Exactly, Gow is more harder to mod, think of GOW as the appetizer and UT3 the frosting on the cake. Agreed UT3 is much more mod friendly but also another patch is on the way

You people are still going around in circles...
Which is fine by us..the longer you keep at it, the more confused you will be when you give you the big news...which is still quite some time away...

We have given our stand-point (several times), and it remains the same. Sadly for now, you will just have to wait and see until the devs have all their ducks in line

I hate to admit it, but I won't be anywhere impressed when RuneStorm announce an Archon-based total conversion for UT2004 or any other engine, which seems to be the case. See why. Guys, I don't believe in Skrith. The story behind Project Archon is so freakingly poor (in matters of plot, originality and consistency) that nobody gives a dime about it but the devs themselves. BW has come to be the best multiplayer-based mod for the UT2004 engine, but it's still all about 2004. The BW weapons never made me think of anything related to the hyphothetical Archon universe - to me they're just sound guns to replace the dull UT oddities which Atari offers in the guise of "weapons". What I need (and hopefully the majority of active BW players) is more balance fixes, a straighter controls system, - how long shall we wait until the laser sights are activated with the same button for all guns and the aim mode is no longer disengaged when you try to run, rather disabling run while aiming?! - and, in general, more improvements to the multiplayer aspect of BW.

It has been for months and years that RuneStorm stuck to the idea above. They always focused on more balance, more guns, and generally more fun, that is a better gaming experience above all. It was all okay when nobody gave a sh*t about UT3, Archon and such like things.

Now guys come, and whine for a port. For the sake of what on Earth, when the latest version of BW can screw up a 8800 Ultra when you plant a rocket in the middle of a crowd busy with a close-quarters gunfight?! The current particle system used for BW is much above the level of detail that a middle-class graphics card could handle, and can seriously challenge the top cards of today. If you don't believe that, just try playing a 32 bot match on one of the more detailed maps, turn on everything to maximum, set your texture LOD to -1, AF to at least 8x and AA to at least to 4x (though 16x / 16x will also do, though you won't notice much visual difference) and see how you get 10-15 fps when there are about a dozen guys all around you shooting all over the place. and gore'n'guts spilling the whole scene. That is more than enough for a multiplayer shooter, I just don't see how you come to hate the current level of graphics in BW, aren't you mixing 133t-targeted stuff like Crysis and the hardcore multiplayer experience, think of thousands people still playing Q3 and CS and having lots of fun regardless of graphics? BW gives you more than just a pretty picture on the screen, and why not leave that as it is? UT3 never, in none of the imaginable ways profitted from the eye candy the devs put inside. The ultimate and only reason to spice UT3 up with the so-called next-gen graphics was to make it sell well. It's all about sixteen-year-olds who buy games just because they're meant to have the best graphics around. The next day they throw the CD away because they grow bored. But it's all ok for the publisher since they got their money.

I had great fun playing Crysis and Timeshift at maximum settings, but still I can't make up a reason why the hell should BW have anything of that, neither I see a way in which BW would benifit from next-gen graphics. Crysis is an interactive action movie after all, which naturally depends on graphics in a big way, and makes a very poor shooter in the literate sense of the word, and Timeshift (which by the way sports graphics better than Crysis) vice versa is an incredibly dull and long old-school shooter which is virtually saved by the visuals since FX are the only thing worth enjoying in that game, and the whole game is based on pressing the trigger and watching how your enemies fly screaming in the air and turn into bloody stubs, and there's also some great physics like fully destructible walls. But that's all, this game much like Crysis draws much of its fun from graphics and the immersive atmosphere it brings, despite the huge difference between these two shooters. But that will never work for BW (which by the way clearly beats Crysis at Medium settings as far as graphics is concerned) since it's a multiplayer game in the first place, and most attention is anyway paid to the gameplay and not the environment. For a multiplayer shooter, BW offers way more than is needed. Asking for a port is asking for trouble, since this will bring devs nothing more than a pain in the a*se. Then you'll get a game that has system requirements thrice as high as UT3 (mind the amount of blood, smoke and decal particles and special FX in the regular BW!), then what next? As reported in December by a number of game news agencies, UT3 and Crysis are parading as the world's least popular multiplayer shooters by that time with only a few thousand players online at any given moment (despite of the millions copies sold), while the less graphically advanced CoD4 enjoys much more popularity, let alone such suckers as CS:S and CS, Battlefield series, etc.

My best advice to those asking for a port would be grabbing a copy of regular UT3 or Crysis and going multiplayer until their faces turn pale green, and if that's not just enough, the next step would be going to Hell and sucking on a red-hot iron poker until Far Cry 2 is out. Reassembling BW under a different engine is pure madness which does nothing to improve the gaming experience, I guess everybody around understands that BW is primarily based on multiplayer fun and not on graphics at all. The more time passes, the better it gets, the devs are but a small group with limited resources, so why the hell should they take to pleasing the graphics-hungry casuals instead of following the old ways, which effectively means less bugs and more fun in its purest form?!

As for the devs' latest statements, I'd say they should be prepared to face a general disappointment if they go on locking on their Archon fancies instead of sorting out actual issues. Until yesterday, - and that's exactly why I'm typing these angry lines right now, - I had been hoping to get two 32-slot BW servers running thanks to an acquaintance of mine who first saw BW this Autumn and was very excited about it, but his final response was that the controls in BW 2.1 are sooo messed up that we better sit and wait till the devs fix the running/aiming problem and produce a straighter and more configurable controls system for special and secondary fire. Of course I was against this decision but it's him who's got the hardware and bandwidth, so I had to yield. Now it's like a few more months before the devs ever care to fix that, and I feel really mad about it. I'm being told right now that nobody (of course presumably) will play on those servers since the awesomeness of BW is easily outweighed by the short yet nasty list of persistent issues.

Keeping future developments in secret while being blind to the blatant flaws of the current build and deaf to the abundant bug/inconsistency reports sound much like fishing for attention. I just don't seem to understand, are RuneStorm thinking that there's a 15,000 crowd right below their balcony shouting for more Archon or what? Are they seriously thinking that saying 'hey guys that's top secret' will bring any more popularity to the project? I definitely think no. That's pretty ridiculous. Until the current incarnation of BW gets finalized in any sense-making form, that is a bit more balance and no bugs & nice normal controls, the devs' vague promises don't even shatter the air as far as my opinion is concerned. Players' feedback and weapon ideas mostly go down the waste pipe, known bugs enjoy neither a cure nor a promise thereof, the Feature Requests / Ideas forums are little more than a sideshow now, set up to amuse the devs when they grow tired of coding / working / doing their everyday routine.

Personally, I need neither Archon, nor little pink elephants with fairy wings, nor fancy staves, nor the discovery of Darth Vader turning out to be a masked, hydrogen-breathing pair of sentient human buttocks separated from the rest of the body and given mechanical appendages instead, somewhere in the secret chapter of the upcoming single player campaign for BW, but rather the nice normal course of development that the devs were keeping to before all of this UT3 port / secret project talk started to emerge. RuneStorm are seriously risking ending up with a nice game, but nobody to play it save for themselves.

Well, this was supposed to be a flame thread anyway...

Baklajan wrote:

I had been hoping to get two 32-slot BW servers running

I thought Long and hard On Running that Big Of a server..But Lets face it..Most people (and I'm basing this on ALL the ONS guys I have talked to) Don't like BW with ONS, So really thats the only game type worth doing 32 players on. With the Virge of Ut3 Being fixed for the most part I'll be moving to it April and shutting all my 2004 servers down with maybe the exception of Killing Floor. I hope RS decides to port their weapons to Ut3 but If they don't I'll find a just as popular replacement or code my own.

Well, if RS do something about the current issues, primarily controls, I'll be able to to get on terms with my friend and sort out enough hardware to run a few BW servers. He's being one of the head managers in a web provider company, there's no real obstacles in the way. Well, except him judging unpredictably on whether a server will be popular or not )

Frankly speaking I don't like UT3. Been there, done that, feels much like UT2004, excessive graphics. Runs smoothly at maximum on my overclocked Q6600@3Ghz / GF8800 Ultra @ 685/3000 rig but that doesn't help the cause much since I'm not that mad about graphics. 2004 has better maps, more fun due to the availability of BW, and system requirements ranging from being able to run OK on even the weakest machines to the higher settings being able to make a 8800 choke on some of the most gore-filled scenes of BW.

So I sincerely hope that the current BW gets finalized before RS move to further projects, the mod has all chances to become as popular as CS and CS:S are despite of graphics, it just needs some serious polishing. Also the problem is that very few people are aware of BW

If you cut down on the hyperbole a little, your post would probably be easier to read.


I somewhat agree here. I've always thought of the backstory simply as an excuse for interesting guns. However, the devs want to do their Archon thing, and BW is their baby, so hey, that's what they want to do. Plus, laser sights are indeed activated with the same weapon for all guns, you ninny. And they tried the sight/aiming thing and decided it was too buggy to implement properly. I've since adapted to the current setup and it works fine.



HAH!



Dude, no. The blood effects are neat and all, but there's only so much you can do with UT2004. The fact that BW bogs down your GPU in extreme situations says nothing about graphical quality. Hell, UT3 both looks and runs better than Oblivion. Nobody hates the current level of BW's graphics, but everyone except you, it seems, would love to see what Runestorm can do with a more powerful engine. I mean, look what they've done with UT2k4?



Come on, read the thread. It's already been established that Crysis would be a poor choice for a port.



This is kind of annoying. This builds up expectations too much, and it kinda gets disappointing when it's not what you expected (i.e. BWBP4).



See, that's just the problem. Your opinion is just that; an opinion. It really doesn't matter unless you can convince the devs it's the right opinion, and a huge bitchy post isn't going to help in that regard. Apparently, someone did want the fancy staves (Redshift) and was willing to front the cash for it. He's sponsored about a third of the weapons in the mod, and I thank him for them (except the Lightning gun. And those staves ). If you want your changes made, why don't you sponsor them?

Think Dune. They used firearms and even crossbows along with lasers just because in that darker sci-fi setting humans failed to create Power-Rangers-themed fancy armor and handheld plasmaguns, it all looked much like XX/XI centuries. There was no need to find an excuse for the 'older' technologies since nobody guaranteed that there are no limits to human engineering. Machines proved not much more effective than humans and were eventually defeated in a war between the humans and some A.I. junk, which resulted in a universal ban on computers, but humans didn't get upset too much since specially trained people were able to achieve even better computing abilities than the machines... I don't know why the hell one would need to introduce Skrith and global galactical warfare, Unreal Tournament is quite a decent setting, BW just makes it a bit more brutal and even steampunkish. No, you won't get your plasma gun in millenium ****, get along with you pistol buddy. Forget about those idiots saying that there are things better than solidium-based gunpowder and a good old D49. Oh, by the way even the original UT2004 suggest a less futuristic and a more steampunkish environment =)

As for my rant, I just wanted to air my opinion warning the devs of their chances to end up in a basement with no-one but them playing their creation... the question persists: are they making something for themselves only and share it with the public or are they making a game for the public and listen to their opinions?


Hell, UT3 is just a normal mapping / parallax mapping showcase. With very limited special effects. As for the looks, first I'd like to say that I don't understand why a multiplayer shooter should have next-gen looks as it only narrows the audience due to high system requirements. Second, try placing similar amounts of blood and smoke in UT3 and see how it fails on a 3x SLI 8800 Ultra. Third, UT2004 is one of the most optimized engines ever so the fact that a mod can make it choke on the most powerful graphics card of 2007 is quite impressive. Fourth, I don't see the sense of comparing an open-area RPG to a multiplayer shooter in means of performance and engine specifics. UT3 has less detail than Oblivion, to start with. Less polygons per frame and so on. Fifth, apparent offtopicking, is that if you collect some of the latest mods for Oblivion based on 2048x2048 textures you'll see that a well-modded copy of Oblivion beats anything in regard of graphics. Literally anything. I don't know why you came up with comparing things to Oblivion, but just mind that. Personally I wasn't too impressed with the changes that come with such mods, but that's true. Sixth, sticking to the topic, I don't understand how graphics affect fun in multiplayer shooters and why ever waste effort on porting BW?


Come on, you're don't getting what I'm trying to say. I would never suggest Crysis as a possible platform for the port. Vice versa, I tried to say that there are games like Crysis, the so-called interactive action movies, which depend on graphics and naturally need a lot of neat FX. On the other hand, there are games that don't need next-gen graphics at all, like multiplayer shooters in general and BW in particular.


In my native language there's a proverb: the water wears down the rock. As people grow less interested in BW, the devs will probably revise their policy. A good option would be to finish BW for UT2004 and design a final pack of at least 8-10 weapons taken from the Ideas forum, - since actually very few ideas ever make it to the mod, - and of course sort out the controls. Once BW for UT2004 is all white and fluffy and at last playable without saying Damn! every five minutes, they could start developing a project Archon game for the UT3 engine with a choice of weapons and set of rules more concentrated on their lore and only loosely based off the original BW - then they will probably create a persuasive universe by the year of 2009/2010, when computers will be able to withstand Runestorm-scaled special effects similar to those in BW without much lags. I mean, when Runestorm design a visual effect, it's usually meant to blow your GPU out, shaming away any commercial product =) Trying to mutate BW into something new, dragging it from UT2004 to UT3 is an essentially bad idea, while finalizing it and moving to a new project for a newer engine would be great.


We've got no Paypal in Russia and I doubt it would work for Africa. Sending over some $100 per month to Africa could be a very good idea, though, but how the hell I do that from a country like Russia?! This is no rhetorical question, since I'm seriously interested in sponsoring. I'm very short on money but I strongly feel about BW and think it's just unfair to have three guys not paid a penny for coding things that can challenge commercial projects. I guess all the three should be instantly employed with a game studio.


They just screwed up. The best way to implement that is to combine the Walk mode and the Aim mode. People usually press Sprint to sprint, use Run as default and press Crouch not to fall off an edge or to do some very precise aiming, but Walk is almost never used. Well, sometimes and most likely only for aiming and slowly moving to avoid getting sniped too easily. So if Walk is an aiming-oriented mode, why not make the character assume the aiming stance while walking? In other words, pressing aim will force you to aim and walk, while deactivating it will force you not aim and run. Pretty much like in Battlefield 2 and many other games. You wouldn't want to walk for reasons other than aiming, anyway. If I'm not mistaken, Runestorm tried to add aiming as some automatically engaged mode complementary to existing ones. If this caused bugs, it's better to try the other route.

P.S. Did I patch BW up in some wrong way? Laser sights and silencers still use different buttons for different guns,... for me.

*no one here but us chickens* - double post, the forum won't let me delete it... so I just took out the text...

Bakjalan, UT2004 is a limited engine. I say we should move on. Not now, no, but some time. Eventually, when another suitable engine cines around, I'd suggest moving on. The only one that is currently suitable other than 2K4 is UT 3, but that would require lots of reskins. Hmm.... I seem to be contradicting myself here... My point is, I'm not opposed to an engine move, but think we should wait a while. Personally, I think that an engine that could support freeform singleplayer would be good.

Agreed about UT3. I already have UT2004, I'm not gonna buy a degraded version of the same game.

And BW is not necessarily the one making your computer choke, it could be the GPU. The 8000 series are reported to cause this behavior in UT2004 due to horrible support in this generation of cards. Thankfully I have a 7900 GTX, and they better resolve this before I upgrade sometime in the future.

The 9800 GX2 is around the corner so we'll see what happens.

I smell something cooking over here....
Man i hope the thread doesn't catch fire!

Those sort of comments are not welcome, shadowdump. If you have nothing to add to the discussion, then don't post. Simple as that.

2 Threadhead, Bjossi

Well, it seems like we have at least a few common points here. I'll try to explain a bit further. It would be great to have an Archon-based game some day, or anything RS can imagine, but the current version of BW for UT2004 makes a very poor ground for that. See, I've been into a game development business and know at least the most primitive basics. BW is a multiplayer-based mod that fits the original setting perfectly, and it's a great success that the devs managed to keep a more or less decent balance between all these guns, - actually dozens of them! But when it comes to designing a game with single player features, a more pronounced class / traits system, at least two-race division (humans vs. Skrith), BW will never make a nice conversion. And I'm afraid that the devs' big secret is something like trying to turn BW into an Archon-based TC, most likely aggravated with crazy plans to port it to some other engine on the fly.

I think it's time for the devs to draw a final line and see what they can do to finalize the mod instead of issuing more and more guns every three or four months. There are still a few ideas around that would introduce cool options into BW - and many of these ideas were approved / praised by the devs but they were never introduced into the mod because of the devs' never-ending big plans. For example, the option to introduce certain brutal weapons like flamethrower or LG as indestructible artifacts that pass from the loser to the winner but can't be destroyed and a fixed number of them are placed on the map before a match starts. Something a bit like CTF, but the flags are replaced with highly lethal weapons, to spice up the action. And so on, and so forth - just check out the Ideas zone. I guess at least a few of those should be included as options...

Once the devs stop adding more and more guns, they'll have the time to clean the mod up for the final release and add some of the new features suggested during the previous two years. It's ideas that make a game sell well, not just graphics and the amount of content. The more original you game is, the more advantage it has over the competitors. The constant increase in guns, unfortunately, means that the more creative work directions are frozen for RS. After taking a look at the fourth bonus pack I realized that at last we've got more than enough ballistic guns, far more than enough. Each one displays unique behaviour and feels like a solid part of the mod, but going that path any further won't be of much good. The only thing that's missing from the pile of arms is a pack of energy weapons, that's just all.

After finalizing the arsenal and adding some long-awaited technical solutions (in form of fixes and optional settings alike), the devs should just say: "Hey! BW is now complete, we're moving to another engine and making a new game!"

A totally new game. It may have some weapons more or less based on those from BW, but when it comes to making a shooter with races, classes, traits and such like things, the current BW arsenal won't do - too much work is needed to tweak the weapon balance considering all the peculiarities of the races, classes and traits. It's all much easier when all the players have the same characteristics as in BW, but... you see, I hope.

Why don't game companies port their popular games from an older engine to an updated one? Why didn't they ever port Rome: Total War to the new engine and made Medieval 2: Total War instead? What about the Age of Empires series - the third game is largely thought to be very nice (personally I disagree), why don't they create remakes of AoE1 and AoE2 using the AoE3 engine?

The answer is very simple. Carrying over old achiements also means carrying over old limitations. Besides, new ideas are always greeted by the public much warmer than the hackneyed ones, so making something new will always be more profitable than remaking something, and in this case profitability effectively stands for estimated popularity of the finished product. Totally new ideas require virgin soil to be cultivated on, and making a new game is always better than porting a existing one if you have to choose between the two paths. Well, unless you are some honorable freak who's firmly set his mind on recreating an older game using an updated engine - like the guys who have nearly finished porting Starcraft to WC3 engine as an exact 1:1 replica... I enjoy such remakes, but if you have enough inspiration and possibilities to start a totally new project, you better leave the remakes and conversions to the remake experts.

Summing facts up, I think it's necessary to start finalizing BW and at least decide what will be included in the final version and what will not. No more endless bonus packs, wild updates and plans for BW bloating up like a cancerous growth. Indeed, it's time to move on. But not in the fashion of trailing behind tons of unfinished old stuff. Once the final version of BW is out, RS can safely start a new project on a new engine without having to split their efforts between piecing together more guns for BW, porting the old content to the new engine and making up some totally new features. Just imagine the amount of effort saved if BW is not ported anywhere but just finalized and purged of bugs and small balance issues. In this case, I guess, by the end of 2009 we'll get a good reason to buy UT3 - a brand new game by RS even better than BW =)

P.S.
9800 GX2 is just as much of a hype as the mythical G92 (which turned out to be a mere 8800 GT) used to be. The 9800 GX2 will be no more than 30% faster than a regular, non-overclocked 8800 Ultra and to provide maximum workload, it will require at least a 3,6 Ghz dual- or quad-core CPU. The prices for those are sky high, by the way, somewhere far above $1000 and no significant drop can be hoped for before summer. It's the 10000 GX Series Prototype that will be about two times as fast (theoretically) as 8800 Ultra, not the 9800 GX2. According to my sources, 9800 GX2 will be just two 8800 GT chips pieced together in some way or another, i.e. a single-slot SLI solution.

Damn. I had hopes for that 9800, hadn't done much research myself. My 7900 GTX will do just fine in the near and far future.

And I agree with you about BW's history. The devs have been neglecting what is already there while constantly adding new guns, that in my opinion do nothing but add an extra hour of fun or so. New guns are good and all, but they don't make the same old maps and mutators refreshing. They should just set a finish line, improve what is already there, and move on. With this in mind I find it plain weird that they looked past all your great ideas to make BW so much better and gameplay-friendly. And you posted all of them before the 2.1 patch was released.
I just don't understand why.

Anyway, as far as I know they have stopped official development and will only make weapons if they get sponsored by someone. I think your chance of getting a better BW lies in the sponsor stuff, but as you said, getting money over there is not easy without PayPal.

I wouldn't say that adding more guns is a bad thing. But yes, the mod is pretty solid in terms of arsenal, and yes, each is solid. Yes, some of the more creative ideas should be implemented. But their are still unique weapon ideas - Like BloodStones RAD cannon or my numerous ideas, and Sgt. Kellys gun pack. I'm really at a neutral point with your arguments, Baklajan.

I have nothing against adding new weapons, but using new weapons against the same old AI in the same old environments with the same old mechanics can only do so much...

I don't believe them any more. "Stopped official development" would sound reassuring if they weren't Runestorm. "No more guns" is a big step towards "a few more sense-making fixes". If this big surprise they're brewing up is the announcement of a completely new project, that would be great. But I guess it's some sort of cross-platform addon for BW, starting on UT04 and slowly creeping over to UT3 with the rest of BW, which in my opinion is one of the worst ideas ever.

Is there a thread for Kaboodles' future patch?

I'm very interested in sponsoring, unfortunately there seems to be no way to send money from Russia to South Africa, but I'll keep trying fiddling with my credit card. I'd be honored to help Kaboodles compiling changelists for his future sponsored patch. My primary idea is that Walk = Aim and Sprint restricts fire from stocked weapons - in this case the sprint ability becomes a lot of fun for those with lighter guns (you really can kill someone from an SMG while sprinting from a few meters!). And, of course, the ability to set a list of artifact weapons which just pass from player to player as prizes. Fighting for the only LG on the battlefield is much funnier than cursing everyone with an LG around... =)


You're exaggerating a bit. If properly balanced, each new weapon adds a new facet to the game experience. However the more weapons are already in, the less fun comes with each consequent addition. I think that the current arsenal is just what the final version needs, save for some energy guns...

P.S.[/b] If Kaboodles is so kind to scrape up some money (suggestions are welcome how to get my $$$ sent along as well) and sponsor a patch or two, probably we could discuss all the necessary and optional features that should be in. Especially the controls, the role of stocks, sprinting, walking and aiming...

Here is the thread Kaboodles made.
http://runestorm.com/pl/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?51253

The developers haven't told much, but Archon is basically a vast extension of what BW introduces. Kind of like BW is the planet, Archon is the solar system, or even the galaxy.

I'm going to keep an open mind about Archon, no one knows if it will be good except time itself.

You guys have no clue what they are going to do in the near future, and BW is merely just the weapons of their universe. Game play is gonna be nothing like how it is currently, some of the weapons will undergo a complete overhaul, according to what SB said once (particularly the skrith weapons, if I recall correctly), and chances are, they're already sizing up potential engines to port the weapons over to.

Maybe it'll be UT3, maybe it won't, it all simply depends on what they feel would be the best suited for their plans. They won't be sticking with UT2004's engine though.

I don't think they'll be continuing work on BW on two different engines at once, but they won't simply drop it completely. Not entirely sure what they meant by this when they said this, but this is what they said, more or less.

I'd like to emphasize the point that only the weapons will be transferred onto whatever the new engine will be, gameplay is likely to undergo massive changes, as it will no longer be, more or less, UT2004's gameplay with different guns.

Now, onto discussion of what Baklajan has said, in fewer words.

You seem to be getting the impression that they actually trying to tell the story and plot line to their future game through the weapon descriptions... Not sure how you got that, but whats been said about the Archon universe has merely been descriptions of different aspects of the universe, absolutely nothing about any plot line has been said, so I'm not too sure why you'd say the plot and story are poor, inconsistent, or unoriginal.

You must be misunderstanding why they want a different engine. Graphics scalability is only one aspect of it, they also want something that has more players so they can get more fans, and they want how things are handled changed, which is why they want a new engine. Believe me, if they stick to UT2004, they could have the greatest game of all time, but there won't be any one to play it.

Now, I understand the controls could be better and can be rather inconsistent, but for crying out loud, how the hell is that going to ruin the game so much if so very few have complained about it this much?

Reasons why they keep their projects secret, is because they like to give everyone a surprise, and they don't want to promise anything and end up not being able to fulfill that promise.

As for ideas not making it into the game, well, compared to the amount of coding they do for the game vs. guns, there's not a lot of guns added, unless you count bonus packs, which they add before any other requests simply because they are getting some money for their work (it isn't cheap living in Hell).

Try making mod in an area with as hot of weather, as many insects, as much crime and corruption, with only a horribly unreliable dial-up connection available that costs $5 an hour, plus recently, frequent power outages; that those guys have to put up with. Try that out for a while and tell me you can do as good a job.

EDIT: I see you don't have it much better... I truly am sorry to hear you have to go through this same shit too... Damning corruption and greed cursed upon this race...

These guys do the best they can with what little they have, which is a hell of a lot better than most any of us can do.

No. Everything I learned about the Archon universe is from the forum and the Wiki. The story about some aliens whose name sounds like a pun on Skaarj and whose weapon designs have been definitely stolen from Skaarj engineers, and who are somehow able to deflect all energy thus forcing humans to take up deer hunting rifles, makes virtually no sense. The lamest plot I've ever heard of. That's just enough for me, spare me - I don't want to know the rest. Judging by what has been disclosed so far, the rest of the plot is even wilder crap, and making up B-class stories has no excuse. Nuff said.

To put it shorter, I don't want nothing from Archon dawning upon the existing BW version for UT2004. Archon would make a fine game on another engine if recomposed from scratch with its plot revised as well, but porting the whole existing arsenal from BW onto some other engine will be a failure, quite justified by the general game design rules.



UT3 is the most mod friendly engine around. Crysis won't do. GoW is nice due to the action-permeated gameplay, various player moves and the general lack of reasons to pose any problems to porting BW weapons, but I wouldn't say it's too mod friendly. Battlefield 2 is damn buggy - ask anyone modding for it, like me. Buggy beyond the point where one would want to start a large project using it in 2008... No other major moddable enginers around.


UT3 is among the world's least played shooters when it comes to multiplayer, much to the publisher's shock and confusion. So is Crysis, should we trust the news. UT2004 is still widely played, and if the rest of the world (not just these forums) is made aware of a stable version of BW, guys will get back to UT2004. I'm planning to have at least two (most likely four) BW servers running here in Russia by the summer, since people keep asking for BW. We just have to light the torch. UT2004 is only 10 bucks right now, so no problem getting a legal CD-key at all. To get familiar with the mod, you could also try downloading a pirate copy from a torrent tracker before buying the game, but I think the screenshots and trailers will be enough to get people intrigued to the point of buying UT04... And now I'm being serious as ever...


That's just because almost no-one plays BW due to the lack of publicity and the overall confusing impression it produces on novices... also due to the not-too-straight controls. Hee hee. However people more or less familiar with BW can't stop playing it, which gives me high hopes.


Secrecy leads to confusion, and confusion leads to disappointment. Due to this secrecy soon this place will have no one around but the moderators to give surprises to. RS seem to be coding / modelling geniuses, but now it's clear to me that they don't know a thing about game marketing.



We've got frequent water outages instead, which is equal to freezing below zero in your own houses in winter 'cause the houses are warmed up by hot running water, for example it was about -15°F in November, and once upon a day somebody decided to cut down the water just for the lulz. Effectively that means that you have nothing to drink, nothing to wash your hands with, no chance for a hot shower (as well as for any kind of shower in general), and your flat is freezing to the point when the windows begin to crack. Electroheaters are but a weak measure against this type of colds. And that's all because some small part broke down somewhere five miles away, and it takes a month for the authorities to find out the cause and force the necessary people to go and fix it, mwahahahaha... We also got mosquitoes living right in folks' apartments, temperatures like 100°F during the hottest weeks of July and August, - that's continental climate, dude, and not the maritime one like in the US, - and as far as crime and corruption are concerned, you better keep your pockets sewn tight when in Russia, - the local cops get severely punished if they fail to arrest the drug traffickers, so the best way to arrest a drug trafficker is to detain a citizen, take him to the police station for no apparent reason and beat him nearly to death, then place a small packet of heroin into one of his pockets and suddenly 'discover' it in the presense of two bribed 'eyewitnesses' - that's how naturally they cheat their statistics and catch the required number of drug traffickers to fulfill the "seven-year plan", and you naturally go to jail for 8-10 years, which is a very unpleasant business in a country where about 80% of prison inmates are infected with tuberculosis and receive no medication. A friend of my has been recently knocked unconscious by two SWAT fighters, only to hear 'Damn, it's not him...' when they lifted him from the ground and saw his face. You see, first they beat you and only then try to see if it's actually you and not the other person they were looking for... To crown it all, most popular sports in Russia are murder, children rape and occasional gunfights between the mafia members. Statisctically, and average of 1 senator, 2.5 parliament deputies and a few dozen major businessmen are assassinated in Russia per month, and this is no f*cking joke. Russia can be clearly divided into two parts: Moscow and St. Petersburg are Europe, the rest is tundra where no laws apply. So I guess I should be proud I'm still able to mod for Battlefield 2 and Oblivion living in a place like this. But the biggest LOL is that they somehow admitted the Olympic Games to take place by our side in 2014, looks like it will take half of our army and a couple of nuclear warheads to provide decent security. Now you don't think Africa beats us in terms of general mess going around, do you?


Getting back to BW, I'm happy to hear BW-2004 is to stay at least the way it is now, and for the possible port I care not. I place my bet on RS failing to make a game better than the original BW, if they ever manage to find a suitable engine. I hope Kaboodles (and I, if the bank allows) will sponsor a patch or two with all the necessary fixes, then I'll just set up a few BW servers and make up a site both in Russian and English, advertising the mod with lots of screenshots, etc. etc. etc. The least thing I will get is a stable Russian community devoted to BW, but my hidden expectations are those of a worldwide BW fever resulting in a few thousand players all over the world after the knowledge of the mod creeps outside this vault...

I hope you and Kaboodles (and your bank) form an alliance so the patch becomes reality. Many of the things suggested tickle my interest quite a bit. If you guys teamed up it would be a megapatch that makes BW more stable than helium.

Will be going to Moscow next week to find out a way to send the money, and started to save funds right now. )

We all owe RS a lot for what they have been creating during all these years...

Controls? I have no trouble with control. That may be because I customised mine, though...

One can't customize what is non-customizable. You are thinking of something else I bet.

Baklajan, are you running under Windows XP, or Vista?

I do have to correct something here, a few of you have talked about UT3 having a more advanced engine, but this is simply not true.

With UT3 you simply get better graphics (all the standard DX9 stuff really), and now you can make cutscenes and stuff like that with Kismet, but that is all you get, graphics and Kismet, and at the cost of needing beefier hardware.

Alot of you have probably seen the UE3 engine tech vids that surfaced before UT3 and GOW hit the market, and marveled at what it can do with lighting, physics, and a lot of other things, yes, the UE3 engine is indeed quite amazing.. but we dont have the full UE3 engine in UT3, we have none of that cool stuff, this game was designed for consoles, and to make it play on a PS3, they have stripped the engine bare, it only has the basic stuff it needs to play vanilla UT3, there is barely anything else there, and definately none of the cool stuff we saw in thouse tech previews!

So really, what we have here is UT2004, with DX9 graphics, slightly better physics and sound engines, and alot less base code (this is the stuff modders need!), the engine wont even do basic stuff like clear an .ini file, or even make opening doors.. i kid you not, you cannot make doors, they will absolutely bug out, as a modder, you can do less with this engine than you can with UT2004!


And word on the street is, modders are fleeing UT3, lack of any usefull support from Epic and all the problems with the engine, from lacking base code, to the way many features where implimented into the game, that are anything but mod freindly, is making it too big a hassle, coupled with how unpopular UT3 is, how few people actually play it, more and more are just finding it futile.

Perhabs Epic can turn this around, but it would require a huge patch, that overhauls the engine, UI, adds a ton of base code, and rewriting how alot of things plug into the game, it would be no small feat, and probably more work than Epic wants to invest in a game that is doing so poorly.

This thread is making me laugh....

Maybe if some of you would spend more time playing the game instead of debating it you'd know what the hell you were talking about..

Ya I see what you mean seriously guys UT3 rocks what part of "unreal" do you not understand

What does the word unreal have to do with the game's fun factor? And I should correct you: UT3 does not rock, you think it rocks.

Bull **** it does have you ever in your life used the stock weapons or do you just play mods, because it sounds like you don't know what your talking about, and you always have to have your two sense in everything just because your a moderator I think you need to get out of this forum and Play UT3 a couple times before you make that statement again, and FYI theres a new patch coming out at the end of april you stuck up prick