Unless you know this already, slap me.

*slap* I didn't know but I wanted to slap you

*Shotgun Slap!*

Yeah, saw it on Beyond Unreal.

I didnt know. Should I whack instead?

You want us to slap you if we did not know it? You better get yourself something to protect your face, heh.

It is amazing what has happened to quality of visuals and audio of games in these 9 years.

Did you ever think games like descent and quake couldnt get more realistic? I did.

9 years later and now you can see the reflections in a characters eyeballs

The next step will be adding armhair to the hand holding the gun, and each straw of hair casts shadows too of course.

Eeeeww... you sure can cast a nasty image, BJ...

... Oh, and...

*SLAPS SX*

Why ew? If hair disgusts you, then you shouldn't open your eyes without a paramedic ready.

No, the next thing is more expressive emotions, improbing the physics, and making the game's characters more human/alien/robot/etc. (humans sweat, robots get rusty, aliens... um... I don't know..)

Good luck finding a developer ready to spend millions of dollars on developing a game engine capable of realistic facial expressions and chemical reactivity.

Don't worry, it will come in time... when humans depend on video games to wage war, they'll have to make their players drink water .

Just kidding, won't be that extreme. I just hope someone would do this, and improve WAY more on video game blood & gore. If they could make the open wounds bleed realistically (not like happy little dorplets in MK:A), I'll be satisfied.

I agree with the visual inprovements, but only half-agree with the improvement on sound. The weapon sounds don't have enough, uhhh, ... crass. While they sound ok, they just seem weak compared to the UT99 sounds. If there was a mod that gave UT04 weapons sound effects from UT99, I'd download that in in no time.

I was talking about the evolvement of games in general, not just the Unreal series.

But now that you mentioned it; UT2004 has the worst piece of shit gun sounds I have heard. UT99 ones were and still are fantastic, they make it feel good to gib someone. Apparently the composer of UT2004 sounds didn't realize how powerful influence it has on the human brain when it receives stimulus from audio and visuals at the same time. This is why it is much more enjoyable to kill a bot in UT99; better gibs, better sounds.

The Ut2004 weapon sounds were too quiet. They needed to be heard over footsteps and music. They sounded alot better with the volume turned up and if you listened to the sound induvidually (as everything else drowns it out). You can do this in UED. Runestorm did it right; shotguns blasting off should not go unnoticed and as a result they sounded vey powerful

Audio in general has definetly improved, listen to the sharpness and quality of sound in Ut2004 compared to ut99. The Ut2004 shock combo is a good example. What they lacked was tone and mood

Quality aside the ut99 weapon sounds did sound much more powerful:

The rockets didnt fly past you they screamed furiously past you.
The enforcer sounded like it launched tank shells and I loved the clinking of bullet casing rattling on the ground.
The pulse rifle secondary did not let off a hum of energy but an angry growl.
The shock rifle primary sounded...indescribeably awesome

But going back to the topic of graphics I noticed in the Starcraft 2 trailer, the characters feet interacted with the surrounding metal. His toes wriggles, his bones moved and I think I saw indivudual little hairs too. If anything is going to be next I am voting for dynamic skin and body collision.

I didnt even think the trailer WAS computer generated for the first few seconds and couldnt confirm it was until I saw the character

There still one way to tell between a computer generation and an actual studio recording: computers cant do microbial skin texture

Guess you knew.... (SLAP)

The UT2004 shock combo sound is fvcking amazing, gotta give credit for that. It is vastly better than the one in UT99 both in quality and powerfulness. You can imagine how it sounds at 100% bass with cranked up volume with a Logitech Z-2200 speaker system.

Ahh, the good old Unreal! If I'm thinking of unreal I remember so many feelings which no other game ever let me feel. Unreal was just the best unreal ever ( but not the graphic, although it wasn' bad). I wish there would be an UnrealI remake with Unreal Engine 3 !!

UT3 is apparently going to have a single player more related to unreal and unreal 2 gameplay

It may not be unreal 3 but if the gameplay is there so might the storyline. (but I hope I still get a few games of CTF in it)

Why not? Its already is unreal tournament and unreal championship merged together.

In 1998, Unreal was easily the best looking game.
The same can't be said about the rest of the series, Quake 3 beat the hell out of Unreal Tournament in 1999 and UT2004 looked plain ugly for a 2004 game. UT2003 and Unreal 2 had nice graphics for their time though.

I thought some of the inside textures in Ut 2004 were nice but the outside levels looked like crap

Unreal 1 = Cool
UT99 = Cool

everything else (including U2) = sucking

You can't judge UT2004 on its graphics since it's just UT2003 with more features. It's just a standalone expansion pack.

Yes you can. Epic did the mistake of releasing the next installment of the Unreal series with a way outdated engine. Why they did that I don't know. Probably thought the graphics whores of today wouldn't notice it or something.

Well at least the graphic whores will be satisfied with Ut3

When I first saw UT2004 I was BLOWN AWAY by the level of detail in maps such as Dria, Face 3, RobotFactory and Plunge. Please dont say it has crap graphics.

I had never seen UT99 or Unreal at that time. So I didnt judge its graphics for what it used to have in the past and what it could have had now.

Compare it to other games released in its Era of creation = 2003. It had good graphics.

Compared to Doom 3 which came out a little less than a year later theres a massive difference

Face3 was in UT2003, in October 2002 that level of detail was amazing, not March 2004.
The game has crap graphics and that is reflected by the very low system requirements. Doom 3 was released 4 months after UT2004, and it had specularity, realtime shadow calculations, not to mentione fifty billion times better-looking lighting.

So you wanted a graphical upgrade by UT2004's release? You expect alot from Epic,

One business as small as Epic can only roll out a game engine so often. The next engine lineup was Unreal engine 2.5 for UC2 but that could not have been released in time for UT2004 just for the sake of graphical competition. Its not that easy when repairing the engine, fixing balance issues, adding more content and healing other embarassments of UT2003 was a higher priority.

Even then UE2.5 just patched new eye candy effects onto UE2 together with better static meshes. The visual upgrade from UE2 to UE3 took (and is still taking) years.

If Epic had to cater to graphical competitors we would have ended up with UT2004 being released in December 2006. This also means UT3 would be even further into the future, UT3 was a higher priority still and they didnt want UT2004 to slow down their progress on it, sacrafices must be made for these kind of things. They didnt have the time for eye candy. They had to focus on the problems they met with UT2003 and they had to release it quick.

But this only meant the graphics wasnt up to par with modernised game engines created in 2004 such as the Doom 3 engine which is definetly not in UE2's era of creation. It doesnt mean the graphics were a piss-poor slack job on Epics behalf.

Even then UE2.5 just patched new eye candy effects onto UE2 together with better static meshes. The visual upgrade from UE2 to UE3 took (and is still taking) years.
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modernised game engines created in 2004 such as the quake 3 engine
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Quake 3 engine was made in 1999...