I was talking about this ages ago in a random thread... that was probably locked... But I found the difference in the UT engines.

Atari published Unreal which was also the name of the first engine. Unreal Engine 1 was supposedly revolutionary, I think that it always was possible to make a game lie unreal. Anyway, it was a pretty good engine. (Unreal engine 1 [UE1])

Unreal Tournament (later released as Unreal Tournament GOTY edition with a number of extra features and then Unreal Tournament 99) used a modified version of that engine. This allowed for more detailed graphics and more colours on the screen at once, this really did revolutionise gaming. Not only was it a fine engine, but it was easy to program for. The engine was called Unreal Engine 1.5 Games such as Deus Ex were made using this engine. It was shortly over taken by halflife which in truth, started out using the Unreal Engine 1.5, then moved onto it's own engine using the principals set down by UE1.5 (Unreal Engine 1.5 [UE1.5])

A few years later, Unreal 2 came out, after the success of Unreal 1, Unreal 2 was bound to be a hit right? Wrong. The game started out good and had killer graphics for the time, but then thats all it was. It was samey and boring. The characters were a little too un-inventive. Many gamers were dissappointed and returned to Unreal 1. Unreal 2 was nothing more than a few pretty pictures. (Unreal Engine 2 [UE2])

Trying to bring gamers back to UE2, in 2003 Atari decided to release Unreal Tournament 2003, the sequal the the award winning game in 1999. Many people loved this game and enjoyed it. I personally found it boring. Assault was removed, and Bombing run was brought into the tournament. The sniper rifle was also removed and replaced with a lightning gun (WTF!?!?!) and the double enforcers were also removed and replaced with the dual assault rifles. Many people loved this, like I said, but I hated it. Atari were proud, but it was short lived as people began to return to UT99. Something had to be done. (Unreal Engine 2 [UE2]

2004: Atari publish the most brilliant death match game to ever have hit the planet with a slightly different Engine. Unreal Engine 2.5 "The most anticipated tournament yet..." was the catch phrase to a lot of the advertising. It was, vehicles were brought into the tournament. A genius idea. Assault returned along with the sniper rifle. The Assault rifles remained though. Onslaught was also a new addition to the tournament, a game mode where vehicles could be used, it was never used in the campaign though. Unreal Engine 2.5 still is an award winning engine, with many new developers using it. Ragnarok Online 2, a Korean game not yet released, uses the engine, along with other games. It is not just an engine for shooters, people have shown that it is an engine to create racing games, rpgs, real time strategies, almost anything... Sometimes after the release of Unreal Tournament 2004, Atari ditch the franchise and Midway come in to clean up. (Unreal Engine 2.5 [UE2.5])

2006-2007 and beyong: Epic finished Unreal Engine 3 sometime this year and began releasing it to other parties a little later. With ground breaking graphics and just about everything else, Unreal Engine 3 promises to keep it's user friendly design so old and new developers can use it to create mods and whole games. Unreal Tournament 2007 and Gears of War are the first games that will be releaesd to use this engine. I can't wait!!!! (Unreal Engine 3 [UE3])
I'm actually going to buy a whole new computer for 2007.

Don't ask me why I wrote this, I've got nothing to do and I thought it was interesting.

Shit thats alot, maybe add spaces to the paragraphs, i'm getting headachs just trying to read, and Bjossi probaby won't even bother cause it looks like one big paragraph.

Good article, nice and now i know the difference between the engines, thanks.

Corrections: Unreal Tournament 99 uses the exact same engine as Unreal 1, save for less than a megabyte of modifications to allow for better graphics. They never caled it Unreal 1.5

HalfLife uses a modified Quake2 engine. Not Unreal.

UT2003 was out before Unreal2.

Beyong, now thats a funny word.

It's the Ut version of Mahjongg, balistic style.

interesting observation.. i personally think that Unreal 2 was really CRAP.. i finish the single player thinking, that was average and looked alright, then sai *lets play some bot*.. then i'm like bots?? bots? where the f**king BOTS!!?? i never touched it agin.. what a waste of money!!

2k3 was CRAP, and 2k4 was less CRAP.. but u know

Yeah, halflife does use that engine, but it was originally going to use the unreal engine
And the engine for UT99 is different to the engine used in unreal 1. Not too different, but it is an updated version of the engine used in unreal 1.

Mac, for all of our sake, use Enter from time to time when writing big posts. I thought I had mentioned it to you that I'm dyslexic when there is a big soup of words, it is tough to read that way.

But what I see from the posts.
Unreal and UT do use the exact same engine with minor modifications in the UT version to support new graphics that were implemented like S3TC textures. But with the patch 226f, that was added to Unreal's OpenGL rendered too afaik.

UT2003 was released in October 2002 by the way, so Unreal 2 is quite a bit younger game.

The thing is, I do use paragraphs, I just don't double space.
There, this is a new paragraph. At least, thats the way I'm used to do them, you don't double paragraph when writing a book. (Mines to be published some time next year!)

well i just have to ask, are you Mac, writing a book when your posting on the BW fourms? No, you aren't so please double space for heavens sake!

Sorry, it's just habit! :S

That's good, but since you aren't writing a book here, then it'd make things much much easier if you'd use double spaces. It is one thing reading a book that has this long and obvious space in the beginning of each paragraph, but this is a forum that doesn't support a space at the beginning of a line. So double spacing is the best option to make paragraphs.

Where did you hear that Half Life was going to use the Unreal Engine? They licensed the Quake engine. Why would they start on one engine and then move to a totally different one?

He might have just misheard info on it.

Well, I couldn't mishear that badly even if I tried.
And just looking at the graphics of HL1 says that they don't look good enough to be UEngine 1.0.

Yeah, Quake2.

I don't think HalfLife was ever slated to be on the Unreal1 Engine. And besides, even the source engine can be seen to have been heavilt influenced by the the Quake engines. They use a lot of the same procedures, almost identical language, etc.

oh well, Guess it was wrong, just stuff I looked up on old websites.

I actually managed to find a website that had a PREVIEW of unreal 99 heh heh.

games that switch engines a lot.. hmm.. what about Duke Nukem Forever?? biggest load of crap ever!! 10-11 years of developement WTF!! useless..

Switching engines isn't a good thing for the content, what looks fantastic on the Quake 2 engine looks total crap on UEngine 2.0 and absolutely awful on the Doom 3 engine.

If they keep switching engines, they'll go bankrupt. It's that simple.

I wonder how difficult it would be to build a custom engine, one that combines the very best features of existing engines but doesn't have (most of) their drawbacks. Basically all you'd need is some decent hardware and a bunch of skilled coders, and those can presumably be hired on the cheap in say India or China.

Another idea is to make it an all-volunteer open source project, sort of like Linux for gaming (only a bit more user friendly).

In either case, this engine would be designed with modding in mind, and would have broad support for all sorts of custom content. And once you have an engine, well, it's time to make some kickass games! Something like UT but with slicker and more realistic player models (mostly just normal looking people), weapons, arenas etc., and some WICKED SICK violence and bizarre humor. None of that silly cartoonish stuff. And I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have to cost millions of $$, either -- that's just ridiculous.

As long as you are making the engine yourself from start to finish and same for the content of the game, then it wouldn't cost anything unless you want the game to be sold. In that case you need a publisher...