Unreal
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For other uses, see Unreal (disambiguation).
| Unreal | |
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| Developer(s) | Epic Games, Digital Extremes |
| Publisher(s) | GT Interactive |
| Designer(s) | Cliff Bleszinski, James Schmalz |
| Engine | Unreal Engine |
| Latest version | 226f |
| Release date(s) | May 22, 1998 |
| Genre(s) | First-person shooter |
| Mode(s) | Single player, multiplayer |
| Rating(s) | ELSPA: 15+ ESRB: Mature (M) |
| Platform(s) | Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS |
| Media | CD-ROM |
| System requirements | PC: Intel Pentium 166 MHz, 16 MB RAM, Windows 95/98/NT, 1 MB video card, sound card, CD-ROM drive, 100 MB hard disk space. |
Unreal is a first-person shooter computer game developed by Epic Games and published by GT Interactive on May 22, 1998. It was powered by an original gameplay and computer engine that now bears the game's name, one that had been in development for over three years before the game was released. Since the release of Unreal, the franchise has had one direct sequel and two different series based on the Unreal universe.
Unreal Mission Pack I: Return To Na Pali was released on May 31, 1999, and added new missions to the single player campaign of Unreal. Unreal and Unreal Mission Pack I: Return To Na Pali would later be repackaged as Unreal Gold. On August 30, 2001, Unreal was repackaged again as Totally Unreal featuring the contents of Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament.
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[edit] Premise
The player takes on the part of a criminal aboard the prison spacecraft Vortex Rikers (designated NC114-85EKL8) which has crash-landed on the lip of a canyon on the planet Na Pali, killing most of those on board. The natives of this planet (the four-armed, pacifist Nali) have been subjugated by a collection or alliance of alien races in thrall to the Skaarj Empire. When the Vortex Rikers crash lands, Skaarj board the downed prison ship, killing all survivors that could be found. Since almost everyone on the prison decks is killed upon impact or soon after, the player is presumed to be marooned on an unknown planet. The primary goal of the game is to locate and destroy the Skaarj mothership and escape the planet.
Unreal features a broad range of settings and artwork. In the course of the game the player explores the Nali iron age culture, a crashed research vessel (the ISV-Kran), the dizzyingly tall Sunspire, a floating city, Nali castles and villages, Skaarj bases, and ultimately the Skaarj mother ship. Several Nali documents refer to a messiah who will deliver the Nali from the Skaarj, with the obvious implication that the player is that messiah.
[edit] Creatures
There are many creatures throughout Unreal. They are either friendly, such as the Nali, or enemies, such as the Krall or Brutes. There are also a wide variety of enemy Skaarj units such as assassins, lords, and scouts. Additionally, there is also wildlife scattered in Na Pali such as Nali Cows or rabbits. Also, there are carnivorous monsters which attempt to kill the player but are unaffiliated with any league such as the devilfish, cave manta, and "blob".
[edit] Weapons
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The Unreal and Unreal Tournament series have been notable in introducing novel weapon concepts. When using the ASMD, the player can detonate the secondary fire energy ball by shooting it with the weapon's primary fire. This creates a purple shockwave, causing heavy damage to any opponent nearby. This combo attack is now a staple feature of the shock rifle in the Unreal Tournament series. When shooting rockets with the Eightball, if the player holds down the secondary fire button as well as primary fire, the rockets are launched in a small area as opposed to being spread out. The Dispersion Pistol has several upgrades available. The upgrades are in the form of white capsules hovering above the ground, and once picked up, transform the pistol. When fully upgraded, the pistol's secondary fire does an incredible amount of damage.
[edit] Competition with Quake series
The Unreal game engine was seen as a major rival to id Software's Quake engine, and the Unreal game itself was considered to be technically superior to Quake II, which was out on the market at the same time. Since Unreal came packaged with its own scripting language called UnrealScript, it soon developed a large community on the Internet which was able to add new mods (short for "modifications") in order to change or enhance gameplay. This feature greatly added to the overall longevity of the product and provided an incentive for new development. A map editor and overall complete modification program called UnrealEd also came with the package.
[edit] About the game engine
The all-new Unreal engine provided a plethora of possibilities to third-party content producers.
[edit] Graphics
Unreal is known for boosting the expectations of 3D graphics considerably. Compared to its peers in the genre, such as Quake II, Unreal brought to life not only highly-detailed indoor environments, but also easily the most impressive outdoor landscapes ever seen. [1] This graphical splendor brought with it the side effect of requiring powerful hardware to run the game fast enough to enjoy. The minimum requirements stated that a Pentium 166 MHz with a mere 16 MB RAM and no 3D accelerator would be capable of running the game. This was not realistic, however, and many gamers were very disappointed when they tried to play the game with such a system. [2]
The Unreal engine brought a host of graphical improvements, including colored lighting. Although Unreal is not the first major release with colored lighting (see Quake II) it is the first to have a software renderer capable of just about everything the hardware renderers of the time were capable of, including colored lighting and even a limited form of texture filtering referred to by programmer Tim Sweeney as an ordered "texture coordinate space" dither. [3] Early pre-release versions of Unreal were based entirely around software rendering. SIMD technology is integral to allowing the software audio and 3D graphics engines to perform as well as they do. Unreal uses several SIMD technologies, including AMD's 3DNow! along with Intel's MMX and SSE (known as "KNI" within Unreal).
Unreal was one of the first games to utilize detail texturing. This type of multiple texturing enhances the surfaces of objects with a second texture that shows material detail. When the player stands within a small distance from most surfaces, the detail texture will fade in and make the surface appear much more complex (high-resolution) instead of becoming increasingly blurry.[4] Notable surfaces with these special detail textures included computer monitors and pitted metal surfaces aboard the prison ship, and golden metal doors and stone surfaces within Nali temples. This extra texture layer was not applied to character models. The resulting simulation of material detail on game objects was intended to aid the player's suspension of disbelief. For many years after Unreal's release (and Unreal Tournament's release), detail texturing only worked well with the Glide renderer. It was, in fact, disabled in the Direct3D renderer by default (but could be re-enabled in the Unreal.ini file) due to performance and quality issues caused by the driver and present even on hardware many times more powerful than the original 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics.
Because of Unreal's long development time, the course of development occurred during the emergence and rapid progression of hardware 3D accelerators. So, along with the advanced software 3D renderer, Unreal was built to take advantage of the 3Dfx Glide API, which emerged as the dominant interface towards the end of the game's development. When Unreal was finally released, Microsoft's Direct3D API was growing almost exponentially in popularity and Epic was fairly quick to develop a renderer for their game engine. However, the Direct3D renderer, released initially to support the new Matrox G200, was less capable and slower than the Glide support, especially in the beginning when it was unstable, slow, and had many graphics quality issues.[5] The Glide renderer's superiority can be seen in a review of the 3dfx Voodoo 5, where it outperformed every other card in Unreal Tournament (same engine as Unreal), due to its native Glide support. Even video cards which consistently defeated the Voodoo 5 5500 in other games could not win against Glide's greater efficiency.[6] Unreal also had limited official OpenGL support, but its compatibility was very limited, due to poor OpenGL client drivers from most hardware vendors at the time and Epic's resulting disinterest in furthering development. OpenGL could perform better in some rare situations, but Glide and Direct3D were usually the drivers of choice.
Later in 2004 and onward, OpenGL drivers developed by independent programmers and offered for free online began to supersede the official drivers for speed and quality. Perhaps the best of these releases was Chris Donhal's enhanced OpenGL renderer for Unreal Tournament, available for Unreal at OldUnreal.Com, which enabled native support for anti-aliasing, advanced multi-texturing including single-pass detail texturing, and hardware T&L, amongst a selection of other advanced and experimental features.
Using the 226f patch to fix Direct3D support is not recommended.
[edit] Sound effects
Unreal's "Galaxy" audio system is highly optimized for speed and quality, utilizing Intel's MMX extensively. It manages both music and sound effects. For sound effects it uses uncompressed waveforms in 8-bit or 16-bit monaural format. The engine is capable of playing back at all common sample rates but is set by default to 22 KHz playback to reduce CPU load on computers available at the time of release. One can change the unreal.ini file's sample rate setting to 44.1 kHz ("44100" in the file) and receive a boost in quality for both music and effects.
Galaxy supports rudimentary software-based 3D audio positioning as well as hardware 3D sound support (although this is quite buggy.) In software mode, sounds are only stereo-panned. Phase shifting and band-pass filtering are used to imitate the effects of sounds hitting the ear, as a function of position. The sound system is limited to mixing and playing back a maximum of 64-channels, but the default is actually 16-channels because of CPU power limitations (each channel consumes CPU time.) This option is also user configurable within the unreal.ini file.
In hardware 3D audio mode the engine is designed to support sound cards with hardware 3D audio mixing and positioning capabilities. At the time of release this included primarily the Aureal Vortex line of audio cards. In this mode, the sound card takes over sound placement with the game providing only positional information to the hardware. If the game uses more channels than the sound card supports, the extra channels will be run on the game's software engine (this can cause sound consistency problems.)
If the system Unreal is being run on lacks MMX support (i.e. a Pentium Pro), the game will automatically reduce sound quality to low. Quality can be turned back up to full, but the audio engine is less efficient (uses more CPU power) without MMX support. On non-MMX machines, the sound code does make some quality and speed trade-offs by limiting sound effects to having only 64 volume levels. One can hear this limitation by setting up an ambient sound effect with a high radius in an otherwise quiet area: the discrete steps between volume levels are quite audible. Epic also noted nearly a 2-fold speed boost with MMX code. [7]
The sound system supports both the legacy WinMM sound system, and DirectSound. DirectSound generally achieves the lowest latency, while WinMM works on Windows 95 machines which don't have DirectSound, and Windows NT 4.0.
[edit] Music
While many game companies went from FM synthesis in the early 1990s and/or General MIDI straight to CD audio and otherwise pre-rendered audio later on, one thing that set many of the Epic games apart from others was their use of module music, (composed with a tracker) which used stored PCM sound effects sequenced together to produce music. Epic had been using this technology for other games such as Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall 2097 which allowed relatively rich-sounding music to be stored in files usually smaller than one megabyte. Naturally, this technology allowed easy implementation of dynamic music for mood changes in Unreal. The Unreal soundtrack was written by MOD music authors Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos with a few select tracks by Dan Gardopée and Andrew Sega. Alex Brandon was also responsible for the soundtracks for Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex, which also use the Unreal Engine; van den Bos also produced the soundtrack for Age of Wonders.
Unreal's music engine also supports CD audio tracks.
[edit] Map editing
Unreal's method of creating maps differs in major ways from that of Quake. The bundled UnrealEd map editor uses the Unreal engine to accurately render the exact scene, as opposed to external editors like Worldcraft attempting to recreate it with different methods. Whereas Quake maps are compiled from a variety of different components, Unreal maps are inherently editable on the fly. This allows anybody to edit any map that is created, including the originals from the developers. Though UnrealEd loads quite a bit slower than most map editors, it runs maps smoothly and swiftly: hitting rebuild automatically finalizes the level within minutes, as opposed to the hours or (at the time) even days with a full Quake map compile.
In addition, Unreal starts with a completely solid world in which you extract areas with primitives instead of starting with a void and building rooms by adding primitive shapes to fill it. Many map designers believe that this eliminates the tedium of matching up separate walls, floors and ceilings.
[edit] Updates
Epic continued supporting Unreal with patches and map packs for a short duration of time. A large amount of downloads are available on OldUnreal. Including maps, patches, mods, and media.
[edit] Gametypes (BotMatch and MultiPlayer)
The following mentioned here are called "gametypes", which are special modes in a video game that offer different ways to play the same game other than its main story mode. Multiplayer is the main reason a game has more than one of these gametypes. Botmatch is an offline way to play a gametype if a player can not find a server to suit his or her needs. Instead, the player may choose to play a gametype with or against skilled computer controlled players called "bots". The most common played gametypes are as follows:
- Singleplayer - This is the main quest in Unreal. The player plays as Prisoner 849, and must escape from Na Pali.
- Coopgame - This is the same as Singleplayer, only it is optimized for play on a network game with other human players. Bots are said to be not supported, however this can be corrected by opening the quickconsole with the Tab button and entering 'admin set gameinfo bteamgame true' without quotes. The result is bots will no longer attack players regardless of their actions, but will not attack monsters unless they pose some kind of threat to them, a player, or another bot.
- Deathmatchgame - The object of this gametype is to kill other players, human or bot, as many times as possible. A predetermained score limit is usually set, followed by a time limit.
- Teamgame - This has the same principal as Deathmatchgame, only teams are divided into two, three, or four opposing teams. The team with the highest score wins the match.
- Kingofthehill - This is the same as Deathmatchgame, but one player is selected to be the "King of the Hill" and will have a red aura. Whoever kills this player becomes the next "King of the Hill". If this player commits suicide, then ____
- DarkMatch - Same thing as Deathmatchgame, only all players carry a searchlight, and it is played in DKNightOp, a map with almost no lighting.
[edit] References
- ^ Shamma, Tahsin. Review of Unreal, Gamespot.com, June 10, 1998.
- ^ what are the minimum sys requirement for unreal? on Usenet, April 1999.
- ^ Yong, Li Sheng. Texturing As In Unreal, flipcode.com, July 10, 2000.
- ^ 6.20 Detail Textures, OpenGL.org, August 6, 1999.
- ^ MATROX OFFERS SNEAK-PEAK AT UNREAL DIRECT3D®PATCH, Epic MegaGames Inc., September 24, 1998.
- ^ Witheiler, Matthew. 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500 PCI, Anandtech.com, August 4, 2000.
- ^ Sweeney, Tim.Unreal Audio Subsystem, Epic MegaGames Inc., July 21, 1999.
[edit] External links
- Gamespot's Blinded by Reality: The True Story Behind the Making of Unreal
- Old Unreal site with many useful downloads for and information about Unreal, including graphical enhancers and better audio/video renderers.
- Unrealsp.org The main site for new Unreal (and UT) SP projects, articles and interviews. It also includes a walkthrough for Unreal and its expansion.
- The Unreal Wiki @ Beyondunreal.com
- The Unreal Wiki
Categories: Unreal | 1998 computer and video games | Mac OS games | Cancelled 64DD games | Cancelled Dreamcast games | First-person shooters | Futuristic games | Linux games | Science fiction computer and video games | Windows games | Computer and video games featuring cooperative gameplay | Epic Games games
