OldUnreal (Engine)

Hey guys, just thought I'd pop in here and offer some encouragement. Shivaxi's been telling me a lot on IRC about all the various improvements and enhancements 227 has got going for it, and I gotta say, a lot of it is really impressive, especially breaking the node limit. I know you probably get a lot of bug reports and constant reminders of all the problems that you're still experiencing, which is only to be expected during the development cycle of ANY kind of software, but it definitely helps to get a pat on the back every once in a while.

I haven't even used 227 yet (planning to install it soon to play Sinistral's recently-released map pack), but I've looked at a lot of the stuff it does and it's really pretty amazing how much work you guys have put into the project. You've unlocked some of the bitchiest engine limitations this game has, too, which is a real treat for any mappers that use 227. Hell, you've even spiced up the editor! Awesome.

I can't say if I'll ever use 227 myself to make maps, since I'm getting to the point where it's almost time for me to move on to modern engines (and get a real job), but I would have loved to have all this stuff years ago. I can only imagine what kinds of cool things people are going to be able to make now that they have all these tools and an increasingly-unlocked engine at their disposal. New mappers are going to have a field day.

The Unreal community is small now, but it's clearly still got a lot going for it, thanks especially to people like you all who keep working on it. So, on behalf of everyone who uses and can appreciate the work that's gone into it, thanks a lot for making 227 and breathing new life into this game. Keep up the good work!

Oh and special thanks also go to Smirf and those others who've shelled out the cash to actually keep sites like this operational. That's a fundamentally important service, moreso even than something like 227.

this feels like warm sun. Thankya, this shows its worth it

Hehe...welcome to the forum Waff

Welcome to OldUnreal Waffnuffly!

That's a great post you shared with us, very kind!

I just wanted to pitch in here too. I've (finally) installed 227 in order to play Unreal: Forgotten, and am very happy with the patch so far. It's good to have the old menus back (I've been using RtNP 226b for Unreal maps), and the in-built mutator for the old Unreal weapon sounds is welcome. The game has hung on me once since installing 227, but that may have been because I was also running iTunes, which sometimes behaves strangely in terms of the drawing order in Windows, so I won't register it as a bug.

From my limited experience so far, my top two suggestions so far would be:
- Make SP mutators selectable from the menus, to make the old weapon sounds more accessible; and
- Fix the OpenAL audio, if possible, so that music starts at full volume rather than fading in from zero.

I know that reinstating the original Unreal reverb has been discussed before, but may have been determined to be impossible (?). The effect that I am referring to is best exemplified by the outdoor parts of the SunSpire, where, in the original unpatched release, the sound effects echoed (IIRC) almost a second after you made the original sound. Classy stuff, and very immersive.

[glow=yellow,2,300]Shivaxi's been telling me a lot on IRC about all the various improvements and enhancements 227 has got going for it, and I gotta say, a lot of it is really impressive, especially breaking the node limit.[/glow]

65535 (2^16) nodes limit? Maps can go up to 2^20 nodes now?

What about 128 zones?

Hey Scrag

I just wanted to pitch in here too. I've (finally) installed 227 in order to play Unreal: Forgotten, and am very happy with the patch so far. It's good to have the old menus back (I've been using RtNP 226b for Unreal maps), and the in-built mutator for the old Unreal weapon sounds is welcome. The game has hung on me once since installing 227, but that may have been because I was also running iTunes, which sometimes behaves strangely in terms of the drawing order in Windows, so I won't register it as a bug.

Many things have been already discussed and fixed for 227g, so maybe the hang you experience belongs to those. other than that I can only say that I currently no similar report in mind for such an issue, so maybe really the iTunes is to blame.

From my limited experience so far, my top two suggestions so far would be:
- Make SP mutators selectable from the menus, to make the old weapon sounds more accessible;

For the mutators we can maybe find a way (but only for UMenu then, not for classic menu)

and
- Fix the OpenAL audio, if possible, so that music starts at full volume rather than fading in from zero.

New version has quite a couple of OpenAL fixes and improvements, mainly for Linux but some for Windows too. I'm currently not exactly sure what you mean with that, but I also fixed a bug which could be described like that.

I know that reinstating the original Unreal reverb has been discussed before, but may have been determined to be impossible (?). The effect that I am referring to is best exemplified by the outdoor parts of the SunSpire, where, in the original unpatched release, the sound effects echoed (IIRC) almost a second after you made the original sound. Classy stuff, and very immersive.

For OpenAL it is unfortunately impossible. The "manual way of manipulating" which is done for old reverb is just not possible anymore with it (at least I wouldn't know a feasible way).
That for OpenAL has some rough "translation" of the old reverb to the new method which is used in OpenAL, the EFX effects.
Those can be way better manipulated and come already with a set of 113 different ambient presets, so mappers have it way more easy to set the right sound for their maps.
That the conversion from old reverb to OpenAL implementation is sometimes not even close to the original is bothering me badly, but without translating each single reverb setting into an EFX setting its quite impossible to match.
However, if you still want the old reverb, you can use either FMOD or the old and unchanged Galaxy, which provide both the original reverb.

Hope I was able to answer some questions

If i may ask, any idea when 227g might become public? I don't want to break the tension around here of making compliments But do you? (I always say my compliments short after the new patch is out )

Smirf - thanks for your reply.

You say "unchanged" Galaxy, but unchanged from which version? Galaxy hasn't offered the original reverb since some time pre-224. I might give FMOD a try, though; thanks for the tip.

Re the music, perhaps I can clarify: In Galaxy, UMX music starts at full volume (subject of course to your settings). In OpenAL, it often starts by fading in from silence. This is particularly annoying for tracks that start with a strong, striking note, such as Fourth and UTemple.

Smirf - thanks for your reply.

You say "unchanged" Galaxy, but unchanged from which version? Galaxy hasn't offered the original reverb since some time pre-224. I might give FMOD a try, though; thanks for the tip.

Re the music, perhaps I can clarify: In Galaxy, UMX music starts at full volume (subject of course to your settings). In OpenAL, it often starts by fading in from silence. This is particularly annoying for tracks that start with a strong, striking note, such as Fourth and UTemple.

FMOD and OpenAL have been changed greatly, also  if some mod use playsound and not specify slot, like slot_talk, it will play muted like.
But yeah there are some music playback differences I noticed as well.

Smirf - thanks for your reply.

You say "unchanged" Galaxy, but unchanged from which version? Galaxy hasn't offered the original reverb since some time pre-224. I might give FMOD a try, though; thanks for the tip.

Galaxy is the same as 226f/b, and presumably UT. It just does not contain OGG support but that might be fixed. FMod in my opinion is the more accurate audio device compared to galaxy's original versus fmod and alaudio, but ALAudio is default because it's compatible with more sound cards.

The only galaxy that truly differed was 225f's galaxy in it's doppler, and the code is still there, just with a stupid check that makes it never work. This check was fixed and put into FMod as well, and you can also disable it like before.

You can actually see this check function in Unreal.unr. Open unreal -> fly next to one of the flames there, editactor class=light, then set it's velocity to something like 99999,0,0, and it will doppler. Doppler only works on sounds that are ambient sounds that are moving.. which by definition, ambientsounds aren't supposed to move.

I myself have acquired the latest Galaxy build as you might have seen on unrealSP, and 227 was updated with this although it seems slightly unstable compared to before for no real reason. The code has a few marked issues that i've fixed and a bug introduced from that I can't seem to fix.

My main issue with updating galaxy is that I can't legally obtain the source for GalaxyAudioSubsystem as that is a part of the unreal engine, an implementation of the galaxy library.

That, and it appears the ogg loading code is just broken. The debugger shows nothing useful, and some things that previously worked failed due to an obvious shift in code structure. For example .669s used to work, but unmodified versions of the new build simply crashed it, and it was a quite simple 2 line fix, it merely was referencing a variable in the wrong fashion.

What I don't understand is my commandline player only has one bug : sometimes tracks fail to switch. but the updated lib -> compile on 227 makes it crash randomly when music is on, sound alone is fine, and my command line player doesn't crash on music. I really don't understand, it's very hard to crash that player with anything that is a standard format & is supported. If it's not supported, galaxy just does not play the sound/music now, it doesn't crash.

Worst part is, I can't run a debugger on it myself when it's attached.

Smirf - thanks for your reply.

You say "unchanged" Galaxy, but unchanged from which version? Galaxy hasn't offered the original reverb since some time pre-224. I might give FMOD a try, though; thanks for the tip.

Re the music, perhaps I can clarify: In Galaxy, UMX music starts at full volume (subject of course to your settings). In OpenAL, it often starts by fading in from silence. This is particularly annoying for tracks that start with a strong, striking note, such as Fourth and UTemple.

I checked it again. Yes, you were right. However, reverb in galaxy always "worked", but it was just made that silent that it isn't noticeable anymore. I fixed it for 227g now.

Smirf - thanks for your reply.

You say "unchanged" Galaxy, but unchanged from which version? Galaxy hasn't offered the original reverb since some time pre-224. I might give FMOD a try, though; thanks for the tip.

Re the music, perhaps I can clarify: In Galaxy, UMX music starts at full volume (subject of course to your settings). In OpenAL, it often starts by fading in from silence. This is particularly annoying for tracks that start with a strong, striking note, such as Fourth and UTemple.

I checked it again. Yes, you were right. However, reverb in galaxy always "worked", but it was just made that silent that it isn't noticeable anymore. I fixed it for 227g now.

I reported this ages ago -_-

Well I'm glad it's finally fixed...allows me to do my music mixing within Unreal again =) 8-)

I'm not entirely convinced we're talking about the same effect, but I will have to try 227g (when it comes out) and see for myself.

Out of the box, retail Unreal using Galaxy offered echo / reverb effects with a variable time period. This meant you could implement a quick echo effect in small enclosed spaces such as the cave just after the area where you raise a narrow beam to cross the lava in Rrajigar Mine, or a massively slow echo effect in huge open areas like the causeways at the beginning of The Sunspire.

With 224, if I remember correctly, reverb / echo effects seemed to disappear completely. They came back with 226 and UT, but since then I have only ever heard a quick echo effect, and not the massively slow echo effect that I remember being so atmospheric at the start of The Sunspire. All of this was using Galaxy.

(I still haven't tried FMOD yet.)

next 227g internal revision will have the updated code, so we can test it then

I'm not entirely convinced we're talking about the same effect, but I will have to try 227g (when it comes out) and see for myself.

You are welcome to join the testers, with your long time experience you would fit perfectly

Out of the box, retail Unreal using Galaxy offered echo / reverb effects with a variable time period. This meant you could implement a quick echo effect in small enclosed spaces such as the cave just after the area where you raise a narrow beam to cross the lava in Rrajigar Mine, or a massively slow echo effect in huge open areas like the causeways at the beginning of The Sunspire.

With 224, if I remember correctly, reverb / echo effects seemed to disappear completely. They came back with 226 and UT, but since then I have only ever heard a quick echo effect, and not the massively slow echo effect that I remember being so atmospheric at the start of The Sunspire. All of this was using Galaxy.

(I still haven't tried FMOD yet.)

As mentioned already, reverb was not broken, it was just scaled differently (and obviously wrong).
I can't tell how it was handled before, but Volume for reverb was determined by MasterGain setting for the maps.
Casey made a list of all reverbsettings in all default SP levels, which showed that the max setting was 132.
But the Galaxy Volume setting for Reverb is from 0-1. If > 1 it plain crashes. So in 224 and above they decided to take the MasterGain/255.
This ensures obviously that the value can't be bigger than 1 (since max is 255) but had the side effect that most reverbs are simply to silent. That this can't be scaled like that is obvious and so it fails for most cases- although it is maybe "working" for some cases in which MasterGain is high enough.
I clamped it now between 0-1 and took MasterGain/127 which ensures that both the effects are loud enough and it never crashes because being >1. Although this is no "real" scaling also it at least works- if I could find out what exactly in pre 224 was used I could refine it some more, but at least its working now again.

Err.. I still didn't had a reply on my question i posted like 2 days ago.
What i asked was if you guys have an idea about when 227g comes out?

Err.. I still didn't had a reply on my question i posted like 2 days ago.
What i asked was if you guys have an idea about when 227g comes out?

When nobody answers a question, it usually means they don't know the answer

What i asked was if you guys have an idea about when 227g comes out?

Two weeks?

haha, joking. It could be a while yet, (Mid/Fall 2010 is my guess) but I say let the dev team take all the time they need.

what... Q3 of 2010? Q.Q
sgu cant release without 227g, zo i think the public beta will be out short after 227g , cus sgu requires little fixes that 227g provides..

I don't think we're that far away. a few linux things to sort out and a thing with galaxy and some other misc stuff is left but it takes time

I definitely see the need for 227g and some fixes can be really called critical or at least important - I also see the need to release 227g soon, but I fixed so many things in the Linux version and in UED2 in the last weeks that it clearly shows that we must take the time to really finalize it.
A few weeks ago I would have said: only a few days maybe then its ready- currently it seems many bugs appear that no one ever reported, bugs in UED, bugs in Unreal. It's like fixing 1 and getting 2 new reports (while only a very few are new bugs from 227f to 227g).
So it's really unpredictable, but at the moment the buglist is kinda small (again).

Smirf - I don't think I can spare the time to help you test the patch, unfortunately, but I await the release of 227g with interest.