Unreal Tournament - with head-to-head multiplayer deathmatches

Summary

I know we played this. Not sure which version, maybe three of them, maybe just one. I also remember playing against real players like Aria and others. I do not remember connecting it to the internet or to other computers, but remember playing it on the Macintosh.

At the beginning, you have to play classic deathmatch rounds. After you have successfully won some of them, a new game mode becomes available, domination. In domination there are about three or four different areas scattered around the map to be controlled by your team. For a certain amount of seconds you control one area, a point is added to your score. The more areas you control, the faster your team's score rises. When you or the other team reaches a certain score, the game is over. The third mode is called capture the flag, every team has a flag to defend and tries to capture the other team's flag to score a point.

The fourth game mode is called assault. This mode requires completion of real missions, such as attacking an enemy base and destroying a specific object in it. Again, there are two teams, the defenders and the attackers. You have to complete the mission in a certain time, for example five or ten minutes. If you were successful, your team has to defend this time and the other team attacks. But the attacking team now only has as much time as you needed to attack.

All these modes are either playable in single or multiplayer mode. If playing alone, you have a large menu with orders you can give your bots. Also, all weapons were redesigned, and some new ones are added.

Overview

Unreal Tournament was designed as an arena FPS, with head-to-head multiplayer deathmatches being the primary focus of the game. The game's single-player campaign is essentially a series of arena matches played with bots. For team matches, bots are again used to fill the roles of the player's teammates. Even on dedicated multiplayer servers, bots are sometimes used to pad out teams that are short on players.

UT is known and widely praised by critics and players alike—primarily for its bot A.I., the product of programmer Steve Polge who had earlier risen to fame by designing the Reaper bot for Quake II, one of the earliest examples of an effective deathmatch bot. The player can choose a bot skill level (anywhere from "Novice" to "Godlike") or set it to automatically adjust to the player's performance. Bots can be further customized by changing names, appearance, accuracy, weapon preferences, awareness, and so forth.

Unreal Tournament is capable of using maps created for Unreal. The Unreal content was automatically replaced with Unreal Tournament content when running an Unreal DM map with one of the Unreal Tournament gametypes.

Development History

The game was officially announced by publisher GT Interactive on November 3, 1998, as part of a two-game deal that also included Unreal II: The Awakening, though development on the game had already started after Unreal was finished. It was originally planned as just an expansion pack under the name "Bot Pack," when it was realized that the multiplayer aspect of Unreal was popular and something that people sought after, so the first priority was to fix the problems with online play. According to Tim Sweeney, the development team felt that the "botmatch" (deathmatch play against bots) was slowly becoming a popular mode, and Steven Polge, who was behind the AI, felt he only scratched the surface of what was possible with bots, therefore placing the focus on getting a competitive AI that felt more "human" as well as working well in complex team-play situations like Capture the Flag. However, what also impulsed the dev team's decision, weeks before UT's own announcement while the game was still being worked, was the announcement of what would eventually become UT's main competitor, Quake III Arena, by Id Software's own John Carmack, a decision that took the development team by surprise. Therefore, instead of taking technological risks, they decided to focus on just fine-tuning and polishing the multiplayer aspect.

At some point during its development, it became clear that the number and extent of the changes to the Unreal codebase that Epic was required to make made UT too incompatible with Unreal. In fact, according to Tim Sweeney, the game has between 200 and 300 C++ classes. Thus the expansion pack was broken off from Unreal and made into a standalone game. The game contains nearly all of the content present in Unreal, except for the maps and music. Nick Michon was in charge of the code trigger scripts, Steven Polge and Brandon Reinhart wrote the mutators and the code for the Relics (according to Tim Sweeney, Reinhart also contributed to the game code, weapons and masterminded the ngWorldStats interface and Linux port), Erik de Neve wrote the LOD character rendering and other optimizations, Jack Porter (who was hired by Epic Games after his USpy mod for Unreal impressed both Brandon Reinhart and Mark Rein; this mod ended up being the basis of the UWindows GUI) wrote the WebAdmin system. In the artistic side, James Green is credited with creating the models and animations for the Relics, the Skaarj Hybrid models, and the weapon on top of the Nali WarCow which eventually made it as a playable character, as well as a lot of concept art, and making high-poly models to test with the skeletal animation system which made it into the Bonus Pack 4.

Early in development, every map from Unreal, including the 10 default maps; the Fusion Map Pack maps; and the Unreal Special Edition maps, were considered for the game. Ultimately, only Curse, Deck16 and Morbias were selected for the retail version as DM-Curse][, DM-Deck16][ and DM-Morbias][; with Cybrosis, HealPod, Mojo and Shrapnel making it through the Epic Bonus Pack as DM-Cybrosis][, DM-HealPod][, DM-Mojo][ and DM-Shrapnel][. 4-team CTF was also planned for the game, but was dropped halfway through development. According to Alan Willard, this was so mod makers could implement the mode.

The first publicly available version (version 322) of the demo was released on September 17, 1999. According to Steven Polge, Epic worked on the demo until the last minute and it was going to be uploaded when hurricane Floyd hit Raleigh the day prior and Epic's offices lost power, fortunately, the demo was uploaded at the end of the day. A version 321 was briefly and accidentally made available to the public the night before, but was rapidly withdrawn. The version 322 demo is for use with 3dfx video cards only. This early version of the demo omits DM-Tempest. A patch was provided to update prior version 321 to 322. Two days later, a patch to the 3dfx-only demo was provided to correct a server crash that occurred whilst using the Web-based remote administration facility.

The first full demo (and a patch to the 3dfx-only demo to convert it to the full demo) was released September 28, 1999. This took the demo to version 338. A Version 338a demo intended to test a server map change problem was accidentally released but rapidly disowned by Epic. The Version 338 demo is not compatible with the final version of the full demo. A final demo was released on October 19, 1999 and contains 5 maps from the game; one map for each gametype, except Assault. The demo has the maps CTF-Coret, DM-Morpheus, DM-Phobos, DM-Tempest, and DOM-Sesmar. The Linux and Mac versions of the Version 348 demo, as well as an additional crashfix patch for the PC version, were released on October 20, 1999. According to Tim Sweeney, the reason of why UT didn't have good OpenGL support is purely because of market share (at the time, DirectX was the main API used for development). Finally, an additional patch to update version 348 servers was released November 9, 1999. Network compatibility is unaffected by this patch.

The game went officially gold on November 15, 1999. According to Jack Porter, once the game was released, in the beginning, the team caught some flak for bugs, unbalanced mirroring of items in symmetrical CTF maps and poor Direct3D support, but eventually these bugs were sorted out.