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Bat I'm not complaining about no AA. My point (not well made in the post) is that I believe at resolutions of 1920x1200 and above AA starts to become somewhat superfluous. UT has little or jaggies and shimmer seems to be minimal (at least in the demo maps). I must admit that I am envious of those write-ups showing > 100 fps with the monster GPUs, dual to quad procs, etc.

The full game will have it only under DirectX 10.

any new developments on the linux/mac side of things?

I dunno why but something about UT99 UI I liked, it was simple, it felt like I was on a computer, and the sound effects added to the feel.  Yeah I know I talk of ut99 a lot, but aside from Halo I haven't played many other tournament FPS games since it.

It's PR; they can't exactly say 'we're aware the UI is total crap.'

DoctorB wrote:

Bat I'm not complaining about no AA. My point (not well made in the post) is that I believe at resolutions of 1920x1200 and above AA starts to become somewhat superfluous. UT has little or jaggies and shimmer seems to be minimal (at least in the demo maps)...

Worth noting, since GoW PC uses the same basic renderer...

Antialiasing Comparison

The sole image quality advantage DX10 offers in this game is the ability to use “On/Antialiasing” which enables 4X AA in Gears of War. There definitely was an improvement in image quality by running with 4X AA in this game.

[imgs]

In all three screenshots above the advantages of 4X AA become clear. All polygon edges and objects in the world are much smoother, with little sign of aliasing as you move through the game. This was evident as you zoom in on the enemy, there is less object shimmering due to aliasing in the distance. The game looked great with 4X AA, you just need to have a very powerful video card to be able to run with DX10 “On/Antialiasing” enabled since turning on DX10 alone causes a large performance hit.

Right now transparency antialiasing does not work; we tried to force TRMS and TRSS from the control panel with no luck. A future driver may provide this support, but out of the box for us it was non-functional in this game. It isn’t much of a problem though in this game, there are not a lot of transparent textures, regular AA makes the most visual impact.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.h … VzaWFzdA==

I think he may find out differently once he gets some new hardware in-house, that there are more translucent textures than he realizes. Anyway this also seems pertinent, giving background:

Lets be honest, DX10.1 brings a lot of new features that don't really matter much if at all, and you can read all about them here. That said, there is one there that will matter a lot, contrary to what MS people say. This magic feature is the multi-sample buffer reads and writes (MSBRW). If you are wondering how you missed that big one in the feature list, well shame on you, read better next time.

What MSBRW does is quite simple, it gives shaders access to depth and info for all samples without having to resolve the whole pixel. Get it now? No? OK, we'll go into a bit more detail. DX10 forced you to compute a pixel for AA (or MSAA) to be functional, and this basically destroyed the underlying samples. The data was gone, and to be honest, there was no need for it to be kept around.

Games like Quake3 would do a lighting pass, then a shader pass, and another lighting followed by shaders and so on until everything was rendered right. This was quite precise but also quite slow. Dog slow.

To optimize around this, a technique called deferred shading took was invented. This does all the lighting passes followed by a single shader pass. If you have five passes, you basically can skip four trips through the shaders. The problem? Because the pixel isn't fully computed, just a pile of AA data, there is no way for it to be read. This is horribly simplified, but I don't want to go into the low level stuff here, go look it up if you really care.

What this meant is that you can't turn on AA if you have deferred rendering unless you do Supersampling which is rendering it at higher reolutions and sampling down. This is unusably slow, so it went out the door, meaning if you were designing a game, you picked speed in the form of deferred shading, or beauty in the form of AA. Most DX10 games will go for speed, meaning the AA hardware will sit more or less idle.

DX10.1 brings the ability to read those sub-samples to the party via MSBRW. To the end user, this means that once DX10.1 hits, you can click the AA button on your shiny new game and have it actually do something. This is hugely important.

The first reaction most people have is that if a game is written for DX10, then new 10.1 features won't do anything, AA awareness needs to be coded in the engine. That would be correct, but we are told it is quite patchable, IE you will probably see upgrades like the famous 'Chuck patch' for Oblivion. Nothing is guaranteed, but there is a very good chance that most engines will have an upgrade available.

In the end, DX10.1 is mostly fluff with an 800-pound gorilla hiding among the short cropped grass. MSBRW will enable AA and deferred shading, so you can have speed and beauty at the same time, not a bad trade-off.

Since NV has not done the usual 'we can do it too' song and dance when they are being beaten about the head and neck by a bullet point feature they don't have, you can be pretty sure they can't do it.

Close looks at the drivers, and more tellingly no PR trumpeting that they will have it out before the release of SP1 almost assuredly means that it will never happen. If you have a G8x or a G9x card, the only feature of DX10.1 you will miss is the important one. µ

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/ … 10-matters

The only DX10.1-compliant parts out are the very new Radeon HD3800s. It'll be interesting to see how UE3 image quality compares in a few months, since probably most UE3 games [do or will] use that deferred shading, and Epic's a longtime member of NV's TWIMTBP program... will Transparency/ Adaptive AA work with 10.1-compliant parts only? Will pundits & reviewers pick up on it either way? Time will tell.

Mr. Happypants wrote:

Mr. Happypants wrote:

Is there a way to tell the installer to use another drive as Temp while installing? Registry editing is fine, just not sure where to look.

Since the Topic is staying alive, any suggestions on this?

Any way for you to have the demo on another hard drive and install to the C drive from there?

Mr. Happypants wrote:

Aha, found a way! Went to My Computer/Properties/Advanced & at the bottom is "Environment Variables" which allows you to specify a different Temp location. I still had to clear asome room from the C: drive though, so I moved all those FEAR Combat downloads to another drive temporarily. <sigh> That was a long way to go for a demo!

Oh good...I didn't reply cause I didn't have an answer. I'll keep this in mind incase the full version has issues too.

Unreal Tournament 3 Dedicated Server Released

Epic Games' sci-fi shooter Unreal Tournament 3 ships to stores for the PC this week and today the game's dedicated server has also been released, allowing folks to run their own multiplayer servers for the game. You can download the server from several sites including Fileshack and Beyond Unreal. There is word on one bug; "There's one known issue where the install will not exit if you have Windows firewall enabled. Disabling the firewall, or ending the install process when it hangs, both work and the installation will have completed successfully."

http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsart … chid=18391

CTF in Campaign?

So much for story. "To save Earth from invasion, we must capture the enemy's.. um... flag, and bring it back here. Morale will drop so low they'll surrender.. we hope. To your machines, and good luck."

I just ask too much from my hardware.

NOOOOOooooooooo!!!

Of course! I LOVE spoilers ... meanwhile, a near-miracle for PS3 fans:

Unreal Tournament 3 PS3 Goes Gold

Epic Games's Mark Rein sent over an email alerting us to this post on Epic Games' official message board announcing that the PS3 version of their sci-fi shooter Unreal Tournament 3 has been approved for certification by Sony and has therefore gone gold, meaning the game is now being duplicated for shipment to stores. ..snip:

Midway has started talking to retailers to figure out exact timing and they will have a formal announcement early next week when everyone is back from the Thanksgiving holiday. My guess is that Midway will start shipping the title to North American retailers on Monday December 10th and it could show up in stores as early as December 11th but more likely toward the middle of that week.

It looks like European gamers will still have to wait until early 2008 for the PS3 version to ship, however.

So, soon you and Doc'll have MacZimizer bugging you to play. So happy you'll be!

And DL those free physics-heavy maps from Ageia.

Think i'll probably wait till the christmas to get it. Either as a gift or myself buying it. Tho I need to save some $$$ for Soul Calibur IV in January. As much as I love UT, I gotta get SCIV on launch.

UT has a very deep story bat...it just involves a lot of guys in heavy armor playing with themselves .

MacZiMiZer wrote:

How did the PS3 version end up done six months before the 360 version?

They had always planned to do the 360 version after PC/PS3 were done.
I don't know why, though...

\o/ PATCHED!

The final patch changelist is:

Gameplay:
- Fixed scaling of certain player meshes (increased in size some human and robot meshes). Addresses meshes being smaller than collision box, as well as eyeheight issues.
- Fixed feigning death into/through ForcedDirVolumes.
- Fixed grenade effects in water.
- Increased hellbender rear turret damage.
- Reduced Goliath machine gun spread, plus slight damage increase.
- Fixed warfare scoring for locking down a prime node not called "prime node".
- Slightly increased momentum taken for damage by mantas and vipers.
- Flak, Rocket, and Shock do slightly more damage to manta and viper.
- Made sure Hellfire SPMA cannon can't fire through walls.
- Increased incoming SPMA fire sound radius.
- Fixed impact jumping with hoverboard.
- Fixed bot Pawns losing their PRI at the end of the match, causing them to, among other things, be invisible
- Fixed being able to switch away from the rocket launcher in the delay between the third rocket being loaded and the weapon autofiring.
- Fixed weapon crosshair incorrectly turning red when hit enemy on the client, but not on the server.
- Disabled attenuation/spatialization on mission briefing sounds.

AI:
- Improved bot AI with darkwalker.
- Tweaked bot voice message frequencies.
- Bot aiming tweaks.
- Fixed bots attacking friendly player in rare cases when that player recently stole an enemy vehicle.
- Fixed bots not handling the "Hold This Position" order correctly when the player giving the order is in a multi-person vehicle.

Demo playback:
- Fixed demo playback not ending/looping correctly when the demo ends due to the DemoRecSpectator being destroyed before the end of the file is reached.
- Demos can now be paused.
- By default, demo playback now runs at full speed and interpolates in between demo frames using the normal client simulation code. The old frame-locked method is still available by passing ?disallowinterp. Timedemos are unaffected by this change.
- Fixed demoplay URL parsing counting the options as part of the filename unless an extension was specified in the demo name
- Added a "Delete Demo" button to the demo playback menu.
- Demo playback now properly handles rotation when viewing a Pawn in first person.
- Fixed looking around while spectating a vehicle.
- Fixed demo playback not working if the PlayerController didn't get recorded into the first frame

Server Browser:
- Implemented History tab page in server browser, with ability to "lock" favorites on that page.
- Implemented a Favorites tab page in the server browser.
- Added 'Join as spectator' feature.
- Server browser uses smaller font to display more servers.
- Fixed custom mutators not appearing in server browser.
- Fixed custom gametypes not displayed in server browser's window.
- Fixed server browser's listed MaxPlayers being incorrect.
- Added filter option for dedicated servers.
- Fixed server browser showing an incorrect goal score and time limit when the .ini values were used.
- Fixed incorrect mutators appearing in server browser details if client & server are not using the same language

User Interface:
- Can now save settings/progress even if have never created a profile.
- Added ping and connect time to scoreboard.
- Removed annoying confirmation menu when starting a game.
- Removed unnecessary top settings page (can use tabs at the top of the settings to navigate).
- Added a Messages tab to the mid game menu.
- Friends messages now saved until explicitly deleted.
- Finer control over mouse sensitivity, using an edit box instead of a slider.
- Added framerate smoothing and FOV options to the advanced video menu.
- Increased max players/bots in menus to 32.
- Fixed auto switching to vote menu at end of match.
- Improved mid game menu performance (don't render world behind it).
- Added version number to main menu.
- Fixed binding gamepad/joystick keys (you must set AllowJoystickInput=1 in the [WinDrv.WindowsClient] of your UTEngine.ini to enable gamepads/joysticks).
- Fixed up the GDF project for Vista

HUD:
- Added the killer weapon to victim messages.
- Fixed flag and orb scaling in minimap at high resolutions.
- Fixed node teleporter not showing "You can't teleport with orb" message on clients.
- Fixed situations where "get in vehicle" pictograph wouldn't work correctly.
- Still draw the clock on the scoreboard after the game is over.
- Fixed Duel HUD issues.

Networking:
- Implemented STUN support (Simple Traversal of UDP Through Network Address Translators) to enable clients and servers to connect from behind a NAT.
- Fixed "open" console command when connecting to Internet servers
- Fixed team scores very rarely not updating for a client.
- Fixed bot faction option when running a listen server.
- Fixed link setup not reset correctly when going from a map with a custom link setup to one using the default.
- Fixed a case where Duel would place an incoming player on the wrong team when some players were still travelling.
- Bullseye stats are now properly recorded.
- Fixed clients not travelling to downloaded maps correctly.
- Fixed the client and server getting into a loop sending each other close messages in some situations.
- Quick match incorporates player rating into search decision.
- Fixed issue where Vista clients would not receive all servers from a server browser search.
- Applied proper fix to suppressing voice on dedicated servers.
- Fixed issues with players not getting on right team in Duel and Duel+Survival if a player leaves in certain timing windows during map transitions.
- Fixed previous level PRIs showing up on the scoreboard/leaderboard after the client travels (making it look like players have already scored lots of points when those clients are in fact still loading)
- Fixed losing your custom character mesh after changing teams during a match.
- Implemented DUEL match stat reporting for gamespy ladder.
- Fixed bugs and exploits associated with ServerViewNextPlayer()/ServerViewPrevPlayer()/ServerViewSelf() being received after the server has already moved the PlayerController out of the spectating state
- Added "BecomeActive" exec to switch from spectator to player

Server Administration:
- Dedicated servers do not require CD keys.
- Added -configsubdir= command line option to cause .ini files to be loaded/saved from the specified subdirectory of Game\Config\
- Added QueryPort configuration and command line option.
- Added an "AdminChangeOption [option] [value]" console command for server admins. This allows changing most simple .ini values (e.g. GoalScore) from the client. This command will not override URL options. The change will take effect after the next map change.
- Added an "AdminPublishMapList" console command for server admins. This overrides the server's map list for the current game type with the one on the client that used the command.
- Uses GameReplicationInfo.ServerName if set for the name of the server on the server browser.
- Added "AdminForceVoiceMute" and "AdminForceVoiceUnMute": Stops/Starts a player from sending voip to others
- Added "AdminForceTextMut" and "AdminForceTextUnMute": Stops/Starts a player from send text messages to others
- Updated AdminPlayerList to show the PlayerID of the players on the server.
- Updated Kick/Ban to allow for using either the player name or the id
- Fixed servers advertising as the wrong gametype if the gametype is changed without restarting the server
- Fixed IP addresses being reported in host byte order instead of network byte order
- Added new IdleServerTickRate property to IpDrv.TcpNetDriver. If not set, IdleServerTickRate defaults to MaxTickRate. Can be set to lower values to reduce server CPU utilization when 0 players. Reported ping will increase if set lower.

Map Specific
- Fixed WAR-Avalanche terrain LOD popping issue on high end PCs.
- Fixed bots rarely getting stuck in mid air in DM-Gateway in the city section.
- Fixed some VCTF-Suspense pathing issues.
- Fixed issues with circular lift on DM-Deimos.
- Fixed translucent mesh sorting issues in DM-Gateway.
- Improved bot AI with Leviathan in Torlan.

Campaign/Co-op:
- Fixed a bug that could cause too many bots to be added to co-op matches in some cases.
- Added support for seamless travel interrupting a travel to start another travel. This fixes single player breaking if the host selects the next mission before the clients have finished travelling to the mission selection level
- Fixed extra copy of a character when a human player leaves a co-op game at the right time.
- Changed network loss during single player to result in player signed in locally.

Modding:
- Improved support for creating PS3 mods.
- Added a SupportedGameTypes field to UTUIDataProvider_Mutator. If some entries are in this array, the mutator will only be visible in the menus if the selected gametype is found in the array.
- Fixed custom gametype midgame menus not being used correctly.
- Shipping script compiler now allows localized/config defaultproperties because otherwise autodownloaded mods have no way for their localized/config variables to work.
- Added Get/SetSpecialValue() stubs to Object to allow mods to expose values that can be modified without creating a dependancy.

http://www.worthplaying.com/article.php?sid=48228

http://download.beyondunreal.com/filewo … patch1.exe