7 ms·
SurrealEngine: Open-source reimplementation of Unreal Engine with playable UT99
- Marciakhan 2y ago[flagged]
- tedivm 2y agoThis makes me so happy and brings back a lot of memories. I really appreciate all the effort that video game archivists put into keeping these old games playable.
- neuronexmachina 2y agoYeah, when I saw the screenshot of Facing Worlds the song from that level immediately started playing in my head.
- manuelmoreale 2y agoIf anyone is willing to set up a server I’m down playing some UT99. I should still have a GOG copy. Such an awesome game.
- klaussilveira 2y agoYou should hang out at the https://www.oldunreal.com/phpBB3/index.php https://www.oldunreal.com/phpBB3/index.php forums
- xhrpost 2y agoA potential side project I keep coming back is reimplementing the dedicated server for an old game like this. Even years ago when the games were popular, I often found the DS challenging to run.
- sterlind 2y agoI used to play so much Bunny Tracks. It was like digital parkour, using physics glitches for acrobatics through crazy obstacle courses. Such a neat game format, but I never saw anything like it (besides Portal, kinda.)
- amlib 2y agoEvery year or so I have my fun with Quake 3 and UT99 with bots. They might not be as smart as a human opponent but playing on Nightmare and Godlike difficulty brings back that twitchy adrenaline infused moments I enjoy so much from those games :)
- Lammy 2y agoIt's so cool to watch it play in the tracker software https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCRibm4kOaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCRibm4kOaE
- klaussilveira 2y agoYou might get a kick out of: https://osgameclones.com/ https://osgameclones.com/ Hopefully you find something from the past that can bring even more happy memories!
- andrewmcwatters 2y agoWow, this is really cool. I would love to also see some sort of diverged reimplementation of the Unreal Engine that worked on a fixed tilmestep instead of a variable one, but it seems like maybe this implementation is faithful to the original engine behavior as well.
- robinpdx 2y agoUnreal Tournament 99 and Deus Ex are two of my happiest game memories. This is a really ambitious project and it’s lovely to see those old games getting some love! Still hoping for a Deus Ex remake…
- kridsdale3 2y agoI would love so much for the eventual state of this project to allow us to modernize the original DX. I don't need a remake, just modern quality of life. I know there's extensive mods.
- anthk 2y agoGet GMDX installed on top of the original game.
- account42 2y agoDefinitely don't do this for your first playthrough thoug, play the original instead with only simple fixpacks like Kentie's Deus Exe launcher [0]. Opinionated mods should not be recommended as the default experience. https://kentie.net/article/dxguide/ https://kentie.net/article/dxguide/
- mdaniel 2y agohttps://github.com/dpjudas/SurrealEngine/blob/efb4a196ccc8566d91fa67b53e48cd21410f9664/Thirdparty/dumb/LICENSE https://github.com/dpjudas/SurrealEngine/blob/efb4a196ccc856... Look, I get it: they named their library "dumb" so they felt they just have to be cutesy with the license file, but please don't. If you hate licenses that much, https://spdx.org/licenses/WTFPL.html https://spdx.org/licenses/WTFPL.html is probably for you (the actual project seems to be BSD-3)
- andrewmcwatters 2y agoMaybe it’s just me, but if you understand the history of audio libraries, it just sounds like a titular homage to LAME.
- georgyo 2y agoYou're complaining about a 3rd party library license that the project cannot change...
- mdaniel 2y agoI know posting a top-level comment seems indistinguishable from wagging my finger at the project, but it was just a license rant. I hoped that by including the third-party link it would make it more obvious what was being commented upon but I guess not
- yodon 2y agoNo one should use packages with licensing of this sort. The way the project changes the license is by changing which library they use.
- mepian 2y agoEpic could open-source the original engine, like its former primary competitor id Software did with the old idTech engines.
- Vt71fcAqt7 2y agoThere were some plans to do so a while back: >We definitely can’t open source Unreal Engine 2 or 3, because of dependencies on a large number of external closed-source middleware packages with complex licensing requirements. >Open sourcing Unreal Engine 1 might be possible, but getting the source and dependencies into a releasable state would take a lot of cleanup effort that we just haven’t been able to find time for. I hope we can do it someday. [0] [0] https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/unreal-engine-1/14084/6 https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/unreal-engine-1/14084/6
- johnnyanmac 2y agoMan, I try to think longer term so "a while back" can be 3-4 years ago. then I see that comment made almost 10 years ago. I feel a lot of that goodwill went out the door once Fortnite became a cash cow.
- Vt71fcAqt7 2y agoMy guess is that they are very busy and forgot about it. Maybe if someone reminds Tim he will do it eventually.
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoFortnite killed UT 4 and I hate it for that
- MildlySerious 2y agoYup. UT holds a special place in my heart, and the abandonment of UT4 cut deeper than it should have. It's not like they couldn't have afforded a small team to continue working on UT4. Not getting more Unreal Tournament, and not getting the original continuation of Prey[1] are my biggest frustrations when it comes to gaming. [1] https://youtu.be/jfHCZAK7p-s https://youtu.be/jfHCZAK7p-s
- SirMaster 2y agoLove the name lol
- newsclues 2y agoI still can’t believe epic hasn’t released a modern Unreal Tournament game.
- bloqs 2y agoThere is one that is on their site since fortnite released but stalled i think
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoThey were working on it but then Fortnight made a trillion dollars.
- newsclues 2y agoSo hire people to finish it?
- nemothekid 2y agoNo reason to hire people at Fortnite Salaries to complete a game that won't even make a million dollars. Arena shooters are pretty much dead.
- unethical_ban 2y agoYep. They can't get zoomers to spend $30/month on a "free" game's marketing skins if the skill floor is too high.
- chupasaurus 2y agoFortnite made a thrillion dollars because people who were making UT4 were tasked to make a little F2P mode for it called Battle Royale.
- patmorgan23 2y agoThere's a beta from like 5 years ago
- matheusmoreira 2y agoThis is incredible! I wonder how they reverse engineered it. Couldn't have been easy. So many engines are getting the open source reimplementation treatment. I wish them all the success in the world and hope their numbers continue to grow.
- modeless 2y agoI just ported Quake III to the web with multiplayer and mobile support: https://thelongestyard.link/ https://thelongestyard.link/. I was hoping I could use this project to do Unreal Tournament as well, but it seems like it's not that playable yet. I wish Epic had GPL'd their old releases the way id Software did. I'd especially like to have UT2k4. I played a lot of ONS-Torlan in college. Instead of UT I may do Serious Sam next. Serious Engine was open sourced and there's already a web port (without multiplayer): https://www.wasm.builders/martinmullins/serious-sam-in-the-browser-33f6 https://www.wasm.builders/martinmullins/serious-sam-in-the-b...
- justin66 2y agoUT2k4 deserves to live, but if we're being honest, there weren't a lot of people playing it during the last decade and a half. I wonder if being able to play it in a browser would actually improve that.
- epolanski 2y agoEven the latest UT on UE4 had like few hundreds of players at best. Seems like the genre is just not popular.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoWith the genre being FPS, or what? I'm not really a gamer. When I discovered original UT I'd play it at work because my home computers never had good enough graphics. I loved the atmosphere of many user-created maps. Is there no similar experience that's popular today?
- archagon 2y agoArena FPS of the Quake/UT era have been supplanted by CoD-style tactical shooters, slower team-based FPS like Halo, hero shooters like Overwatch, and battle royale shooters like Apex Legends. I don’t think a popular pure arena shooter exists today. (Though Splitgate and, to a lesser extent, Halo Infinite scratch the same itch for me.) I’m optimistic, though. Adventure games were dead for a while but eventually came back with a vengeance. I doubt the desire for quick, pure shooty fun will ever go away.
- jsheard 2y agoMy immediate thought was "this is like that project which hosts UE1 games inside UE5" and it turns out it's the same project, they've just rebranded from DXU24 to Surreal, and they now seem to have their own open-source frontend in addition to the license-encumbered UE5 frontend. The developer has a bunch of WIP videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dxu2424/videos https://www.youtube.com/@dxu2424/videos
- anthk 2y agoI think you are wrong. SurrealEngine was designed to reimplement the first UE1 as a standalone engine, not requiring UE5 at all.
- jsheard 2y agoSeems I jumped to conclusions, both UE1 reimplementation projects are using the name "Surreal" but indeed there doesn't seem to be a direct connection between them. The more the merrier in that case. To set the record straight then: Surreal98 (formerly DXU24) hosts UE1 games inside UE5. Plans to release as a commercial product? SurrealEngine (this post) is a standalone UE1 reimplementation. This one is open source.
- anthk 2y agoYup. SurrealEnegine should run fine at least on 64/128MB video card suppporting SDL2 and Open GL 2.1 (or GL 1.4 by hacking up the engine renderer like crazy). There's no point on reimplementing a game needing either a propietary engine (cough, cough, OpenMafia's switch into Unity) and/or a modern one with crazy requeriments defying the original purpose of replaying a game when a low end machine can't run a 20-24 years old game.
- doctorpangloss 2y agoBy that logic there’s no point in reimplementing the game at all. You should replay the game with an appropriate emulator. Or play the modern sequels.
- anthk 2y agoDeus Ex and GMDX on top of this: heaven.
- Lammy 2y agoRecommended: Civvie 11's “Epic Unreal Megaspecial” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PtU2stZK0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PtU2stZK0M [01:15:46]
- rossant 2y agoI miss UT99 so much. I never came to like modern FPS games as much.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoThe art seems a lot cooler than many other games
- klaussilveira 2y agoUT99 sat in a place between Quake 3 and CS that was quite unique and interesting. It wasn't as fast paced as Q3, but not as slow as CS.
- deisteve 2y agonow if somebody can open source reimplement Rune which was made on Unreal Engine during this period
- leecommamichael 2y agoInteresting, they've got a little GC in there.
- kevingadd 2y agoIn this time period, Tim Sweeney was talking in public about garbage collection, Java, etc. and it seems like the Unreal engine scripting and object architecture drew a lot of inspiration from bleeding-edge (at the time) tools and programming languages. The interview I remember reading at the time is no longer on the internet, but this touches on some of the same subjects: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/classic-tools-retrospective-tim-sweeney-on-the-first-version-of-the-unreal-editor https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/classic-tools-retrospec...
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoThere've been a couple mentions of Unreal recently, and they keep making me semi wistful over the time I had playing U2:XMP (eXtended Multi-Player). A nice capture-the-flag game with deplorables & vehicles. Amazing set of 3rd party maps. It'd be amazing to see this brought to a modern engine, especially if the maps could be imported.
- dvngnt_ 2y agoAnother developer is making surreal 98 that allows UE1 games like deus ex and UT playable under UE5 with vr + mods and other modern features https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2M0hrLoA5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2M0hrLoA5M
- roland-s 2y agoDoes anyone have a good sense of how many dev hours it would take to write something like Quake/Unreal from scratch today? Not a port, but a full rewrite with a custom engine
- tryauuum 2y agoprobably a good time to post this. I've dockerized unreal tournament 2004, it runs ok on linux x86_64: mkdir -p ~/.ut2004/; sudo docker run -it --rm -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY -e XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR -e HOME=/ --network=host -v /tmp/.X11-unix/X0:/tmp/.X11-unix/X0 -v /run/user/$UID:/run/user/$UID -v ~/.ut2004/:/.ut2004/ --user $UID:$UID --privileged --name ut2004 ikuinen.earth:5000/ut2004
- H3BCKN 2y agoHow was it achieved? Is the original UE open source, or was it reverse-engineered?
- anotherhue 2y agoI've opened a PR to nixpkgs for this, includes full instructions to get it running. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/337069 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/337069