[u227i] Unreal: Resurgence Part 1

[Teridax]

Here's a link to the alpha version: http://www.mediafire.com/file/vz2le375frixiwc/ResurgenceAlpha.zip
I haven't had the motivation, energy, or time to do anything on this for a while now, so I'm releasing the most complete maps. That way, at least some part of this project sees the light of day. I'm really sorry I couldn't get it to be a full release as it should have been. Sorry for getting everyone's hopes up. Maybe I'll be able to finish it one day.

Life sucks.

Thanks to everyone who contributed, you guys are great.

[Shivaxi]

Awesome!! So glad we finally get to see something from this, been a long time =)

Haven't played it yet but quick question, why are there different sized textures in the texture folder of textures from UT99? Like these textures are textures from UT99, but they do not match the file size at all of the textures right from my UT99 folder, in fact yours are a lot bigger. I made a list here of the textures that are conflicting.

UTcrypt
UTtech3
WOTdetail
DDayFX
Indus1
Old_FX

Did you modify these? And if so why not rename them? Or do I possibly have the wrong versions somehow? My textures like I said just came from my UT99 folder, but they are no where near the size as the textures included in your mappack here for some reason. Trying to nail down where the confliction is coming from.

Also should I replace my textures with yours? Or is it safe to use the originals I have from UT99?

EDIT: I tried opening and comparing my UT99 original textures to your textures which are much bigger in file size, but there seems to be no difference at all. They're not even higher res, same number of textures, no new textures at all...so I'm not even sure why they're a much bigger file size.

EDIT2: Okay just opened your version of UTCrypt and it seems to have some seriously broken textures, some of the wall textures are just all black, but then at the top its like the orginal texture is super squished down for no reason

http://i.imgur.com/ToygMe0.png

your UTCrypt is also 11 MB, where the original is 2 MB lol, with no other differences either...so I think something is messed up here with your textures, and you may want to grab the originals from the vanilla UT99 install.

[Teridax]

Replaced the link with one that should have the textures fixed.

[yrex]

Wow. That looks really professional. Having unfinished stuff released is much better than waiting until a project gets out of its forever WIP state in order to become "perfect".

What I particularly liked:

- Overall quality.

- Flyby. It looked just like some commercial game.

- Nalis with hammers.

- The trapped titan, which for some reason wasn't really grateful that I released him.

- Level titles shown at the beginning of levels.

- "sectors 084, 864, and 867".

Now some constructive critique:

- There were places where my framerate dropped to 4-7 FPS. It shouldn't be really hard to optimize this, but I guess the proper solution would be for me to just buy new shinier hardware and shut up.

- There was one critical problem - the badly positioned bridge in ResurgenceTwoB.

- The authors used static meshes, which is good, because they render so much faster. It would be even better if they applied flat shading to most of them (SmoothingGroup=-1) to make them even less distingushible from BSP. (And also, if Smirf fixed behavior of LE_NonIncidence on meshes)

- There was one place with apparently no way to escape (ResurgenceTwo.Mover102 after it falls).

- The bomb explosion effect in ResurgenceTwo. It looked like a bunch of very small and wrongly timed ExplosionChains (a typical problem), while it could have been done much better with emitters.

- The village in ResurgenceTwo could be made mandatory so that the players don't miss a lot of stuff.

- Invisible wall near ResurgenceThree.Trigger0.

- There's a learn by dying place at the beginning of ResurgenceFour.

- Light cones aren't visible from inside.

- Some round things could be converted to static meshes for better lighting.

- Broken animation in impaler (crystal jumping around).

- There was a frozen nonsolid merc near ResurgenceTwoB.SCSkeletalMercCarcass0. Perhaps it was even this actor, just with wrong animation sequence for some reason.

[AlCapowned]

For both the bridge in map 2b and the falling mover in map 2, you're supposed to use the Razik's lunge (hold the left and right mouse buttons). You can also use the lunge ability with the invisibility cloak and dampener in map 2 to sneak into the village and jump down a chimney. We planned a tutorial map at some point but never got around to it.

The village in map 2 is intentionally optional. While it would be a shame for players to miss out on so much cool stuff, skipping it (or not disabling the mercenary signal) means that you fight the mercenaries at the end of map 2b instead of the Kraal. It's meant to be a harder fight, but we didn't do a lot of testing with that one.

Was the replacement battery in map 3 hard to find?

[yrex]

After trying like 100 times I found that you can aim with the mouse vertically to affect direction of the jump.

The battery was easy to find (I might have been lucky), although it was located in a place where I would rather expect secrets instead of stuff needed to progress.

[UB_]

"Critical: Ran out of virtual memory. To prevent this condition, you must free up more space on your primary hard disk."

Christ, it's literally impossible playing a U227 pack at all (though this time it might have to do more with S3TC textures, even if it actually shouldn't be happening like in old Unreal vers)

Sucks because the build quality was so far really good.

[watcher_of_the_skies]

One of the best Unreal experiences I've ever had.
Loved every second of it. Thank you guys for all your hard work on this one!

[editor Dave]

I played the pack and first of all, Im impressed of what you call an "Alpha" because all maps seem very much playable and are indeed very enjoyable (although I did notice a lack of level details at the end of TwoB) and I have to agree with all the positive aspects yrex wrote!

If I had to pick a favorite map it would be the final Crypt-themed map: The atmosphere it creates with the lighting, the sounds and the scripted sequences was striking! I also found the hints at most traps were clever, such as blood traces or enemies running right into them. Part of why I enjoyed it most was because it felt better balanced than TwoA and TwoB. In those maps I was constantly either at low health or low ammo. I found that especially the health items were too sparsely placed in the beginning. On the other hand, I liked the structure of those maps (like the completely optional village) and the changing themes.

The Impaler was by far my most liked weapon, not only because it is kind of tied to a story, but also because of how effective it is - and it looks cool! from the new enemies, I found the Flayer the most convincing in terms of animations and sounds. Also, the first encounter of them was very well executed, it almost scared me! Actually, the whole "shrine" segment was very interesting. I did love the dragons too, though both their entrances didnt really "catch" me. I expected those dragon moments to be more exciting by a change of music or of them suddenly crashing in - the scream didnt cut it for me.

The "lunge" mechanic of the Raziks was a nice addition (actually, the whole play-as-Skaarj-theme was cool), as it allowed unconventional playstyles without having to care too much about level design as opposed to the Translocator. I thought Three made the best use of it.

All in all, Im very pleased that I could participate at your ride. I hope you find some time to continue on it!

PS: Now onto G59, I guess

[Lightning Hunter]

"Critical: Ran out of virtual memory. To prevent this condition, you must free up more space on your primary hard disk."

Christ, it's literally impossible playing a U227 pack at all (though this time it might have to do more with S3TC textures, even if it actually shouldn't be happening like in old Unreal vers)

Sucks because the build quality was so far really good.

What do you have CacheSizeMegs set to in Unreal.ini? I used to have this set really high, thinking it would boost performance - but all it did was cause the same crash you are getting while using my HD skins pack. I now have it set to 8, and have not seen that error since.

[UB_]

"Critical: Ran out of virtual memory. To prevent this condition, you must free up more space on your primary hard disk."

Christ, it's literally impossible playing a U227 pack at all (though this time it might have to do more with S3TC textures, even if it actually shouldn't be happening like in old Unreal vers)

Sucks because the build quality was so far really good.

What do you have CacheSizeMegs set to in Unreal.ini? I used to have this set really high, thinking it would boost performance - but all it did was cause the same crash you are getting while using my HD skins pack. I now have it set to 8, and have not seen that error since.

Still 8. Happens when a map loads. I never had this bug years ago with S3TC and pre-227 Unreal on weaker computers and I really doubt these maps are anywhere close as being intensive as something like EXU2.

Also sending Mercenaries into laser barriers with the Stunner is fucking priceless lol

[Semfry]

Have you changed your Windows virtual memory settings at all? Even if your RAM far exceeds anything a game like Unreal 1 could possibly use, games (namely older ones) can still act weird if it perceives there to be none or not enough, so just leaving it on auto is the most reliable choice on modern systems. There's a chance a program could have messed with it too, so it's worth checking anyway.

[Lightning Hunter]

Also, try setting CacheSizeMegs to 4 just for the heck of it. I believe this was the default when Unreal first came out.

[yrex]

Lol, 4 MB of difference? We are talking about hundreds of megabytes here. Opening map 2b and messing around causes my Unreal to take 200 MB. This is without any HD mods. Now add S3TC textures to that and you will get some more hundreds of MB. So I would start from disabling the S3TC textures, or at least replacing them with the low-end ones (you will save a lot of disk space for hardly any quality loss). Then there's obj garbage/obj purge.

By the way, the Cache of which we're changing SizeMegs seems to be the same cache that you rebuild with "flush" command, which in turn is related to lightmaps and other rendering stuff. Knowing how slow lighting calculations in Unreal are, increasing this may in theory actually improve performance.

Finally, sometimes the out of memory error may be caused by something unrelated to memory. For example, I used to get it when opening .umod files with UnrealTournament.exe. Obviously, the cause wasn't lack of memory, but using wrong executable (which most likely interpreted random gibberish as number of items to allocate etc...).

[Lightning Hunter]

Lol, 4 MB of difference?

Sounds crazy, but when I playtested UnrealHD, I stopped getting crashes going down by just 16MB. I don't know why.