The April - May beta (unknown build) detailed discussion

[Leo T_C_K]

may07QueenEndTop.PNG

Okay the top view seems to be matching the low res screenshot...so I guess those are really the square lifts then.

I'll let you know if the other ones match too....because this is really stuff that's difficult to spot. I guess its really a bit of a frankenbuild then and that GTI fucked up merging maps. the verdict depends on the examination of the evidence

[Leo T_C_K]

So basically all those magazines/strategy guides and what not got each at last moments different versions from their distribution of gti....some of them had hugely outdated maps like queenend while others had them updated. This also seems to be the case with that score magazine...(it had already the plasma based projectile yet it had queenend tht was based on the april dated version)

I guess "dispammo" could be easily recreated (even using u3dbinread) but why? Then again such questions could be asked about the nwfalcon version too like why did he change the unpass.ini to be instead stored in unreal.ini....

[Leo T_C_K]

This is different though...so the pc gamer one didn't have the actual start corridor...judging by this..look

compare it to the low res screenshot...

thats not surprising given the pc gamer version still even has the plain krall skin but yea.....

May07QueenEndSide.PNG

May07QueenEndFront.PNG

edit: To delacroix and similar figures: You should be blaming nwfalcon for setting the precedent and thus making us suspicious. That warning you made is still relevant..except fayiadg wasn't one faking anything. He did however sell the beta under not so great circumstances. Or rather...release it behind a paywall online...

[Leo T_C_K]

When I said plain krall skin I meant plain krall beta skin..but yea

For myself I concluded that this beta is most likely real...it just isn't something put together by Tim or anyone else in charge. Its basically a merger of the test master with things being removed, in between that and gold master....it seems like GTI created a multiverse of different versions (GW press/Prima and various magazines showing different ones in different countries/distributions). That is hard to keep track of...in some of them some resource was updated in some it was way behind schedule...and since schreiber and few others had creative input and decisions...stuff kept changing in this manner.

Tim was obviously overworked to keep track...he was tasked also with assembling the final build and the main test build before that in April. But the problem is that GTI released stuff in between to various people/reviewers and what not. Epic should have had more engineers imo to fall back on.

But yea these are the problems when you strike a deal with publishers too. At the time of Unreal Epic alone couldn't have afforded the higher developement costs, hence...all that. They used to publish their own games(and games of others even, see Radix, with minor contributions by james schmalz, ironically a game that was similar to the very oldest 1994 "Unreal", a "space" shooter) until around the developement of Unreal. And didn't resume until way later after around fortnite's success...

edit: In b4 Mister Profit hears of "multiverse of Unreal betas" and says "VORTEXX MESSA....its time for you to go there!"

[Leo T_C_K]

for reference here are the other two versions (apart from that pc gamer vid)

Queen_1a.png

that is from the score magazine which i had

but this one seems identical to may07 as it has the start corridor plus the same bsp bug

Queen_Editor_2.png

[Leo T_C_K]

I found a page talking about a may beta version, but shows a screenshot of villa2 as well. So maybe its a slightly differentversion?

I dunno why the article was updated though with a modern s3tc screenshot at the top though

https://www.pelit.fi/artikkelit/unreal-4/


https://www-pelit-fi.translate.goog/art ... r_pto=wapp

yea it doesn't have the beta text on the translator icon either. Bet this is the gw press version instead?

any way to contact this guy?

Code: Select all

Julkaistu
    1.6.1998
Kirjoittaja
    Tuomas Honkala 
    

[Leo T_C_K]

I wanted to finally write an update on this. That guy claimed not to have anything left.
Anyways, I was able to check out the may7 beta in person finally on one of the public libraries, not for very long though and right now I'm at place far away from any public library and it was hell to get this running at all...

So...one of the things I noticed that I don't think was noted public yet is that...the weapon switching is more like Doom, when you run out of ammo you can switch back to your weapons. It will then switch to the next weapon with ammo. Instead of no ammo messages.

The reason Vortex2 doesn't have the femalebody skin when the map is run under the released/vanilla version is because female1skins had differently named team skins and for some reason this version had the blue skin, named fem1blue or something instead of t_blue.
I noticed that the french trailer shows the body having one of the other skins though but that was a different beta.
If you use delacroix's resaved files the file won't have the reference anymore to that skin as it got cleared out when re-saving. This means all team skins potentially used in those maps might have the skin cleared out.

Speaking of teamgames, the beta has the option to name your team and the initial plan seemed to be to have loose teams without forced team colors and they seemed to be implemented pretty late/were optional. It all wasn't finalized but the team games were meant to be more improvised and I bet there would have been other clues and listing to find out who is on what team, just never got implemented.
So in that release crunch period they went to what was the easiest to implement and went more quake like without the actual pallete changing tricks but hard skins anyways. This is why there aren't really team variants of all the other skins but defaults in Unreal. With UT that was changed obviously, but remember its a small miracle they even got the multiplayer in a state it is. It seemed to have been shoved away at the last moment and there were heavy changes still week(s) before release. Radikus was the last map made and the second one to replace the "showcase warpzone map" slot. It used to be Splash and then it was Solaris only to fall on Radikus in the end with more traditional portals. Solaris was more Escher like and was supposed to be seamless but it must have been nightmare online.

Deathfan has a nice blue sky and I asked jackhonda to make a combined may7 deathfan (as release for final Unreal), Delacroix or someone can link to the file in the meantime, its just something interesting to try out and its how morbfanza would have looked like if it was included.
The deathfan has also the windows like the released version, yet the layout is still like the february beta.
HealPod has Terraniux like pipes in the section connection to flak cannon instead of walkways. However sometimes player can get stuck in them and skaarjplayer won't fit at all. This is why it was changed. The belt "secret" is also not there at the upper most level instead there's the forcefield item and no ledge with the shieldbelt. Deck16 is like I remember it to be from the version I played basically back in 1998. Toxinsuits and overall being more like the feb beta but a little nicer. I only played that map once but this reminded me how it was.

Setskin will allow you to see your current skin in the main menu btw.

Also if you get cornered by monsters and use splash damage weapon, you are fucked because in this version the damage will all go to you basically.

So...there are more differences than meets the eye and I couldn't spot them based on screenshots and videos provided to me.

edit: so yea it just shows that if things didn't happen I would have had a different impression and would have also been more sceptical with inoxx's and others reports, because of the messy developement and multiple people involved.
However I need to examine something very specific next time I get the chance. Something that makes no sense to me and is different when I tried it than what was shown to me before.
But what I mean I was practically on the run from criminals and the government in extent since the threats and trouble came. By now I know that if I stayed I would have sure been killed or been in very very bad shape. Not that I am now in good shape, my lungs are destroyed compared to how they were...after like two pneumonias now.
There was no way I had any fair chance. It was all difficult and sacrificies had to be made and someone really sabotaged things for me plus we got robbed as well. It was stresfull for all the people that tried to help me and not everyone made it intact if you get what I mean.

I had no recourse possible. Because of that other court case that happened, they had a second shot at it, years later and just decided off the table I need to be imprisoned. At that point no lawyer is even possible. Or whatever the heck some people were suggesting. Czech republic does not have the rule of law despite what it seems on the outside. There's just open corruption.

And those guys after me would have reached me easily inside those institutions. Given their connections.

[Leo T_C_K]

Sorry for the OT stuff at the end of the edit but I needed to explain my absence. And I don't have time/opportunity to explain it in another thread.

Also I noticed that ISVKran (both the combined april version and the separate 32 version) have unused vent shaft drops at the coolant section. I believe this was once used for spawning of enemies/traps, but was later changed up. I couldn't check the released version for comparison but if jackhonda is to be believed those brushes were completely removed later on.

[Leo T_C_K]

About that examination...somehow the altered file for the KTC fix altered properties of the endgame gameinfo class. Somehow dispersionpistol and regular hud was added there, like if defaultproperties were copied. It could be some bug related to user config, it might have literally copied every defaultproperties or so hence it was modified within the editor. But yea...that's some strange behavior really.
If anyone is using the ktcmorbiastest thing, be aware of this issue and it will be fixed in a separate file by jackhonda later as I instructed him. All the KTC fix was supposed to do was to fix the mesh of sacredcow from being none. But apparently there are some strange behaviors, like I myself noticed if you run the game before applying the altered file, you will have different defaultproperties for the gametype and it will alter it for subsequent use because of your config file. But the other way around stuff happened too.

[Leo T_C_K]

Oh great now I can't edit the previous post, too much time passed. Well...
he will make the patch and attempt to also re-add the missing sprites for the dp, I was meant to do that but yea on the library the editor didn't work either when I had a chance. (plus all the stuff gets erased when you log out so you can't continuously work on anything)

Also, I think the bug here is that he might have opened the properties of the parentclass, then because its a config class, it did copy the properties from config/parentclass into it while re-compiling. It seems to be a bug with config classes only and unique to these beta versions so that's another thing that shows its unique version and thus real, despite how it was shoddily put together at the gt interactive offices.

[Leo T_C_K]

A patch for the UnrealI file from the beta(rename the file from the archive to "UnrealI.u" please):
patch

this is a followup to this


viewtopic.php?p=103528#p103528

what this new patch does is it fixes endgame back as that one for some reason had regular hud and dispersionpistol, so its back to defaults, this happened due to a bug with config classes.

Additionally it also adds back the missing sprites for the dispersionpistol upgrade.

This was implemented by JackHonda based on my instructions.

[Leo T_C_K]

There is some more findings I noted down earlier:

the grab key functionality. In the beta unlike in vanilla/200, you can't grab small steelboxes (and since 220 it got reverted to this behavior again).

During flying decorations don't get destroyed when you touch them so you can push, only very small ones get destroyed like books. And those you can still grab midflight.

And some messages like these:

Like there is a "lost his head" death message as alternative to decapitated by and maybe also when its self damage. Its just it gets displayed for both cases sometimes and the messages are a bit broken ingame.

[Leo T_C_K]

A patch for the UnrealI file from the beta(rename the file from the archive to "UnrealI.u" please):
patch

this is a followup to this


viewtopic.php?p=103528#p103528

what this new patch does is it fixes endgame back as that one for some reason had regular hud and dispersionpistol, so its back to defaults, this happened due to a bug with config classes.

Additionally it also adds back the missing sprites for the dispersionpistol upgrade.

This was implemented by JackHonda based on my instructions.

Just a note, if you use the ktcmorbiastest with this file and you haven't yet run the game, you need to change bnomonsters to false. In the UnrealI included with the test that was changed but since all config was reset to avoid the endgame issue, this is now how it works, so you need to do that in preferences, the ktc options are there under gametypes.
its prefered to use the new file overall, just you need to do that setting yourself.

[Leo T_C_K]

A question: Is it me or is the execution section a bit different actually in the left corner? There is a "square" missing in the glass too and from one angle on Glide at least it starts to remind a bit of forcefield. I wonder then that this must have been made from the forcefield room at one point. That they re-arranged the room a bit to turn it into this and moved it down?

Seeing a lot of the maps on Glide makes me remember things how they were in the other beta more.

Also there's no bandages on this vortex2 unless they are also gone on Unreal difficulty because that's what I played at. When playing as skaarjtrooper you can dodge into the kevlarsuit but otherwise its broken because you cant exit the map through the hatch. You can also destroy the fan with altfire at the end.

Also if you keep shooting at the Warlord at NyLeve with automag when he gets "stuck" for a moment, you can get him to chase after you, not sure if I mentioned it here. He won't fly off. This is probably how they made those screenshots from that other betatest in those powervr or whatever screenshots.

UnrealI.int still mentions peacemaker and translocator module and also has the lost his head message but in a fuller form. Check it out, you can paste it here, the message. Because I forgot what it said.

Also I like playing using female2 with setskin 3 command. After you do that you can see the skin in the menu.

Its also interesting how the male1 bots don't change skin at random like the vanilla ones do. It really looks like they reverted to older build and continued on from there at one point.
Because the older betas have all the bots change skin at random, like the february one. With male1 they chose to bring it back to showcase the "unused" skins or something? though this breaks sometimes continuity in machinimas like powerout because the male1 bot can get a different skin in part 2. That was kind of stupid on part of Epic honestly.

When played on a screen with big size and correct resolution on Glide, DeathFan does look identical especially from angles to the version I remember playing really. It must have been this version with the windows and the blue sky. the date of the map is still April's isn't it? Which means really that the one I played must have been an April one most likely.

Curse also seems to be similar to the one I played. Apart from missing secrets there is forcefield and the minigun bridge uses a different (better fitting imo) texture and also the above walkway has a stone texture. I find this a bit better aestheticaly than what we got though I love the new secrets in the later Curse.

Btw I can really safely say this is a real beta and not a fake given all the above. I just wasn't shown/told really these things.When I couldn't play it.

edit: I recommend people try the botmatch with auto adjust skill for bots skill level 3 and coop weapon mode, with frag limit at least 15. Try playing it like that and you might somewhat enjoy this version.

Also if you want to try glide just do this
drag glide2x.dll into system and run the game and select resolution in windowed mode from the context menu and then do hardware 3d.

problem solved

glide2x
here for download

[Leo T_C_K]

This was the head loss message I talked about found in UnrealI.int

HeadLossMessage="lost his head while fighting"

edit:

The UnrealI int file is dated
06.04.1998 (April 6th).
So...it is around the build I played so no wonder it sounds familiar, the lost his head message.

That's why peacemaker and translocator are there still they weren't cut yet...while they are missing in the may version.

This is a fucking frankenbuild staight from gt interactive offices LOL

If there ever was official frankenbuild its this one LoL

version 88 codedrop internaly feels like one too with the weird mix of things but this is a real thrown together stuff lol

edit2: also not sure if I mentioned it, the king of the hill is still similar to the february beta one although I think with the exception of it not giving you health per each frag. But you are "speciallit" when you become king, you don't glow red like in vanilla. You are all black. (unless you get shone into with speciallit light)

WE'RE 100 PERCENT BLACK! (reference to Deus Ex Malkavian Mod)

ME TOO

[Leo T_C_K]

So...I played around with the Warlord and lesserbrutes. The thrown male body skin is actually M1_Green and uses a simpler "animation". I see this will become a problem so maps with carcasses will need to be resaved/remapped for the later team skins.

I made the warlord kill all the brutes by having them infight the problem is he turns to the player after and its GAME OVER man GAME OVER.

He fucking made me back off into the cage elevator, he killed the tentacle and he had me end up on the roof of the elevator where i got crushed.

The ASSHOLE WARLOD. LOL

Noo but seriously if the warlord was set up differently and just triggered, that flying stuck thing wouldn't happen but if he's mutilating and triggers on sight there's this bug hence why me and uberserker usually set them to low sightradius. For Unreal PSX E2L1A he had to be triggered/shielded from the player with invis movers for cutscene to work properly. Unless you fix the script itself otherwise for the sight stuff.

YOU'LL SEE NEXT TIME WARLORD I'LL GET YA.

If I had a peacemaker and if the beta still had it, I would....just throw it in his face and LAUGH like he LAUGHS with the CUT THROAT ANIM.

HA.

EDIT: and it wouldn't be this guy





or this guy that i'd throw at him



edit2: lol I didn't notice it picked for me the spanish version of that image with clooney lmao

EL PACIFICADOR

MAKE PACIFICADOR WEAPON

[Gamesharder]

killall warlord

Warlords hate this one simple trick!
Click for more!

[Leo T_C_K]

It reminds me though that one czech magazine or something I had once claimed that the Warlord can come in two forms, one wingless and one with wings. The only wingless warlord we saw is the old model screenshot in that 96 creature document though.

Like as if he had detachable or mechanical wings at one point or something.

[Leo T_C_K]

Zeur speculated that maybe the intention was at one point for him to detach his wings like at the end of the fight at nalilord or equivalent before teleporting away. It could make sense to do something like that once and make him iradiated like he is at the beta.

[Leo T_C_K]

Okay the rest of nyleve completed/examined in detail by me. I came to surprising conclusions. There's another M1_Green in the Nali House under the tentacle (I'm playing on Unreal difficulty).

The water flow is different actually, left of waterfall pushes you to left right of waterfall pushes you to right, its not uniflow like in the release version.

Also because i can't compare it to the release game directly, the pushing combined with the player physics in this version can make you stuck completely unlike in the release version where you can still get out. The 'pillar' on the far side with the elevator above water can be walked through as well so that bug is in both versions.

That's it basically apart from some skill level differences otherwise with different items appearing/enemies.

edit: jackhonda confirmed to me that its the physics of the may7 version that gets you stuck, they did tweak the controls later to allow for more.

so when you run this map (or resaved delacroix's version) on later versions of the game it works like intended.

[Leo T_C_K]

But yea apparently the released map just happens to have zoneleak underwater. One side is supposed to push you in the other direction still.
With rebuild it might fix itself or break completely lol.

[Leo T_C_K]

I just had a weird otherworldly experience with the beta while I tried to get a coffee. I used the public computer for like 5 mins or so only, just launching king of the hill...I became the KOtH and then...I became

CONFUSED TRAVOLTA in an instant



Seriously, I jumped into the slime with the asmdammo, I listened to the Guardian music (i thought none of the levels had music anymore but this time I had audio clearly on) and the moment I hit the slime with 5 points of toxinsuit, it bugged out, I thought I was killed but I was not....

I was stuck and my health became 200 like when becoming koth, I was in behindview mode and I was invisible. I could still fire with my flak cannon but everything was slowed down. Either I hit a bind with slomo cheat or it was just messed up and was some bug with tick and timing...I have no idea.

Just wtf...

EDIT:
I forgot to name the map, it was on deck16...

[Leo T_C_K]

OK I figured out what the issue was. Apparently the score limit got reached and its fucking buggy on endgame().

It does set timedilation to 0.3 during endgame. So the last death is slowmotion. Except it bugs out sometimes and you can respawn and the bots also sometimes.

It sucks lol.

Anyways started to play on Dig, just got past the arrow button 4 sided pillar and that's it for now. No new observations apart from what was already stated about Dig, the skaarj barrier(the bars that close on you) not having the "step" arrangement yet for coop, the forcefield being yet another texture, the lift at the lava being by default down and some bsp/hom error differences and that's about all I could see.

edit: the slowmo death thing reminds me of that mutator they did in the later games honestly

[Leo T_C_K]

I played further, but really, some of the erratic behavior does remind me of the beta I played. Like there was a bug there that caused bots to stop appearing, I didn't trigger it here and we thought it was because of the virus but I think its just the messyness with the config and how it fails to save settings for one gametype properly and that kind of stuff.

now in Dig I got a mixture of random behavior and odd enemy appearance like it was clearly on difficulty 3, yet the second skaarj failed to spawn, i stopped hearing any music, that kind of stuff. I mean its good that normally the music resumes from what it was after save, including the song sections but now it fails to play music at all.

So the experience of the second half of dig SUCKED for me. It does get boring the only positive thing was the dp upgrade and wow on the speed its supposed to run the fully charged one does look very impressive on Glide I have to say. The way it spins and kind of reminds of the skaarj projectiles, with the big ..what's the word, the part of a star that reaches out, those arms, as in of the flare effect.

I have to say nyleve and vortex2 felt like better experiences, I usually like playing Dig but these issues were ruining it for me, together with the fact that the fan zoneinfo velocity is impossible to pass from what i could see. On the way back you can drop down but really, this is worse than it is on version 220 with this stuff. Yea I never finished that challenge run myself that I set out, not fully.

But yea they really broke the player physics here. Like even the february version IS better mind you. The zonevelocity shit gets brutal both in nyleve and here. And you swim really clumsily its like walking than swimming. Who the fuck thought of this, yet in behindview it feels different, like they made it more depending on you seeing the actual anim or what is this? What were they thinking? Yea I know there's also the fact about the weapons if they run out of ammo it acts way different from the release version and more like Doom. But come on now.

Than to think that maybe this version was supposed to be really the base/split for the Dreamcast version lol.

[Leo T_C_K]

It seems to be rather random what kind of behavior you get. Are there also more oddsofappearing or not? Because i'd swear its normally different with some of these enemies. Dug has f2_green. Near the exploding barrels. So yet another green teamskin. They seemed to be fond of using the green team often for some reason.

The skaarj are more agile and the skaarjwarrior easily jumps down/drops down even by mistake. And sometimes they can be dumber than vanilla but often they seem more unpredictable. The amplifier changes things up, lol it becomes an overpowered weapon in altfire really, unlike release unreal the altfire gets also upgraded but in different way with dp upgrade and even more radical with the alt....
but yea the darkened glass in dug before the end warehouse makes stuff really dark until you shoot it, that was changed in the release
Passage has more mantas I'd swear, also the water splashes work PERFECTO here...
I mean even better/less buggy than retail, it really just only registers right at the radius height and it doesn't spam the sound either just wow. This is how it was supposed to work...
Also the texture on the back of the door that closes at Chizra entrance changes between the maps lol. Is that also the case in the release ver?

Btw in case you want extra dm maps to play with/compare.
Here's all the "retail maps" that will load on this version, plus dmvilla2 (not resaved). DmFith you can leave out if you want, the only real difference is better lighting and the fact the released map has 1337 nodes on bsp stats. LOL

extra

here are the original february dm maps renamed
febextra

but since some of them are bugged quite a bit, here are resaves/fixes, like I told jackhonda to fix all the zoneinfos that blinded the player by
decreasing viewfog by two digits.

also the two maps that had warpzones had to be rebuilt. splash and sky11
you can test the original on the may beta and see what happens with them LOL

so here's patch for most of them but not all..some run without any problems and fixes needed
febmapfix

I had to fix the issue by editing the unreal.ini config file btw with the koth, because it kept remembering the old values and you could not change it in the menu. Music worked alright this time too.