Wow, sounds great, glad you enjoyed it! I think you might have hit some save bugs though. And what difficulty did you play through on? Any spots that gave you too much trouble and should be looked at?

"Most fun I've ever had with a game" is a pretty big compliment; I hope the final lives up to that

I didn't play through the entire thing because my PC crashed when I was at the Dark Arena. But don't worry, the crash and EXU weren't related. Aside from that, I played on medium. I loved the intro map, but underestimated the warnings being "go on easy if it's your first time". I was fucking owned by pupae in Vortex. But when I got the hang of it there weren't much problems, unless I was careless and got cornered. In which case I died like a lobster thrown into a lava pit.

I need to play it through again, but I wanted to wait until Zephon was released before doing so. That being done, I'll give it another go soon, be sure about it Only thing that I found impossible was the mentioned Titan-turned demon fight in the abyss underneath Chizra. But it's probably due to my playing style, don't know. Like I said, I'll give it another go now that I've gotten the basics down and the hang of it.

Don't know if you saw my previous edited post, but the Shitgun is epic I want to marry that gun, Seriously.

lollllll yeah I really like the Shitgun too; everyone underestimates its firepower though! It's really right up there with the EnergyAR and Hell Gun in terms of damage output in most situations.

The Archdemon fight is hard, but if you keep moving and always stay behind cover, taking shots at it before it can see you, you'll be a lot better off. If you can prevent it from even throwing meteors you'll be a lot less prone to taking splash damage (or hits from the homing demon skulls that burst out). And don't forget about locking on with the Screamer if you get a chance.

[Edit] I think you should maybe replay on Easy if you had a lot of trouble on medium, especially because of what goes down in Map 15 :p

Hyper Flakker's primary and the EnergyAR's secondary are good against the Archdemon. Flare Gun with Shock Flares or Razor Flares are great too. Use the Screamer missile for a small help.
The darker part of the arena (which doesn't have lava if I remember well) has a big pillar which is perfect for taking cover and annoy the crap out of the boss - the pillar is placed near the Archdemon pit.
Don't go close to him if he suddenly shoot hell laser beams everywhere.

The main rule is to anticipate any of his movements. Shoot him when he's coming out from his corner and then escape, until he dies. He's just tough and the battle will be very long, no exploits here.

Must say, EXU made me better at FPS.
The flare gun is a nice, nice addition in my opinion, as in my previous run in demo 3 I quite didn't use flares as much as needed, and ended saving a lot of them in fights where they could have been the easiest solution... though, during Archdemon's first fight it was actually quite hard without it to set up an explosion right below him.
The only advice, if I could, about it is that you could allow the weapon to charge the power of the shot while pressing the fire button, allowing for shorter lobs when needed...

Not a bad idea. I'll talk to UArchitect and see what he thinks about implementing a charged shot for the flare gun. Maybe an inverse charge, where the longer you hold it, the slower it goes? Since generally you want maximum velocity, at least for the primary fire. In fact, such a feature might only make sense on the alt fire since it fires bouncing flares instead of insta-splode flares.

I just remembered, about that Archdemon fight under Chizra: I died constantly, so I had to reload the map quite a few times. Luckily I saved before the fight ensued, but on some reloads he'd get stuck in the fire pit and have problems coming out. Just thought you should know.

Indeed, the geometry in there is kind of haphazard and can bug out sometimes. I've tried a lot of things to force the Archdemon out of the pit, but I think, to get it 100% reliable, I'm gonna need to put some shitty ghetto-ass-tastical code in there to do it Probably something like where, for the boss, once triggered, set Velocity.z = some number, set collision size to 1 as it rises out (to ensure it clears the pit), then set the collision size back to normal and disable the upward velocity. Shitty as hell and totally awful solution but it could work! After all, that's how 99% of EXU was made anyway! It's only recently that I've entered the development hell of code cleanup :I

Good luck with that! It can be a bitch to clean up tings, especially code.

Yeah, Archdemon didn't manage to come out from his pit one time during my reloads. So I decided to stay over its small lake and pee on it with weapons and such until I got bored. The boss was like stuck in his own hot diarrhea, and he screamed a lot in those instances.

Aww yeeeuh, I went and applied some major performance boosts to the Archdemon! Now you can have a whole bunch of them on screen at once with no noticeable performance drops.

Turns out that the primary reason the thing was lagging the game so much was because of UE1's horrific sprite rendering problems. That is, if you have a lot of translucent sprites on top of each other, the game just shits itself for some reason. Naturally, because the Archdemon uses a complex particle emitter for its fire effect, there are TONS of sprites overlapping all the time. If you are far enough away from the Archdemon that bStasis kicks in and the particles stop being rendered, the lag is virtually nonexistent, so the emitter was never the problem, just the sprite overlap.

To compromise, I placed an Archdemon fire emitter in a black room, centered it, and took a ton of screenshots of it. I kept the best 12 and cropped them down to 512x512 textures, stuck them into an animated sprite actor, and disabled the emitter-based fire effect, switching instead to the animated sprite. Now you have a very very very similar (but not QUITE as cool looking) effect with almost none of the performance hits! Success

This should hopefully speed up Map 15 quite considerably, but there are still other AI issues to work out which cause the latter half of it to get really slow. This stuff should be fixed for the patch, I hope. That's the goal, at least.

EXU progress has been a bit slower for the past few weeks because of busyness at work and tons of stuff going on with The Machine. UA and I have switched gears to that for a while, but EXU will still be getting stuff done to it. We switch between them pretty often when the times are right. And in case it wasn't clear, we're not going to talk much about The Machine other than "it exists" and "it's progressing" -- primarily because we want you guys to be surprised! So don't ask questions about it, because we're not going to reveal anything until it's released. I think it will be worth it, though

Had finally a chance to play it (online, after I couldn't get it to run offline several months ago) and I say it's genius, totally insane, but genius (both are same thing anyway).

The weapons are wonderful, my favourite is the energy rifle, if I'd do a sci-fi gun, I'd do it like this, it feels somewhat authentic as a weapon system (no slow floating bubbles, but a lightning fast razer-sharp energy bolt, just how a self-respected weapon has to be), I was even surprised to see such a classy thing in a such crazy game. Pity the ammo isn't rechargeable, as I always prefer to stick to my favourite weapon, which eats all my precious ammo in EXU2.

The look is fantastic, that cave with the Balrog-esque demon looks almost UE2,5 like and is filled with atmosphere. Entering the cave after the madness before gave me a huge chill, until the madness started over. I even wish EXU2 was more focused on the demonic atmosphere, instead of the crazyness, but well.


Good job! But gimme rechargeable ammo plz!

Is it possible to use the EXU2 weapons as a stand alone mutator (with rechargeable ammo)? If not, would you make one (of course with rechargeable ammo!)? That would be nice.

Yeah, I can add an ammo-recharge mutator to EXU for the patch. As far as standalone weapon mutators, if you look at EXU.int in a text editor and uncomment (remove the //) the EXUAddGun mutators, you can enable those and use 'em. They should accomplish the same thing.

Could someone with EXU2 Batshit Insane Demo 4 installed, verify if the MP3 music plays correctly on Mr.loathsomes EXU2 server?

adress: 69.210.212.203:8777

I can't do myself, because the laptop i used to play UT with died a month ago, and I don't have EXU2 installed on the one I'm currently using, neither do I know where those mp3 tracks should start to kick in.

I created a new RMusicPlayer.u that should be compatible with the original one, while allowing players who don't have EXU2 installed to receive it from the redirect without problems. The connection tests where successful, I just need to know whether it's functional.

Note that in order to connect successfully, players must either have RMusicPlayer installed correctly (either standalone or through EXU), or not installed at all (receiving fake from redirect). If you just have the RMusicPlayer.dll but not the RMusicPlayer.u installed, you will fail to connect.


EDIT:

Mr.Loathsome did a couple of tests, looks like it's working well.