damaged wrote:

LEOTCK wrote:I spoke to someone who was more "involved". There might yet be hope for other content, though most cds/stuff were thrown away. Don't wanna go to details though. Just wish me luck and keep hoping something comes out of it.

Go get 'em Leo.


I checked into the Nintendo support for IDA and it looks like I can do the Metroid Prime thing. It's probably likely that the Nintendo devs got a hold of an early Unreal build. I mean, who would you have port the Unreal engine? It makes sense. I would just have to think about how to determine whether it used the Unreal Engine. I don't know that much about that particular game.

It wasn't nintendo, it was retro studios who had this engine. It was said that Nintendo decided to use it after they saw it in action in the game Retro was developing. But that doesn't mean it was a completely original engine. So many aspects are way too similar and when you make the game display on real screen/signal without the low resolution and refresh rate, it really does look like the unreal engine games of the time. It isn't just the looks but the way the engine behaves in many ways which can't be said of other game engines at the time. Too many people deny this or refuse to comment on it. I did try to speak to one developer but he didn't reply to the unreal engine connection question at all, like he declined to comment. I find that a bit odd. There were rumors and they never really flatly denied them. It's like there's some no speak rule about it. Nintendo can have some harsh policies and this might have been meant to be a big secret. As I told you when I got out of the map boundaries and observed
stuff, it seemed to use fluidsurfaceinfos, water volumes in the same way, fog and the way the engine loads the visible areas which is identical to the unreal 2 way, not the other loading and door transitions/triggers or "streaming", but the use of so called antiportals. You can not notice this normally, except sometimes when you wait for the door to open you notice that some staticmeshes suddenly appear on the background, but if you are out of the "map" lke under a door walkway and completely out of reach you will notice the same erratic behaviors I observed in Unreal 2 when doing the same thing. Check the thread at assembler games about the "developement tools" thing where that guy suddenly said it was unreal engine, because he saw the extracted scripts and files. But its been a while and he doesn't hae that ready anymore and he wasn't that skilled or knowledable about the engine to say it for sure.

I'd say they did lot of effort to mask the obvious behaviors etc of the engine the way the game is structured, but that horribly falls apart if you get out of the "map" and do something that wasn't expected.

just wondering but did the old unreal engine use .utx and .urn packages like the released version had done?

masterofcrime wrote:just wondering but did the old unreal engine use .utx and .urn packages like the released version had done?

unr packages were there since the beginning. utx not, or were optional. Everything the map needed was originally stored in the unr files. Then later there were the .utx sets but they were not required to run the map because the map used them and the used textures were used with the map. Of course that inflates the file size though but there were probably reasons plus there was also a package dependancy system. A mapper had to specify that in order to make the map not save everything used into itself. In the late 97 versions up to final it was obviously the opposite way. Nothing got saved into map unless "myleveled".

I wanted to say, I realized what was the name of the other warez cd that has this elusive Unreal leak. I did find the listing ages ago but someone from here has shown me it again, it was called "VooDoo 13", that particular CD.

I am hopeful that more might surface relatively soon. I certainly want someone to recover the 96 leak, I have got to know some details from someone who remembered this version so I know what to expect and what not and what might/not be there.
It won't be anything truly groundbreaking however the build is important because it's the first one having the editor and certain monsters/skins that were later cut and perhaps some unheard music too.
One shouldn't expect much level wise from it, but it's certainly more level centered than the 95 september alpha. I still don't know why everyone forgot about such leaks. I know that people often got flamed at irc channels for discussing it later on, but still. Those are important history pieces and should be preserved. Once it gets leaked it should be treated as something public, especially if it's basically a demo and contains so much differences.
Also I'm trying to get something else, but soon might be clear if i suceed or not, but if yes then there's time for another news. Don't wanna give out much details though.

Thanks for the update! I hope you will succeed in finding the lost pieces.

And the news won't likely be happening, the other thing i wanted someone to recover. :/
sorry
at least not for the forseeable future. But the 96 "alpha" might get released by someone still, I hope.
Also way ago it was revealed to me that there were also some internal leaks/source codes just given to specific groups/members, which wasn't ready as public leak because of how sensitive it was and how much of it was I guess. It's very possible some of the builds we got from emissary were there too, perhaps originally coming from one of the contractors to begin with. It's unknown which versions those were though but there's less chance to recover all those than that public early 96 leak. Of course one wishes he would also see that full early 97 beta that Bill Gates got to play, but I guess that would be in dreams...

It's strange how so much stuff detailed in some notes/ideas were ahead of time but hardly survived through to the final game. I guess same kind of happened with Quake because it mentions there was a showcase alpha of Quake(which i also heard from other source) which had a hammer with multi modes etc and there were planned dragging of bodies and stuff like that. Funny how Quake turned out in the end just as a fast paced action game usually equated with simplicity. And kinda funny how Unreal developers wanted initially to have more complex stuff in. I kinda think that the whole competition stuff/deals ruined what could some games become eventually. And it never got better as the time went...
Acording to early notes there were character shadows during early 1996 era(not sure from when to when), but it was like that. And metalic reflections etc. As the developement progressed it was all getting cut and as technology evolved/devolved.

maybe some of these old warez-cd-s contain u1 stuff? ftp://176.107.241.42/public/CD_collections/ (too bad no date markers on them)
or they were only released on fate cd-s?

I can't seem to make a connection there. Not just fate cds though. VooDoo CDs as well. Are VooDoo among this?

EDIT: I got in but I don't know what's on those cds, I know crazybytes and Twilight didn't have it but not sure about the others.

LEOTCK wrote:It's strange how so much stuff detailed in some notes/ideas were ahead of time but hardly survived through to the final game. I guess same kind of happened with Quake because it mentions there was a showcase alpha of Quake(which i also heard from other source) which had a hammer with multi modes etc and there were planned dragging of bodies and stuff like that. Funny how Quake turned out in the end just as a fast paced action game usually equated with simplicity. And kinda funny how Unreal developers wanted initially to have more complex stuff in. I kinda think that the whole competition stuff/deals ruined what could some games become eventually. And it never got better as the time went...
Acording to early notes there were character shadows during early 1996 era(not sure from when to when), but it was like that. And metalic reflections etc. As the developement progressed it was all getting cut and as technology evolved/devolved.

You can still find the old Usenet posts by John Romero regarding pre-release Quake. They make for an interesting read. You can also find posts regarding the Hexen2 beta.

I loved the idea of Unreal that was originally made public. I don't think people truly understand how it was back then. One minute it's Doom and Doom2 and the next, Quake and Unreal. It's was pretty amazing. Unreal originally sounded like an adventure to be honest.

The hexen 2 alpha was leaked but I was not able to locate that either..
Can you send me those usenet posts? or at least put them in a file and sent them to me, if they are in google groups i cant acess those anymore since they forced javascript requirement (kinda fishy though).

I released TerraEd on beyondunreal forums:
http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t=202901
This comes from the developement of the game The Circle. I haven't had chance to actually run it and nobody showed pics of the old version which I suspect might be based on very early stuff even though the dates might be off. The Circle started on very early unreal engine and continued on 1997 early unreal engine but this wasn't preserved. But most of the game material has been preserved fortunately. Meaning models, textures, brushes, terrain, an updated mesh animation tool to work on windows as well, etc. And the documentation and story.
This is also a version of the same but with added textures: TerraEd.zip

Awesome find, I tried to run the texed you linked on beyondunreal forums, it worked fine, just had to manually create textures dir and convert the pics to bmp. Even this one you linked here works perfectly and it has textures already. Too bad the game files werent preserved, still... would be interesting to look the early concepts/models/docs to imagine how it couldve looked like.

Can you describe to me though how different is the TERREDIT one with all those different executables? Might some of them be previews of early levels or not? As I said I haven't had chance to try it and without my own working windows machine it's impossible for me now. Is that one and VIEWEX very different from each other or not?
I'll probably link the entire stuff here after talking to someone.

Also if you can take pictures it would be welcome.

Sure

The new terreditor (viewex.exe):








This is the old terreditor (terredit.exe):


Shape editor (shpedit.exe) didn't work for me


Keytest.exe is just for testing keyboard input values, and rtm is needed for pascal stuff, seems like all the early tools were written in borland.

-----

Found some basic info about the circle on their old website (emery productions later got renamed to world tree games)
http://world-tree.150m.com/past.html

-----

Another find:

Daniel Cook released The Circle asset pack (2d textures)
http://www.lostgarden.com/2006/07/more- ... phics.html

A second pack of textures from The Circle:
http://www.lostgarden.com/2006/02/250-f ... tures.html

It was actually under Eclipse officially first. The team consisted, acording to old 96 doc, of Daniel Cook, Jason Emery, Alexander Brandon, Dave Carter, Robert Allen. There were few more contributors though but this was the core of the team.
Thanks for the screenshots.

Thx for the info, meanwhile Ive found a small interesting pack:
http://www.lostgarden.com/2006/07/more- ... phics.html
Daniel Cook released this himself

Ah yes, I know about that one. It's been quite a while since I downloaded that and indeed the whole stuff has this archive as well within in.

The whole stuff is about 173 megs large iirc.

Wow, thats amazing, hope one day you can upload them. Meanwhile, Ive found the 2nd pack of textures from The Circle:
http://www.lostgarden.com/2006/02/250-f ... tures.html

Not just one day, I'll post it very soon, it's hosted now at a site of a friend who's known around here anyway.

I tried the unrealEd from v0.84 and i could import the t3d exported from the circle's terrain editor, but after importing, it looses all the texture tiling, and its imported upside down Too bad, I wanted to make some testmaps, already played some with the terrain editor

It shouldn't lose the tiling, and youcould rotate/flip it to avoid that I guess.
But this was specifially designed for the 0.85 etc versions which had own terrain support(yes we don't have those). The later versions should however be compatible with later. Try to import it under later versions and together with the texture/tile names. That should do the trick. They need to be iported into the editor as textures too.
EDIT: MiscArchive.zip - hogsy has put this up online. It should contain the rest of the stuff.
Also try playing with the t3d import options. One of them might do the trick, or even outright level import or brush import...

Once again we see Leo (and friends) pull a rabbit out of a hat.

If you read the docs, you see "Torg" mentioned. As luck would have it, this is also mentioned in a song that was ripped from the "dark vengeance" game. The same guy who tracked the music for Unreal also tracked the music for that game as well. In the samples area, you can read about Torg. Completely new songs and known ones with changes. I enjoy listening to it.

I thought it was the original idea for the "sky cities" Epic had planned. Little did I know.

You can get the album here:
http://www.mirsoft.info/gmb/music_info. ... e=MTM4ODI=

Someone just messaged me and asked what are FATE cds. I can't reply back due to the guy having disabled private messages so I'll adress it here.
Fate Numbers CDs were series of warez cds back in the 90s, there is a site which has the listings archived, and can be trivially found. This is not ran by the original owner though it's simply there as archive. The CDs had many stuff that was released on the BBS back in the day.