Mark Rein, lead developer for the massively anticipated Unreal Tournament 2003 at Epic Games, has spoken out, giving a complete update as to the progress of the game.
He begins, “Performance optimisations are really coming under control nicely. When we originally announced UT2003 we were pretty sure that hardware T&L and 32-bit rendering would be must-have features just to get the game running. It turns out we might have been a little too conservative with this specification. Resident graphics wiz, Andrew Scheidecker, has cranked up graphics performance very nicely and hardware guru Daniel Vogel has somehow managed to get 16 bit working quite well and make the game run on low-end cards like TNT2 and even 3DFX's famous Voodoo3!”
Excellent news! A new graphics card will not be an obligatory purchase for the massive UT community.
But wait, no sooner have your hopes been raised, than they are almost immediately dashed. “So there it is, Voodoo3 and Voodoo5 will work with our game. Here's the disclaimer: the company that made these boards is no longer in business so these boards won't be "officially supported". The Voodoo3 drivers we tested with were 3rd party drivers from voodoofiles.com. Dan thinks the Voodoo5 drivers he tested with were the ones provided with Windows 2000, the OS on his test machine. We can't guarantee everyone who has a Voodoo3/5 card is going to be able to get the game working nor can we guarantee that the game is going to run well on their system. On our test box, an Athlon 1Ghz, we ran the game consistently on Voodoo3 around the low to mid 20's (frames per second) at 512x384 and 640x480 both, of course, in 16 bit colour. Visual quality was decent, not perfect, as there are some visual flaws, but good none the less. The Voodoo5 was able to achieve the same kind of performance but at 640x480 with 32 bit colour and the visual quality was actually quite good. A TNT2 achieves about the same performance but at a lower resolution - for TNT we're running 320x240 at 16 bit colour - the absolute lowest end of the scale. Even at these resolutions the game is still a LOT of fun to play.”
Phew!
And there’s more good news for the small spenders out there, this time on matters of connectivity. “Network performance is improved from the original UT. Bandwidth usage has been decreased which should help particularly for people playing over modems. We've also focused on optimising server CPU utilisation. AI and gamecode is undergoing a lot of tweaking and improvement. In this area, the last 10% is the difference between a good game and a great game and, as I said in a previous update, UT2003 is going to be a great game.”
So we can all play. Amen to that!
He begins, “Performance optimisations are really coming under control nicely. When we originally announced UT2003 we were pretty sure that hardware T&L and 32-bit rendering would be must-have features just to get the game running. It turns out we might have been a little too conservative with this specification. Resident graphics wiz, Andrew Scheidecker, has cranked up graphics performance very nicely and hardware guru Daniel Vogel has somehow managed to get 16 bit working quite well and make the game run on low-end cards like TNT2 and even 3DFX's famous Voodoo3!”
Excellent news! A new graphics card will not be an obligatory purchase for the massive UT community.
But wait, no sooner have your hopes been raised, than they are almost immediately dashed. “So there it is, Voodoo3 and Voodoo5 will work with our game. Here's the disclaimer: the company that made these boards is no longer in business so these boards won't be "officially supported". The Voodoo3 drivers we tested with were 3rd party drivers from voodoofiles.com. Dan thinks the Voodoo5 drivers he tested with were the ones provided with Windows 2000, the OS on his test machine. We can't guarantee everyone who has a Voodoo3/5 card is going to be able to get the game working nor can we guarantee that the game is going to run well on their system. On our test box, an Athlon 1Ghz, we ran the game consistently on Voodoo3 around the low to mid 20's (frames per second) at 512x384 and 640x480 both, of course, in 16 bit colour. Visual quality was decent, not perfect, as there are some visual flaws, but good none the less. The Voodoo5 was able to achieve the same kind of performance but at 640x480 with 32 bit colour and the visual quality was actually quite good. A TNT2 achieves about the same performance but at a lower resolution - for TNT we're running 320x240 at 16 bit colour - the absolute lowest end of the scale. Even at these resolutions the game is still a LOT of fun to play.”
Phew!
And there’s more good news for the small spenders out there, this time on matters of connectivity. “Network performance is improved from the original UT. Bandwidth usage has been decreased which should help particularly for people playing over modems. We've also focused on optimising server CPU utilisation. AI and gamecode is undergoing a lot of tweaking and improvement. In this area, the last 10% is the difference between a good game and a great game and, as I said in a previous update, UT2003 is going to be a great game.”
So we can all play. Amen to that!
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