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[Unreal 227J] The One

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User avatar Hellscrag
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Subject: Re: [Unreal 227J] The One

Post Posted: 31 Oct 2022, 21:05

Diego96 wrote:I think I randomly stumbled upon all of them. You just need to keep walking.
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Thanks. I thought I'd walked everywhere I could, but it was just a switch that was hard to spot.
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User avatar Hellscrag
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Subject: Re: [Unreal 227J] The One

Post Posted: 31 Oct 2022, 22:22

I'm currently roaming the hub map, and I'm kinda lost for words by how enormous and confusing it all is. I've finally found the entrance to Underground 2, but I don't know if I want to go through it yet. It's massively engrossing but also slightly frustrating as I don't really know what I'm trying to accomplish.

My son plays The Legend of Zelda a lot, and this sort of reminds me of it (especially Breath of the Wild) with its enormous overworld and strategically placed 'dungeons'. The theme is a sort of tropical jungle that we wanted to create for part of Battle for Na Pali but probably wouldn't have been able to pull off at the time. The new engine features such as static meshes seem to be integral here.

I've yet to find the village or any of the NPCs.

One thing's for sure - Turboman is a unique talent.
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User avatar Turboman
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Subject: Re: [Unreal 227J] The One

Post Posted: 31 Oct 2022, 22:47

Thank you all for your kind feedback! Glad to see that people are enjoying it so far :o


Hellscrag wrote:I'm currently roaming the hub map, and I'm kinda lost for words by how enormous and confusing it all is. I've finally found the entrance to Underground 2, but I don't know if I want to go through it yet. It's massively engrossing but also slightly frustrating as I don't really know what I'm trying to accomplish.


Admittedly I can understand that the layout can be frustrating. In a hindsight the island design isn’t exactly laid out in a straightforward way. Something that stemmed from the muddy development, a topic which I might talk about some other time :)

Navigation does become a bit easier once you get past the village though, as more area's will open up from there
► Show Spoiler


But as far as directions to the village go:
► Show Spoiler

User avatar Hellscrag
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Subject: Re: [Unreal 227J] The One

Post Posted: 31 Oct 2022, 23:30

Thanks for the pointers Turbo, I'll stay in the hub for now!
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User avatar Turboman
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Subject: Re: [Unreal 227J] The One

Post Posted: 31 Oct 2022, 23:53

Preki wrote:So uhh... where do I even begin?
I had quite average expectations for this one - just another map pack with lots of eye candy and custom weapons thrown into it. But the actual experience just blew those expectations away. This is not an ordinary map pack, although it might seem to be that way in the beginning. No Unreal modder has ever tried that pseudo-open world design before, and while both Project Xenome packs or the most recent The Descent are cool in their own terms, these feature classic level-by-level progression. In The One I was shocked to discover that upon completing a level I'm thrown back into a humonguous hub area, constantly discovering new places within it - every nook and cranny hides some stuff. I remember being blown away by the huge scale of maps in Interloper, but this is just another league. All those beautiful vistas are not just for the sake of looking pretty in the distance - you can actually go there most of the times, it's like... NyLeve Falls of the original Unreal up to eleven. In the first minutes of my playthrough I was running like a headless chicken trying to find a way to proceed further or acquire any weapon. Combat is quite sparse so far, but encountering those packs of Krall or bosses are really tense moments that keep you on your toes. But even the exploration feels very satysfying for reasons mentioned above, I can see some huge influence from Triamid Ruins here. And that variable weather and day/night cycle - HO-LY SHIT! What's that magic? Turboman, I'm starting to feel afraid that Firestorm is not gonna live up our expectations after witnessing The One :D Lol just kidding, keep up the good work!

Hell, I'm gonna say something really far-fetched, but The One is how Unreal II should've been like! I can't wait to play more of this, in between doing my day job, playing Gran Turismo 4 or working on a project of mine (non-Unreal related).


I’m delighted to hear that you liked it. I’m honored that you feel it’s what an Unreal II should be like.
Part of the idea that crossed my mind when developing this was: How I would design an expansion/sequel to Unreal.
I wanted to make a somewhat conservative “classic” singleplayer experience, yet still add some completely new features that wouldn't contradict the original game too much, I kind of thought of Half Life 2, a game that largely respects it's original, it does a lot of new but doesn't change too much of the old.

As for the Hub maps, glad you enjoyed it! Something that I strongly felt would have huge potential in Unreal were Hub maps. From early on I've always wanted to do a hub style campaign (like in HEXEN or strife). And one day I noticed that dots (;..; ) unreal97 conversion had a limited amount of hub maps so I integrated his code and tried to stretch it's use by adding as much inter-map events as possible. :o

And interesting that you mentioned The Triamid Ruins, as it really was my first attempt at doing something non-linear and something unique in Unreal. Although it may have strayed too far from the original game’s formula, I took a lot of stuff I’ve learned there and applied it in The One, they're very closely related in that sense :)

User avatar Aspide
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Subject: Re: [Unreal 227J] The One

Post Posted: 02 Nov 2022, 07:18

I have finished the campaign twice (in Medium and Unreal difficulty) and it's a masterpiece :D , the brush work, lighting, new weapons, scripted sequences, story and the 227 features are all fantastic, this sp campaign is pushing Unreal to new uncharted territory and it's going to be a very difficult project to top.

However even though it's a masterpiece, it's a flawed masterpiece, I'm okay with that considering that the majority of the work was made by one person but there are some things that really bother me:
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Besides that this campaign is a wonderful achievement and it's definitely one of the best mappacks I have ever played. :tup: :tup:
Somewhere in Nevada...

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Subject: Re: [Unreal 227J] The One

Post Posted: 03 Nov 2022, 10:58

Hi Aspide, thank you for playing!

Let met respond to you in one giant spoiler :P

► Show Spoiler


Once again thanks for playing, and for providing this elaborate feedback on both Normal+Unreal difficulty :)

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Subject: Re: [Unreal 227J] The One

Post Posted: 03 Nov 2022, 11:07

In reply to some of you guys querying about a map of the island. I already mentioned how I've scrapped the idea of providing a map in-game. But I did work on a very early draft drawing of what I hoped would become a map inventory item at some point, I figured maybe it'll be useful for those of you who are REALLY lost out there :shy:

Spoiler warning, very ugly unfinished drawing of the island with some quickly added annotations:
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Hope it provides some help to people being lost out there, although because of the vertical nature of the island, some of these pointers can be quite useless as you'd still have to figure out what level these reside on :B

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Subject: Re: [Unreal 227J] The One

Post Posted: 03 Nov 2022, 17:02

I do remember talks about a location map during testing, yes. Besides being something that would have been cool aesthetically, I was one of your testers that got a bit turned around trying to find the Monastery (that was a few hours of exploring the island before I got over my embarrassment and just asked you :o) I think we also discussed alternate ideas, like waypoints, but I can't remember if you were too into that idea (or some kind of log that would let the player know when certain places were open and free to visit/changed).

I also would be very interested in reading or viewing some kind of development supplemental about how you made everything (and how this project started), since you mentioned it :tup:

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Subject: Re: [Unreal 227J] The One

Post Posted: 03 Nov 2022, 21:52

I finally made it to the town!

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Subject: Re: [Unreal 227J] The One

Post Posted: 05 Nov 2022, 01:27

Finished playing through the whole thing yesterday, was an amazing experience that really felt like its own game and just goes to show how much can be done with 227 and a bit of creativity. I was minded a lot of Zelda as previously mentioned by Scrag and I also kept thinking of Minecraft for some reason!

Really loved using the 2 new weapons, once I got the knack of the grapple I was always looking for opportunities to use it and the Smartdisk 2.0 was a lot of fun too when there were groups of enemies (I tried not to spam it too much I promise :P ). Combat I found quite tricky in places but I may have accidentally set the difficulty to Unreal oops

The story was interesting, definitely felt like there was a depth to the lore and the voice acting actually didn't even feel too out of place (was nice to see/hear a surprise guest appearance!). I'm still not sure exactly what happened in the ending but I guess that just calls for another playthrough right?

Very interesting to read also that it all started as an HD remake of Nali Cove haha
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Subject: Re: [Unreal 227J] The One

Post Posted: 05 Nov 2022, 21:54

SteadZ wrote:Finished playing through the whole thing yesterday, was an amazing experience that really felt like its own game and just goes to show how much can be done with 227 and a bit of creativity. I was minded a lot of Zelda as previously mentioned by Scrag and I also kept thinking of Minecraft for some reason!

Glad that you enjoyed it, unsurprisingly I was partially inspired by a Zelda game, particularly Majora’s Mask played a role in developing this. Initially I even wanted to have the day-night cycle affect actual NPC behavior/time schedules as MM did, but everything was already complicated enough to begin with.

SteadZ wrote:Really loved using the 2 new weapons, once I got the knack of the grapple I was always looking for opportunities to use it and the Smartdisk 2.0 was a lot of fun too when there were groups of enemies (I tried not to spam it too much I promise :P ). Combat I found quite tricky in places but I may have accidentally set the difficulty to Unreal oops

Happy to hear that you enjoyed both weapons. I’ll be honest; I wasn’t even sure if the grapple was going to make it in the end (code-stability issues, which were graciously resolved by ;..; in the end). Hence why It's all quite "tame" on the grapple puzzle department as I was considering a fallback, luckily enough it all worked out in the end. :)
The razor/bladestar was intended for crowd control, particularly as it tries to home in on it’s own as you can just switch to another weapon. :twisted:
Have you used the hidden alternate fire modes of the crossbow yet? I personally found those to be my favorite attack (the main reason why there are so many flares!)

SteadZ wrote:The story was interesting, definitely felt like there was a depth to the lore and the voice acting actually didn't even feel too out of place (was nice to see/hear a surprise guest appearance!). I'm still not sure exactly what happened in the ending but I guess that just calls for another playthrough right?

Happy to hear that it kept you intrigued, there is definitely some lore behind this.
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It's deliberately a bit ambiguous. Hopefully another playthrough would provide some clarity, but it’s mostly open to interpretation whatever’s going on. :shy:
And I’m extremely happy with the surprise guest who provided most of the voice acting, he did an absolute terrific work at conveying the mood I was aiming for!

SteadZ wrote:Very interesting to read also that it all started as an HD remake of Nali Cove haha

Somehow that map left a lasting impression on me :B. It's a bit short, and it's not a very "good" map per se, but it did set up an interesting premise that had a lot of potential. I really wanted to expand on that when I started developing The One.
The influences of Nali Cove are strongly present in the Port town and monastery architecture. In the monastery, you might actually spot several areas that are almost identical in layout.

Then the underground is largely inspired by the first Hollow map, which I might have forgotten to credit in the end! :shake:

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Subject: Re: [Unreal 227J] The One

Post Posted: 06 Nov 2022, 01:53

Played through, it's a massive achievement and one of the ambitious sets made, with incredible visuals almost everywhere along with lots of interesting new scripting and design.

I mentioned it on discord but a couple of technical notes are that the "MeshDetailTextures" OpenGL setting needs to be off or else it breaks a bunch of stuff, and also, Hellscrag mentioned this, but you have to play on the 32bit exe as in 64bit there are a bunch of savegame crashes for some reason. Most of my initial issues came from these and there were few notable problems after I did these two things.

For inspiration I'm also curious if Risen was an influence; the piranha bytes Bites pseudo-open Gothic/Gothic successor games felt like another source of inspiration throughout, but Risen was the one that kept coming to mind with you being washed on the beach of a place with a bunch of mysterious ruins. If it wasn't a source it would be big coincidence because it's the game I felt in the theme and style more than Zelda and other series that have been brought up.

The balance felt a little odd, because most items coming back on level transitions (which I guess was a technical thing made intentional) meant you could be maxed all the time in the hub areas. On the other hand it meant you had room to experiment with some of the new stuff due to otherwise limited items being near-endless, especially with some enemies coming back too. Plus it
► Show Spoiler


On that note
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I'm not entirely sure what happened story-wise, but I guess that gets me curious to play through again sometime and see if I can put some stuff together from what I found earlier in the pack and potentially overlooked as important. The downside is that it did feel a little aimless to start with as you don't really start getting a general goal until you stumble onto certain things.

For the actual issues I had (While this looks big they are mostly nitpicks in practice, and many overlap with Aspide's):
► Show Spoiler
Formerly Mman

User avatar Preki
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Subject: Re: [Unreal 227J] The One

Post Posted: 06 Nov 2022, 12:45

Welp, finished. Thankfully I've got a save file form before the point of no return, so I'll mess around the island more, because there's still some stuff to do there. Yet I was curious of what lies beyond the point of no return, so I decided to tackle the endgame challenge first. This mod might be short, but it sure is very replayable even without trying higher difficulty settings.

New weapons are absolutely fun to play with and most importantly, they don't feel out of place when compared to the original arsenal - that's something hard to achieve when adding new toys. I don't mind lack of the BioRifle, even the Eightball Gun could disappear and I wouldn't notice. Setting enemies on fire with flares is very satisfying and practical at the same time, plus you've got virtually unlimited supply of flares scattered around the place. The Bladestar is pretty fun to use too, but I only found it useful for dealing with lone enemies. This weapon is also another reason why there shouldn't be as much ammo and items laying around, because it allows to conserve ammo for bigger firefights or boss encounters. Also I wish it could tear smaller or weaker enemies such as Mantas or Tentacles into gibs, althtough it's still capable of performing headshots like Razorjack blades.

It's really good to see new enemies and friendly NPCs alike. The beasts are really terryfing, like Pack Hunters on steroids, but amplified ASMD and flare arrows can quickly take care of them... If you're not mauled by them first. Also the new variants of Krall and bigger numbers of these foes made them formidable opponents rather than walking Rifle target practice they were in the original game. Still I wish there would be more Skaarj encounters. And thank God there are no Spinners within the underground ruins, I hate these buggers.

As for the music, yep, the mod is in dire need of new tracks, but not quite new tracks. Remember Nali Chronicles, right? Original tracks for this add-on were composed in a tracker and heavily used samples from Unreal OST. It's new music, but thanks to these samples it still holds that unique atmosphere of Unreal. Toxeen did the same when he scored songs for Operation: Na Pali. The problem is that not many musicians these days use trackers to compose music and with the 227 patch you don't really need to use module files anymore, but I would prefer to have a soundtrack composed in a tracker anyway.

So let's get down into the spoiler territory, shall we?
► Show Spoiler


BIG SPOILER!! Do NOT open before finishing the game! You've been warned! I just had to share this with Turboman (though it would be better to PM him about this).
► Show Spoiler


Seriously I'm afraid all the mappacks I've seen so far will bleak in comparison, and what's more worrying, Firestorm might not live up to the years-long hype, even if I've got nothing against classic Unreal megapack experience.

User avatar Turboman
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Subject: Re: [Unreal 227J] The One

Post Posted: 06 Nov 2022, 16:13

Semfry wrote:For inspiration I'm also curious if Risen was an influence; the piranha bytes Bites pseudo-open Gothic/Gothic successor games felt like another source of inspiration throughout, but Risen was the one that kept coming to mind with you being washed on the beach of a place with a bunch of mysterious ruins. If it wasn't a source it would be big coincidence because it's the game I felt in the theme and style more than Zelda and other series that have been brought up.

You are certainly correct, the early stages of the island were very strongly influenced by Risen, It was also the influence for the semi-open ended vertical design of the island with the many cliffs and canyons to explore. I also remember Dark Messiah of Might & Magic being a big influence for most of the underground architecture.


Semfry wrote:The balance felt a little odd, because most items coming back on level transitions (which I guess was a technical thing made intentional) meant you could be maxed all the time in the hub areas. On the other hand it meant you had room to experiment with some of the new stuff due to otherwise limited items being near-endless, especially with some enemies coming back too.

The respawning items on the island was a design choice made because of the hub system limitations. It's also why many valuable items in the island were locked away in chests so I could apply a randomized spawner to keep it varied. The NPC's at the Inn re-giving you their weapons each time you return was to entice te player to (hopefully) return to that place more frequently. In hindsight the town should have had a more central placement in the island as it's a bit of a slog to reach each time.

Semfry wrote:
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I was made aware by some testers that the grapple can throw things off quite a bit. Particularly if you acquired it before the town. I decided not to do anything about it as I found the idea of people playing it however they want to quite amusing. Even though it made the town map like 99% skippable lol.
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Semfry wrote:
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Oh snap. I’ve had a similar issue during testing once. I’ve had two cutscenes not playing out during one of my 100 or so last-minute test-playthroughs. I was missing out on entire story segments because of that. I tried debugging it to no avail, luckily as with you it didn’t impede progress. I’m just going to attribute this to my really weird trigger setup which might fail under rare conditions (maybe it’s because a hundred dispatchers are firing off at one which might cause a race-condition, who knows :? ).
As for the other bugs; I’ve been made aware of the DP missing bug many times during development, but for some reason I’ve missed it entirely when scanning through my buglist for the hundredth-thousandth time. :shake: At some point I had this MASSIVE buglist, they just kept piling up like crazy! I put them into categories ranging from severe to nice-to-have-fixed. Then I went into crunch-mode spending several late nights resolving them, it kind of got a bit overwhelming and I decided to just throw it out there the minute my bug-checklist had almost all green checks, I was close to being burned-out by bugfixing lol.

On that note, I apologize to everyone who plays on unreal difficulty
► Show Spoiler
It was the result of a really last-minute bugfix that SHOULD have required extensive testing on ALL difficulties. Oh well... :(


Semfry wrote:I mentioned it on discord but a couple of technical notes are that the "MeshDetailTextures" OpenGL setting needs to be off or else it breaks a bunch of stuff, and also, Hellscrag mentioned this, but you have to play on the 32bit exe as in 64bit there are a bunch of savegame crashes for some reason. Most of my initial issues came from these and there were few notable problems after I did these two things.

Surprisingly this went unnoticed to me when testing, I know that early on when testing with 227I and earlier J builds, detail textures on meshes used to completely break fog, but later versions didn't exhibit this behavior. Or perhaps I've had it default to false since then.
Building this thing wasn't particularly easy with 227J being in development, I was working with moving goalposts as a lot of patch features evolved as it progressed. In hindsight it wasn't very responsible to develop such a large mappack on a platform that wasn't final/stable yet, I should have locked it down to 227I as most map packs did.
I hope the oldunreal team can fix the 64-bit issues in 227K though. And here's hoping this remains compatible with 227K. :)

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