Important points and advice

[TB-303]

Hello everyone. Firstly I'd like to say great job to everyone involved who helped in aquiring the unreal source code, this has been news many people have waited a long time for so that important improvements can be made to the game. For some people this could appear as too little too late from Epic because of how old the game is and how small the community is now. When they stopped working on official support they could have provided an avenue available of the code for serious and trustworthy modders/experts to get together and fix remaining bugs and help the development of mods. Many lost all hope, but many remained patient, and now the excitement and hard work starts to see what is achievable.

It is now important for all the experts on the unreal engine code to work together and get something created worthy of releasing that will do justice to the game. All the major mod authors need to be in the inner circle on this with the additional support of server admins and players who can offer constructive advice, ideas and help with the reporting of bugs. To get more people to this forum who might be able to help, it might be a wise idea to contact clans who can mass email their forum user databases about this. This patch should be high priority, I know you cannot rush alot of bugfixing and testing, but the patch needs to be done in a matter of months not 1 year or more. People have already been waiting years for major bugfixes/improvements. The important thing to think about is do you want this to be an unreal geeks patch or the peoples patch? Maybe you can have the best of both worlds but trying to do every little thing (meaning things that rarely happen or don't get noticed by the majority) could take way too long to complete.

Some advice I would like to give would be to think clearly about what is most important that should be included in the patch. Think about the majority of people who play unreal, who they are and what they do/know. There are naturally more players than server admins/experts. So naturally a patch should cater for players (noobs especially) first, fixing the major bugs that cause disruption and confusion for them and making the game easier to set up and configure. If a new/inexperienced player is having problems then it would be great to direct them to this patch which will fix alot of problems for them and let them enjoy the game without hitches.

Think about what bugs are most noticed, what bugs break the game experience. Vision and small annoyance bugs affecting a minority are not as important as game breaking bugs. Some things named as bugs by some people, having read the posts here are not very important. An

example would be Turboman:

"sometimes when an enemy dies and its carcass is spawned the collision isnt reduced so i am firing at the collision of his corpse instead of an object behind it, looks really weird and gets annoying."

This is a feature of the game which for me is a good feature. It is natural and realistic because when the body breaks up there will be bone and flesh and your firepower will hit this. You can't expect to fire through it. To avoid it - make sure you are clear of the flesh. It's a laugh when people do die because of the flesh, I usually find it funny.

I would like to stress not to add any major new features that can dramatically change gameplay. Nothing should be done to movement and the weapons, the ammo etc. The game should remain unaffected by a patch which should fix bugs only, not change gameplay to suit people's ideas of what the game should be. Unreal is different to UT and that is why I love it. If you want air control for example that is optional in UTF. Someone made a double jump mod for Unreal and the movement was too clicky to be taken serious enough. Some things are best left alone. It is important not to get carried away. Epic got carried away and left the game with more bugs and some bad design in 226f/Unreal Gold.

[TB-303]

ok, here are 2 lists of Dos and Don'ts I think should be thought about for the patch.

Do
1) Redirection Facility
This is one of the worst things about playing unreal online when you are at a home server with a poor upload speed. This affects everyone, especially noobs. If they get this lag when playing unreal online, you can bet most do not come back again if this is their first experience. It is a pain if you want to host a home server but downloaders ruin the experience, and providing a link to go and download maps means a link in your servername which if too long people wont see or read and most people do not exit a game to go and install content and come back, any noob does not
have a clue how to download and install content. This is an essential piece that unreal needs, and it should be possible now. TCP Wolf told me it should be possible a long time ago if the source code was available. Not everyone can afford to pay for a professional server or a really fast internet package, there are alot of small home servers that can benefit from this fix. Compression feature might be difficult to include and take some time to develop? but it is not needed since unreal files are alot smaller than UT files. You are only suffering downloading from Unreal Servers if you are on 33k or something! With redirection server performance can remain stable and better than ever before.
2) Game breaking crashes
Popular game crashes need to be fixed to improve the stability of the game. The game should not break and cause disruption like it can do sometimes. Hopefully most crashes can be prevented from occuring now.
3) Password Facility
In 226f the password facility does not work correctly, password is not remembered by the game. The password feature was removed in Unreal Gold (stupid..) (command line available only). The patch should bring a fully working password field feature like in 224 and 225 versions. I personally use 225f. A working password facility will help players in a big way. It used to be tiring hearing of people unable to use passwords in 226f/gold. Even people who had played unreal for a long time.
4) Compatibility (Versions)
Hope you have a clear mind to take this in. It is important to maintain compatibility in 227. If someone installs the patch, then obviously this will be a version that will help server admins and players. Players with 224/225/226/gold/227 have to be able to connect to a 227 server. A big question is is one patch going to be able to be installed by oldunreal users and ugold users, or will there have to be seperate patches but both will provide the same compatibility. Will a universal or seperate 227 patch for ugold enable ugold users to run a server like an oldunreal server? (so if you join a server it will be just version 227 unreal, even if the game used for the server was oldunreal or ugold. Even if 227 cannot provide ugold users support then the great thing is the patch will improve servers and player options alot for oldunreal users, however a large majority of players use ugold, especially newer players, alot of players who play unreal regularly use gold.
5) Compatibility (Mods)
The patch should make sure it is compatible with all the major mods, mutators and add-ons. This is a chance to fix any bugs that make it hard for mod makers to fix bugs in their own works.
6) Ghosts/Scoreboard Errors
Forgive me if I am wrong, but I think this is only a UTF (UTeamFix) bug where players who use 226f and also gold get doubled up scoreboards and have to reconnect to fix the bug. Hopefully this can be fixed so that no one has to RECONNECT for this reason. Also there is a ghosting bug
in 226f and gold too I think where a player will see ghost players in the map. I'm sure you know alot more about that already. This should be fixed so that reconnects are not needed.
7) Menu System
Would be a good idea to develop the patch with a menu system that is used in old unreal (224/225). Not like the fancy pants interface in unreal gold. The advanced options are easy to use and configure in oldunreal. Console box from gold would be good instead of drop down console, especially if drop down console crash can not be fixed. The menu system used by keyboard in 224/225 is very fast and easy to navigate, mouse support is not required. The game has a better feel also with the older style menu, it is too UT in gold with that flashy interface with bad design/unfinished features and unexisting configuration options. This is personal taste I know. Stability is most important, and the ease of implementing things. A big question would be if it is possible to replace the gold interface with the oldunreal menu system in the patch.

[TB-303]

Don't
1) Graphics And Sound
This is an important issue. Some would argue the game is fine as it is for graphics. Many people choose a different version of unreal because it works best for them and their graphics card, and because a certain patch or program works best with that version of Unreal. If adding any additional graphics modes (not sure how that would be possible) then I think it is important to provide the original graphics modes listed also so that the user can choose what he/she wants to suit them. It is important not to delete options that some people need, prefer and love. In 227 it is important that it supports compatibility with other graphics patches and programs (Glidewrapper!). I don't need to talk about sound because all of the above applies to sound also.
2) Weapons
The weapon functions and effects should not be changed, the game should remain as it is now, as it was originally made. The way ammo works should not be changed. I would say everything about the weapons are fine and you are just too fussy if you want to change something. External mods can be used if a user or server admin wants to change something.
3) Gameplay
Nothing should be changed in gameplay, original movement should remain the same for example. Unreal is unique as it is and should not turn into UT or anything else. Unreal is Unreal, do not mess with it.
4) Menu System
Do not go overboard with the menu system. The more options and features in a menu, the more programming and coding it will need which means the patch will take alot longer. The menu system needs to be stable, easy to access and use. Original menu options should remain, some things could be improved. Obviously a redirection facility would need a menu system.
5) Destroy compatibility
As previously talked about in the Do list. Don't break compatibility between unreal versions, if possible 227 could be a chance to improve compatibility. It is important not to ruin any working relationships between current unreal versions.
6) Mods
227 should be mainly about the game, not about modding. This should not be a chance to throw all the mods into the patch which could make a bigger file size, make the patch development longer, and could cause more bugs. Unreal has had and still has a hard working, successful mod community, people have not abandoned the game completely and I admire mod makers hard work and effort they put in to help improve the experience for server admins and players. Mods should remain independent and not be included to totally change the game in a big way. Remember not everyone likes or agrees with the different mods that are out there. Also future fixes/development of external mods could cause incompatibility with 227 if code from these mods were included in 227. Just a thought but I am no expert.
7) Additional Content
This is a big no no from me and I expect many others. Patch should be kept as small as possible. Maps, Texture files, music, intro movies, large images, demos etc etc should be kept away from this patch. The patch should be kept professional and true to the vision, and that is to do what epic did not finish. Additional content falls to the decisions of server admins.

[TB-303]

I expect the patch to come as an .exe and function like the official patches, if that is possible.

If you feel this is serious enough and that there will definitely be something at the end of all of this then it might be worthwhile to get in touch with BeyondUnreal and PlanetUnreal so you can make this a news story. But it might be wise to know what you are dealing with first, knowing if you can do the patch as Universal for all unreal versions is a biggie.

Well I think I have finished, sorry about the length. I had to write it all in a text file because I don't trust browsers with my forum books (after losing 1 or 2 masterpieces in the past because of forum systems developing a fault), then I had to copy and paste in sections because of the limit and when copying into the forum field it puts everything in 2 line segments with a empty line inbetween so I had to do alot of sorting out!

Thanks for listening.

TB-303

[Smirftsch]

heheh, i'm impressed. Some of the bugs u mentioned are already fixed, like the scoreboard and the password f.e. - but ok to the text you wrote. I think with your "no no" you have got the point of this patch, i couldnt have written it myself better. Compatibilty is a hard thing, and in the current state any older unreal can connect to a new server the only possibility to break it is a bug which can't be fixed otherwise, then its a decission of fixing the bug or keeping compatibility. But such a question will be asked here in the forums then, this patch is developed with the community, not without it, as you can notice here.
Gameplay wont be changed at all, maybe some eycandy and such will be added, like decals and maybe if possible footprints and footstepsounds- although i wish to add one thing i missed since unreal is existing- why can't a person don't crouch through a tunnel of half player height ? Maybe adding this feature as some kind of additional gametype.
If possible, but currently i doubt it can be made in a considerable amount of time are features like bumpmapping and realtimeshadows.
Yes, most of us prefer the old menu style over the UT-Style, and its a matter of time too, the bugs to fix are more important than working for hours and hours on a new menusystem or backporting it from UT like it was done in UGold (which explains the bugs and missing functions there)
Uhm...what to tell else. I'd love to add some new plants, maybe some new healing plants to replace the stupid bandage which looks kinda ugly and weird within a nature based map and maybe healingplants for underwater - and the reworked textures from the retexturing project are amazing - but those are additional then and will when made (but hell this is step 10000000, currently bugfixing is more than enough work) downloadable as .u file so that older versions can use it as well if mappers build them in. If in a maybe coming "Unrelal-Platinum" those plants, textures, maybe finaly some reworked trees, the old are really very ugly can be placed without losing netcompatibilty is a good question, guess not.
First we have to provide a patch so that everyone wishes to switch to 227, if server or client. Then we can provide more features.

[TB-303]

If some of the bugs I mentioned have already been fixed then please feel free to add them to the fixed bugs topic.

I would advise on a forum area for the community to talk about ideas and features regarding 227. If you want the community involved then they need a dedicated place to vent otherwise you will end up with posts in this section which you want for bugfixing only. Would also be the place to ask questions/polls. Hopefully more people will come here to give their input and if you want the community involved then people need the right to have free speech somewhere. But of course you need to get the news about the development of this to people, not alot of people know about it.

"why can't a person don't crouch through a tunnel of half player height ?"

I cannot remember this affecting me or anyone talking about it alot, usually tunnels in maps are made to accomodate players easily, something to do with the collisionradius.

no offence but it sounds like you contradict yourself a little bit saying one thing and then saying the opposite. You are against new content but then talk about replacing the bandage and adding some things.

If you mean the S3 textures I have tried them before, they can look nice but if I remember can look odd sometimes because not all textures are supported and in custom maps it might make things look bad perhaps.

Considering the age of the game the content is unique and nothing should be replaced imo.

if you want to put in too much external stuff it could easily turn into a bloated mod.

Since this is the first and only chance we have at doing something like this I understand why you want to include things, but I don't think things should be changed if fine as they are. Most people know how to install mods and other content if they want extra features/content on their server or for personal viewing.

game function is most important.

[Shambler]

I got that crouching thing working in Infiltration but I had a problem were the players view goes all screwy...plus I don't think you could do the slidge-dodging after coding that in....got fed up with it after a while and left it, IMO it's not suitable for a patch anyway.

[TCP_Wolf]

Some good advice there, although Smirftsch goes along the same ideas fixing bugs first before getting at new features.

"DO REPLIES"

@1) Redirection
Nephthys allows for download slowing, so home servers now CAN have a resolve to their lag. The will possibly be imported if possible. Redirect would be nice, of course. At this point I am not sure if both client and server would need to be 227 for that to work. I know Smirftsch is working hard at the netcode, so maybe sometime he may be able to answer that.

@2,3) right

@4) compatibility (engine):
Smirftsch hinted that the patch - as based on 226f - will hopefully work for all releases, however, it will probably disable all Gold features when patching Gold. So you will lose the UT style menu and the UPak-Console. There's another thread about redoing the menues related to that, but personally, I give a s-h-i-t on the UT style menu.

@5) compatibility (mods):
This is a major concern that was heeded from the start. Not much point if you suddenly can't play Inf, Serp, CTF etc etc anymore...

@6) Ghost bug:
It is a garbage collection error on the engine part. It has nothing todo with UTF. It does not happen on EDM servers because EDM's console executes a forced garbage collection in between map changes. UTF has no console, so you are exposed to the bug.

@7) see 4...

[TCP_Wolf]

"DON'T REPLIES"

@1) not my expertise  ;D

@2,3) right

@4) well 3rd time that issue comes up. I don't really agree redirect needs a menu subsystem, because the redirect really only needs to be set by ADMINS and those are supposed to read the manuals either way to properly set up their inis. Players don't need their hands there...

@5,6,7) basically a repeatition, I perfectly do agree to keep it "Unreal like" in all regards as it should be - this isn't UT  :-*

[TCP_Wolf]

Thanks for listening.

My pleasure

[Turboman.]

you seem to have completely misunderstood my statement about broken carcass collision, basically i'll try to explain more detailed:

a certain pawn has a collision of 500 units high, which is from his feet to his head, however when the pawn dies his corpse still stays at a collision of 500 units high while his entire body is located on a floor and not occupying any more then 20 units high, meaning you are shooting at his collision while his body isnt even located near you, its a really annoying bug because its collision can obstruct your fire, its completely unrealistic and a completely lame bug.

basically cylindrical collision is a completely retarded idea and i dont know what they have been smoking at epic when they implented that.

[Smirftsch]

"why can't a person don't crouch through a tunnel of half player height ?"

I cannot remember this affecting me or anyone talking about it alot, usually tunnels in maps are made to accomodate players easily, something to do with the collisionradius.

no offence but it sounds like you contradict yourself a little bit saying one thing and then saying the opposite. You are against new content but then talk about replacing the bandage and adding some things.

i didnt say the opposite of anything, and my idea wasnt to replace the bandage but adding some new things which increase the beauty of the game, f.e. like small plants for nature maps which can be placed instead of a bandage and those plants not included in the game itself but in a small .u file which can be used for any unreal version before too. No one will be forced to use such things but those who want can, and i'm sure a lot of ppl especially the mappers would appreciate a lil more beauty in the game. Take it as a gift, if it can be realized.

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The password bug was mentioned in the fixed section, the other, yep, forgot to add it

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" expect the patch to come as an .exe and function like the official patches, if that is possible.

yes it is, and it will

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If you feel this is serious enough and that there will definitely be something at the end of all of this then it might be worthwhile to get in touch with BeyondUnreal and PlanetUnreal so you can make this a news story.

If you know Oldunreal you know that all bigger updates we made here like opengl and openal were at PU and BU as well as on some others.

--

But it might be wise to know what you are dealing with first, knowing if you can do the patch as Universal for all unreal versions is a biggie."

what do you think we are doing here .....?

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I would advise on a forum area for the community to talk about ideas and features regarding 227. If you want the community involved then they need a dedicated place to vent otherwise you will end up with posts in this section which you want for bugfixing only.

This forum will be for ideas and such when the time comes for it, but features are a completely different story. Currently no feature requests could be discussed anyway, the bugfixing is taking already every minute i and everyone else in the team can spare. So the request for bugreporting only atm was chosen for a good reason. If 227 will contain any new base features as well can be questioned. Probably 227 will be really an "only bugfix" version, while "UnrealPlatinum" is as request in the forums here, with new features and such, could be maybe 228 or so then. Its all a question of time. Then it makes sense to open an official feature request board. Until then feel free to open such a thread, i didnt made any limitations about that, but i wanna have it seperately to the bugs.
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Would also be the place to ask questions/polls. Hopefully more people will come here to give their input and if you want the community involved then people need the right to have free speech somewhere. But of course you need to get the news about the development of this to people, not alot of people know about it.

Sure, sooner or later more people need to come here, but the reason i didnt announce this project currently at BU or PU is simple. At the moment there are a LOT of bugs reported, its a lot of work to fix those, once the already mentioned bugs are found and fixed there is enough time to show the ppl the work and make it public as pre-release so that more bugs can be searched and fixed. When this step is over then we can talk about releasing an offical 227. And then as already mentioned above - feature requests.

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Considering the age of the game the content is unique and nothing should be replaced imo.
if you want to put in too much external stuff it could easily turn into a bloated mod.
Since this is the first and only chance we have at doing something like this I understand why you want to include things, but I don't think things should be changed if fine as they are. Most people know how to install mods and other content if they want extra features/content on their server or for personal viewing.

I hope you understood that no one here is going to change the game and NOTHING is gonna replaced - to add maybe some long missing things, and some eyecandy, which anyone can choose to activate or not can hardly be called a change in game or gameplay. The idea is to give the mappers arround here the chance to create some maps which they couldnt realize yet.

And to be honest some additional things like trees which could be used in a new maps or reworked popular maps instead of the ugly things which are called trees atm... , don't u think ?

for the crouching - the same, i didnt plan to change the game but to give it a chance to enhance the game a bit there, as already said maybe as additional gametype. Sure, the current maps wouldnt need it, but new maps COULD use it, and i dont know any other of such games like Unreal which wouldnt support it, i find its a long missing feature. Why shouldnt a crouched player not be able to crouch through tunnels ?

- but even all this is to be done, currently only an idea and should be put into the feature requests later anyway, so maybe my mistake to speak about it here at all.

[Canadian_Bacon]

When you do add features such as realtime shadows, decals, all the eye candy, will it be possible to turn these off completely? my comp can't take any eyecandy, it'd be ncie if you came up with a way to speed up the old comps or the ones without gfx cards lol. like a feature that is performance only if it can be done. TB - 303 is right about some parts he said and that corpse collision hull isn't a big deal. Once the death animation is done the hull flattens out around the corpse so you can shoot over it.

plus if you did happen to fix the collision hull, people with the new patch would have a clear advantage over the people who didn't get the patch. It's make more sense to implement this in unreal platinum which should NOT be presented as a patch but as a new game entirly if your gonna change some crap around. so far features such as real-time shaodws and decals don't really effect anything. It would be awsome to be able to see decals in inf alot better because the smoke puffs that it makes only work every 10 bullets or so. i guess this is sometihng shambler would kknow about.

[Smirftsch]

IF they can be realized and when are the questions first, and i can't answer them. Sure, when implemented then with a possibility to turn them off. For the advantage...well the problem will be anyway that when added they won't probably work in a lot of maps simply because the lighting in the maps was never set that for that, a lot of maps i know have a few lightsources somewhere in the sky instead of placing them to each point where a lightsource should be - again a lot of work. Don't be afraid, it might take that long that you can afford a new pc in this time

[TCP_Wolf]

plus if you did happen to fix the collision hull, people with the new patch would have a clear advantage over the people who didn't get the patch.

No!

Collision detection is serverside, so if server is 227 and "fixed" saying "you shot over it" then you did shoot over it, if not, then not.

[Canadian_Bacon]

oh ok, so it shouldn't cause a problem