://www.gamespy.com/stats/index.shtm page,where Unreal Tournament is #6 and rising quickly. Hopefully some-day we’ll overtake that 3-year-old QuakeWorld thing. :-)

-Tim

3.30 Oct 02, 1999

3.30.1 Unreal Tournament players overtake QuakeWorldat #5

Top Game Servers By Players from http://www.gamespy.com/stats/index.

shtm

@ 7:52 PM EST

Game Servers Players================== ======= =======Half Life 1502 4344

3.30. OCT 02, 1999

http://www.msnbc.com/news/318085.asp?cp1=1#BODY

http://www.newsday.com/plugin/ccov0929.htm

http://www.unreality.dk/

http://www.gamespy.com/

http://www.gamespy.com/stats/index.shtm




Quake II 1628 1711Starsiege TRIBES 589 1162Quake 3: Arena 1040 1156Unreal Tournament 423 520Quakeworld 623 517Kingpin 127 256Unreal 134 144Turok 2 20 43Descent 3 8 23

-Tim

3.31 Oct 06, 1999

3.31.1 Windows 2000 RC2 Rocks!

I recently upgraded to Windows 2000 Release Candidate 2, and wantedto mention that it’s extremely solid! With NVidia’s latest Windows 2000TNT/GeForce drivers, DirectX7’s Direct3D and OpenGL both work flaw-lessly. What’s cool about the new OS:

• High-performance DirectX7 Direct3D and OpenGL support.

• USB mouse support – mouse movement is very smooth.

• Much more stable than Windows 98, especially for software devel-opment.

• Good administration tools, more powerful than NT4 and far easierto use.

• Great international support.

• Dual processor support.

• Plug and play.

3.31. OCT 06, 1999


3.31.2 Windows 2000 Internationalization

This is a topic we’re very interested in, because we’re always trying tomake our games and engine as widely accessible as possible. As a mat-ter of fact, today I’m working out the font management issues for theJapanese version of Unreal Tournament.

The Windows 95/98 OS had very weak international support, and a con-fusing array of incomplete features such as supporting Unicode in a fewAPI’s but not all, weird and undocumented multibyte character set han-dling, and mixed ANSI/OEM file system conventions. Localizing Win-dows 9X apps is a very difficult undertaking.

On the other hand, Windows 2000 is by far the most thoroughly inter-nationalized piece of software I’ve ever seen. All international versionssharing the same binaries, fonts, and input support. Everything is 100%Unicode. So, you can open up a Japanese language document on yourEnglish computer, visit Arabic web sites, use an Input Method Editor totype in Chinese text, and so on. While most people might not care aboutthat, it’s infinitely beneficial for developers to have that power at theirfingertips, because it enables you to do all of your international devel-opment and most of your testing without jumping through hoops andinstalling multiple OS’s.

When Windows 2000 makes its transition into the consumer OS market,it will be a great day for worldwide software development.

-Tim

3.31. OCT 06, 1999

Chapter 4

2000 News

4.1 Feb 22, 2000

9 out of 10 doctors say now would be a good time to prune the Unrealtech page, and that sounds like a good idea to me. I’d like to start overby talking about a bunch of things I’ve been meaning to cover, but neverfound the time.

4.1.1 Common Questions I’m Asked

Q. I’m an aspiring game developer and I want to get into the business.What’s the best way to be hired?

A. The single most important thing game companies will look for is pastexperience: what cool stuff you have worked on previously. This mightsound like a Catch-22: ”You need experience to get a job, and you needa job to get experience”. But nowadays, the mod communities aroundleading games like Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, and Quake 3 Arenaare great proving grounds where aspiring game developers can work onprojects freely (mostly in their spare time), and build levels, mods, andother game-play enhancements. In the past few years, the majority ofnew talent Epic has hired have been people from the Unreal and Quake

103


communities:

• Steve Polge, creator of the ReaperBot mod for Quake.

• Brandon ”GreenMarine” Reinhart, early Unreal mod maker and writerof cool UnrealScript programming tutorials.

• Jack ”mek” Porter, Unreal mod maker and PlanetUnreal news cor-respondent.

• Alan Willard, maker of cool Unreal and Quake levels.

• Shane Caudle, amazing artist and level designer who was buildinghis own Quake TC.

While past work on cool projects is the number one criteria for mostgame developers, having a University degree is a major advantage. Whilethis isn’t a must at Epic, most larger game developers place more em-phasis on having a degree. Besides that, college is a great opportunityto learn useful stuff. My degree is in Mechanical Engineering (Universityof Maryland) – by the time I was in college, I had been programming forabout 10 years and didn’t feel getting a computer science degree wouldbe challenging. So, I chose engineering, and that turned out to be a majorchallenge, and incredibly valuable.

The math I learned there, including vector calculus and finite elementanalysis, which are directly applicable to 3D games, is something I neverwould have studied independently. Self-taught programmers pick up al-gorithms just by looking at other code and reading the occasional book(that’s how I learned to program). But differential equations are just notthe kind of thing you’re likely to rediscover on your own, though un-derstanding them brings clarity to lots of real-world problems you’ll en-counter.

Q. What do I need to get started making mods for popular games?

A. Just a copy of the game, the editing and compiling tools, and accessto the web sites that contain information for mod authors. For http:

//www.unrealtournament.com/, you just need a copy of UT, which in-cludes the editor (on CD#2) and all the http://unreal.epicgames.com/

4.1. FEB 22, 2000

http://www.unrealtournament.com/

http://www.unrealtournament.com/

http://unreal.epicgames.com/unrealscript.htm



unrealscript.htm code for the entire game; visit the Unreal communityweb sites (listed at the top of this page) for tons of pointers to Unreal in-formation. For http://www.idsoftware.com/, you need the retail gameand the utilities; visit http://www.planetquake.com/

to get started. For http://www.valvesoftware.com/, get the game andsee http://www.planethalflife.com/ for tips.

Q. I’m working on a project; do I need to license the Unreal Tournamentengine or sign any paperwork?

A. That depends on what you’re doing:

• If you are making a freely available mod, all you need is the retailversion of the game.

• If you are using the engine for non-commercial academic purposes,all you need is the retail game. Lots of people have been using theUnreal Tournament engine as part of university projects and theses.

• If you are a startup game developer and are prototyping a game inthe Unreal Tournament engine (using the tools available in the re-tail version), you don’t need a license agreement while you’re proto-typing the game. You do need a license agreement in place beforeyou advertise a game, sign a publishing agreement, or otherwiseprofit from the game.

4.1.2 Programming Languages

Ever since my http://www.gamespy.com Developer Week article, ”http://www.gamespy.com/articles/devweek_b.shtm”, I’ve been getting ques-tions about whether we plan to ”do something about it” and define anew programming language. The answer is, we’re already doing that toa certain extent with http://unreal.epicgames.com/unrealscript.htm,which is a high-level, object-oriented, platform-independent languagewith some cool extensions aimed at game code development.

As an engine developer, we’ll always be involved in language design toa certain extent. In the future, the scripting language could evolve into a

4.1. FEB 22, 2000



http://www.idsoftware.com/

http://www.planetquake.com/

http://www.valvesoftware.com/

http://www.planethalflife.com/

http://www.gamespy.com

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/devweek_b.shtm

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/devweek_b.shtm



simpler form, more true to the ”scripting” term: controlling sequences ofin-game events. Or, the scripting language could grow to subsume evenmore of the engine code. We’ll be evaluating these options anew witheach major iteration of the engine, doing whatever is most appropriatefor the technology, recognizing the benefits and drawbacks of going withwell-known proven tech, versus creating newer, better tech.

4.1.3 Also...

• The cool soon-to-be-public site http://www.linuxnewbie.com/ al-ready has posted a http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/games/unreal_tourney.html on how to get started with Unreal Tourna-ment under Linux.

This site is a great idea; the biggest barrier to widespread Linuxadoption right now is the difficulty of getting started, and now instandard decentralized Linux fashion, sites and resources are start-ing to pop up to address this.

• http://www.chessmess.com/musqa-0100.htmon http://www.chessmess.

com/ (saw this on http://www.bluesnews.com).

-Tim

4.2 Feb 28, 2000

Check out the http://www.gamespy.com/articles/moddevweek_b.shtmonthe state of mod development, by our own Brandon ”GreenMarine” Rein-hart. This is the first feature in http://www.gamespy.com/ new http://

www.gamespy.com/articles/moddevweek_a.shtm feature.

Upcoming articles in the series feature Jesse Taylor from the Infiltrationmod team for Unreal Tournament, and David ”crt” Wright of Rocket Arenafor Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament.

4.2. FEB 28, 2000

http://www.linuxnewbie.com/

http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/games/unreal_tourney.html

http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/games/unreal_tourney.html

http://www.chessmess.com/musqa-0100.htm

http://www.chessmess.com/

http://www.chessmess.com/

http://www.bluesnews.com

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/moddevweek_b.shtm

http://www.gamespy.com/

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/moddevweek_a.shtm

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/moddevweek_a.shtm


Now is an exciting time for mod development, as the best teams of enthu-siasts are earning tremendous praise, opening up serious biz opportuni-ties. This dynamic reminds me of the shareware game business around1991 when Epic, Apogee/3D Realms and id Software were born. Backthen, we were just a handful of kids making games for our own enjoy-ment, and releasing them online for others to enjoy – hoping that wemight be able to make some money to pay the bills.

Today all three companies are industry leaders.

Now, think about where today’s best mod authors will be in 9 years!

The advantage that enabled id, 3D Realms, and Epic to rise to the topis something that today’s mod authors have too: we’re in the middle ofa thriving community, and that gives us an awesome feedback loop. Ifwe release something that sucks – whether it’s something big like Un-real 1’s network code, or something subtle like weapon balancing – thenthousands of people will email us complaining until we fix it. Thousandsof smart people besides ourselves are expanding the game universe byrunning web sites, making mods, building levels, and running servers,and they let us know what they like and dislike. In this kind of pressure-cooker environment, only good games and good ideas survive.

-Tim

4.2. FEB 28, 2000

tim sweeney archive - news archive

Documents

tim sweeney

tim sweeney

finding challenge

server administrators

mod authors

unrealscript

unrealscript

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