Unreal Tournament 2004 is back

I love Tac Ops! Was one of the most realistic mods out there (it was sooo easy to die).

I seem to remember there was some behind-the-scenes political / financial shenanigans with Counter Strike and the Game of the Year edition bundle that kind of killed it.

Wow thats a name I haven't heard in a long time! I really miss the way tacops 2.2 felt, never did get along with 3.x versions. Was definitely a formative gaming experience for me as well

I lost so many hours to this game. Thank you for the walk down memory lane.

This is brilliant, I had complete forgotten about this one!! Thank you very much.

That volatile ammo mutator was made even more awesome because it actually spawned "shots" of that type, so a plasma pile wouldn't just explode but rather spread various plasma shots around it. The granade one would have the granades bouncing around a bit before exploding. It was so easy for things to go wrong and backfire on you :)

> also gameplay available in Quake Live in which you could have a Railgun only match, but they could also behave like Rocket Launchers for rocket jumps

That used to be my jam in Q3A, Instaunlagged. Nothing is quite like railgun jumping with no splash damage. Dusk's crossbow jumping comes close, but isn't hitscan..

We modified Action Quake II (somehow, I forget how) to change gravity (I think it was in the map itself) and we would bounce around Cheyenne in a completely different playstyle - and everything would send you flying.

Railgun trail to match the reload time, always!

And it was literally just so they could skinnerbox people and sell skins. I still remember when if you wanted a skin you just downloaded it and could put it on your server and anyone who joined would download and use it. People running their own stuff makes DLC/lootcrate/cosmetics unviable and I do think a huge part of the "server" finding stuff is to algorithmically put you in situations you are likely to win/lose at certain rates to keep you playing. Anything other than community servers as the primary avenue is a dark pattern. You also lose out the path to getting into modding/3d modeling/programming/running servers that those modded servers were for lots of people including me.

If you have fun instagib servers that might detract from how many lootcrates people buy since they might just get curb stomped in it + it's just harder to track and measure the impact of changes when you are minmaxxing for monetary extraction when you have high variety of mods/servers. If you want to track and evaluate player behavior to manipulate it you need to control for as many variables as possible. These game companies are straight up evil.

Not only killed modding, but also killed the way those unique communities developed. I suppose it's possible you can find people on community Discord servers nowadays for pick up games, but not in the same way as just seeing and talking to the same people all the time on your favorite modded server.

My favorite server which I think is dead by now, Dead Man Standing was a low gravity CS 1.6 server, no footstep noises, but there was a hook you could use to maneuver the low gravity, and the hook made noise, it was really something with those CS mouse maps. That was peak CS for me, I never saw anyone come close to the quality of that server. DMS I will always miss you.

UT1 was basically instagib by default: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm3m1sszTEs&t=6s

So many sounds that will forever live in my head.

I think I actually beat UT99 on a laptop trackpad a couple years later. (School device)

i am such a slow old boomer now but i absolutely loved the sauerbraten TOSOK (Team One Shot One Kill) venice servers. also assault cube TOSOK/OSOK (dm variant). also UrbanTerror jump maps. ut_swim will always be in my heart.

Man after my own heart <3

Loved Tribes! I mostly played Paintball mod from 2000-2004!

Sounds a lot like emacs, there's a core written in C etc but the overwhelming majority of the bits that make it an editor are in a scripting layer that you can change at runtime (and indeed there's hardly any reason to use emacs if you're not doing so)

Same, same. E4M3 Elder God Shrine forever.

Eh... it was arguably more accessible back in the day, because it was (a) server side & (b) fully decentralized, so each server admin could run whatever they wanted.

Some games come close now, but I'm not aware of any multiplayer games that afford that level of control to their playerbase.

I've never been a fan of Warcraft, but I did play the custom Warcraft 3 TD maps at lan parties. Some were just so epic.

The game Grounded almost has that feel, but it's open world.

There's another game called Hypercharge:Unboxed that is definitely giving me the feeling of those old UT maps, but I haven't actually played it.

Having a match grind to a halt because literally everyone on the server was standing in the livingroom staring at the tv...

Sniping people in the bathtub from the sink was so fun...

de_rats and similar in CS1.6

Me and my friend are somehow still playing co-op without mutators. My friend is max level, I'm like 100 away

There are big companies, that are actively doing harmful things to undermine personal computing, in order to farm engagement, attention and show us ads. Phones become more and more locked down, except for very niche products. Many people don't even have a PC any longer, and only have phones, with none of the freedom of personal computing that we enjoy(ed). Only people in the know are able to and willing to put in the effort to run an OS that includes freedom. Trying to help a friend or family member with a computer or phone problem, one will quickly notice the efforts that big tech makes to undermine freedom respecting solutions.

Not just working, but it actually ran better in Linux for me -- my university-mandated laptop could only run it at 1280x800 in Windows if you wanted to hit 60fps, but the Linux client was able to run at the panel's native 1920x1200.

I had it working without issues from Steam (I bought UT 99 and 2004 before Epic de-listed from Steam)

> played a few DM-Morpheus bot matches

This part is one of the features that doesn't seem to get mentioned enough. Unreal Tournament was one of the first franchises to have bot behavior that was well thought out, relatively realistic and challenging, and most importantly worked for every single one of the game types included (including multi-player team objectives).

In addition to just being able to play single player in what would have normally required a functioning online environment and WWW connection for other franchises, you could also fill out large teams with bot players if you could not find enough actual humans to log in and join your game.

Gametypes like Team Deathmatch and Assault were then viable for single or small groups even when you didn't have a great (or completed lacked) WWW connection.

Is that the low-gravity one? Such a fun map.

I remember modding the homing missile gun (forgot its name) to be more agile around corners and building obstacles courses in Unreal Editor for DM-Morpheus to shoot the missiles through. Modding Unreal games was always a great time considering the technology back then.

Facing Worlds was absolutely peak.

Facing Worlds was really something. Getting absurd streaks mowing down bots wasn't particularly challenging but it sure felt good.

And wine made it playable on FreeBSD which was quite something to behold.

Especially when my friend launched it on the 256 color, literal X term I had at home. Solid 0.2 FPS over the network.

Tell me more! Are you in the Bay Area?

> may feel differently about releasing the source

Still sounds like something someone would change their mind about if enough money was involved, if only Epic had enough profits.

This is the one that I still fire up with my friends once in awhile. The only problem is it sort of lacks the charm and nostalgia, and it's a bit rough around the edges in parts (the gun selection is fairly abysmal and don't feel right IMO).

I love Warsow but am I right that it's very hard to find an opponent these days? I just checked https://arena.sh/wa/ and there are 4 non-empty servers, but most (maybe all) of the players seem to be bots.

TOXIKK was awesome. But very hard to find matches with players.

Splitgate captures the feel nicely. Simple, fast, and last I checked free. Very recommended.

Splitgate 2 is scheduled to launch later this month.

Overwatch is a objective-based game, and like Valorant is a "hero shooter". Apex and Fortnite are battle royales.

I think the closest I got was The Finals but still class-based, so reminds me more of Team Fortress.

I loved playing 1v1 on Quake 2/3 and UT, also team deathmatch, from the list you commented it feels like each game got one of those aspects but none that makes the genre of UT what it is: knowing where weapons/ammo/armor spawn, map knowledge to navigate around, emergent movement mechanics (rocket jumps, strafe-jumping, etc.).

Interesting to see this genre mostly died out, and remnants of it have been scattered across other genres.

No, these are class based team FPS, core of UT and Quake is (team) deathmatch

Halo 3 multiplayer had this solved by maintaining a dynamic rating of the players so that it could match skill levels when random matches were made.

UT2k4 had software rending support via the Pixomatic software renderer from RAD Game Tools:

https://www.radgametools.com/pixo/PixoWithUnreal2004.txt

Further discussion about it here:

https://forums.beyondunreal.com/threads/software-rendering-i...

UT3 felt sluggish at the time. Both in gameplay and graphics performance. Still much faster than most games today of course.

Ah, for me that would have been UT aka UT99. But chances are, I'm simply 3 - 6 years older than you ;-) Though I definitely I was not the intended age group upon release.

UT4 would have been pretty nice. I remember building the alpha from source when they put it GitHub.... .... Which is now closer to the release of UT 2004 than today. sigh

Don’t you blaspheme in here.

It hurt reading that.

I think the tone of of UT2004 was slightly sillier than UT99 and the guns felt .. fatter? I'm definitely looking at this with some nostalgia but UT99 will always be my favorite shooter

What happened if you bought it when it was available? Hopefully no Amazon Swindle 1984...

UT3 was a dismal failure both critically and commercially, while Gears of War was a huge success. Epic rode that for a while as they worked on Fortnite, and then they put out the battle royale mode in 2017 and the thing took off.

some of us do e.g.

https://github.com/aldehir/ut2004-patches/releases

To be fair, I did read that, but didn't state why I was sceptical: I've been playing UT since UT99, it's one of my favourite games. I wasted hours of my life in unreal ed 1. Anyway Epic removed UT from all online stores, I still have access to my gog version but in general as far as I know it's impossible to buy a legit copy these days. They also shut down it's master servers. To be fair I haven't tried playing a few years so maybe that is fixed and maybe they have restored it to gog or the epic store. I don't know I haven't checked.

A random post on Reddit "with epics blessing" looked pretty much throw away to me. But hey, I'm wrong :)

Bold to assume a poster on the internet can actually read.