The whole Unreal series and the engine it spawned were, and still are something i love to just look at.
I remember going through the file system as a kid and looking at all the nicely arranged but weird files in Unreal Tournament. I liked the music from the game and wanted to play it, but i didn't know what the weird UMX file was, but i knew it was music thanks to being placed in the Music directory (A nice change to Quake 3 where all i found was a giant PAK file). A Google search and a winamp plugin later and i could play it. Looking at the winamp plugin i realized that it was not like an MP3 or wave with everything baked in but more like a midi, there was a whole UI in the plugin which displayed the instruments and timeline of the song being played. It was a really fun thing to learn about on top of instagib matches on Deck16.
Looking it up now i see that Alexander Brandon is the composer of Go Down, the music for Deck16. I guess ill have to go and find a nice source of the music from UT and have another listen. It'll be nearly impossible to deal with a UMX file these days!
it looks like there is a umx decoder (libmodplug) in ffmpeg actually, and i have the games on steam. Maybe i'll convert them to mp3 myself for a trip down memory lane.
speaking of changing formats, Unreal Tournament 2004 was the first place i saw an Ogg file too.
.umx is nothing more than renamed Scream Tracker or Impulse Tracker module (.s3m/.it), so playing it just requires getting module player, mikmod is modern, still maintained and portable implementation, which can be used directly as player and is used in many open source media players.
And if you want to edit them or look at the pattern/sample data, I recommend Schism Tracker, a modern open-source clone (with new features) of Impulse Tracker.
I too have fond memories of going through all the directories for games and demos looking for cool stuff (graphics and sound files). Nostalgic shout-out to "Jonas' Mega Ripper", a tool which would go through data files and executables looking for image/sound chunks and save them to separate files.
Living in Waterloo now. I was walking home from work with my friend when we met a guy flying a drone. After briefly talking, my friend mentioned that he was a developer #2 on Unreal back in the day. Must have been Schmalz! Crazy to think you just meet your heroes like that...
When I was 15 when my brother got me a disc of pirated games. On it was an Unreal directory which contained a tech demo of sorts. a castle with marble walls and eyeballs you could place with the mouse. Even then the realtime 3d rendering was really solid. I wonder how far along development was at that point and how this demo was leaked to BBS' at the time. Do you have any information on that?
Out of everything, I remember the music the most. Unreal's music has always been fantastic. Deus Ex, too! Thanks!
The thing that always impressed me was how good Unreal looked with CPU rendering at decent frame rates. I wasn't able to convince my parents of the necessity of a Voodoo or TNT card, but Unreal handled my rig far better than most other games.
It was greatly overshadowed by its bigger hit of a sequel, Unreal Tournament. I still fondly remember the original's remarkable technical and artistic accomplishment though.
I remember forcing my parents to drive me to our local Apple retailer so that I could play this game on a beige PowerMac G3. One of the first games I truly lusted for.
>But we did establish specific points where music would turn to combat and sometimes play or stop for cinematic moments. And that ended up being the system that eventually got modified for Deus Ex.
I'll always hold a special place in my heart for Alexander Brandon and his work on Deus Ex's score. It still remains one of the most immersive game soundtracks ever made. Tyrian's score was equally magical.
Tyrian and Jazz Jackrabbit remain two of my favourites for music.
As an aside, anybody know the best way to get Tyrian running on a modern win machine with modern gamepads? I tried tyrian2000 and open Tyrian and no dice.
Oh my god, I thought nobody else remembered those two.
Epic Pinball to me is still the best pinball game in history and I played One Must Fall for hours on end despite not actually being a fan of the genre.
EDIT2: Different company but same area: The Crusader series (No Remorse (1995)/No Regret (1996)) had a pretty awesome score as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2xs8pQBcZk
Jazz Jackrabbit 1 plus addon. Great game and music. I also played the second game and the unfinished third (3D) one - they were interesting, but lacked in comparison to the first one.
Deus Ex 1 was superb. It's one of the top five PC games. Not only the awesome music score, basically every element of the game was great, and still is to this day (only the Unreal Tournament era graphics hasn't aged that well, a remastered version with Unreal 4 engine and 4k textures would be a good move). Sadly, the casualization of Deus Ex already started with Deux Ex 2, everything was dumbed down for the XBox 1 console with its mini-mini-levels and just one ammo type, etc. And the later instalments weren't have their own problems like an outdated graphics engine, far smaller story, small hub levels, daylight, more simple gameplay, almost no physical interaction aka very steril levels, 3rd person camera at times, automatic quick kills, boss enemies, and many more elements that make it very different to Deus Ex 1. I even consider Watch_Dogs 1 and Dishonored 1 a more Deus Ex 1 style gameplay than Deus Ex >2. The Deus Ex 4 has a for example little story and just one hub level and many side missions - and the graphic engine from Hitman feels a bit dated with character animations from the last century. From a real new Deux Ex like game I would like an open world like GTA V or Watch_Dogs where every player can interact eith the world and can shape it with every interaction. Deus Ex 1 is still unique with its original vision, sadly some advanced features were cut, but the original design documents can be found online. I heard Warren Spector is about to make another game, let's hope it's a System Shock 1 or even better Deus Ex 1 like game, with a different brand.
>I heard Warren Spector is about to make another game, let's hope it's a System Shock 1 or even better Deus Ex 1 like game, with a different brand.
It looks like he's working on System Shock 3, and there's also a remake of the original System Shock in the works by another studio, assuming I've read these correctly.
I can't forget a line from a PCGamer article on Deus Ex, quoting Spector on the development. Something about him sitting at his desk, almost banging his head against it while repeating "Why do we make things so hard for ourselves?!" over and over. This because of the complexities over interactions and player choices.
I fondly remember sitting in an IRC channel with the devs and enthusiast fans well before the game was released. Treated to lots of screenshots and rumors about the game.
I miss those days where you could easily connect with the developers in a small tribe like that. I grew up chatting with Epic/DE devs and modders in those days and it was a terrific experience.
Now developers are either beyond reach or stick with mediums where it’s more like a sounding board for them to talk at you than for both of you to have serendipitous discussions.
For those who (like me) don't quite like the 1/3 of screen banner asking you to login to view the article, here is the content:
Unreal: The Backstory
During the development of Tyrian, Jason, Robert allen, Daniel Cook and I visited the Epic office in Rockville, Maryland, which at first was a fairly small place, only a few rooms. These were used for the growing shipping and customer service departments. By departments I mean one person each. There was a room where Tim had his office, and a larger room that doubled as a conference room and, in the case of our first few visits, the room where the last phase of Jazz Jackrabbit was completed. Arjan Brussee was present along with Cliff Bleszinski. The two had a funny "smack talk" rapport. When I called Arjan "Ahr-yahn", he turned and said "thanks! For once someone who can pronounce my name right!" to which Cliff responded "oh, so no appreciation for people who've tried this whole time to get it right, ARR-JAAN!" <collective laughter>
The next office was the whole floor of a small office building, also in Rockville but more out of the way, rather than in an office park the building was more surrounded by trees (I don't remember the address). The shipping department grew into a few people, same with customer support, with a very small supply chain room with boxes of diskettes, envelopes and various printing label machines. But quite a few offices were devoted to development. And Tim took the largest corner office. We figured out most of Tyrian's development decisions in here, fed mostly by Domino's pizza and water from the local water buffalos out of red plastic cups.
In these days Tim had something pretty cool going on. The title at the top of the window said "Unreal". And it consisted of polygonal 3d experiments, among the first of which was a red dragon, which started life as a flat texture that got folded around the mesh. 3d art was created in interesting ways back then, with UV mapping, wrapping and unwrapping and binary trees being widely used terms. Tim also got a Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 workstation with Alias PowerAnimator. Several developers rendered cinematic single frame artwork for cutscenes using these systems, and you can see some examples in "Traffic Department: 2182", which was the first Safari Software release (Epic's sister company).
Unreal seemed neat. 3d levels sprang up, and the effort was jointly between James Schmalz and Tim. James operated out of Waterloo, Canada, and had a small team that eventually would turn into Digital Extremes, the folks who brought us Warframe and Dark Sector. But from the start it looked special, as the games garnering the most attention in 3d at the time (1995) were Doom and the following year, Quake.
Given that I'd heard the great orchestral MOD composing of Michiel Van Den Bos on the Epic published, Triumph developed "Age of Wonders". I asked him if he wanted to pitch Tim on doing the music of this new effort. He said "sure!" and both of us being at the Epic office at the time, we walked into his office and I asked if we could write the score. Tim said "yeah" positively and that was it. We were onboard.
Given that it would be about 3 years before the game got released, we ended up writing a lot of music. Now, I honestly don't remember what Michiel's deal was but to the best of my knowledge it was separate from mine. Given that percentages were how we worked things on Tyrian, I asked if the same could be done for Unreal and the first contracted amount was 4%. Eventually, the game grew and grew and the amount shrunk to 2% or 2.5%, something like that. By the time I asked for a buy out because I owed money for taxes that year, I had pulled in around $100,000 total. So clearly the game did pretty well.
At first, Michiel and I wrote a theme that still isn't in the game, but is found on YouTube (it was called Underworld and we worked on it jointly). Theres also a longer...
There should be a button like "not now", or something like that, which doesn't removes the white box, but makes it smaller (of course it's possible to remove it with developer tools unlike other pages like quora).
Or you can use NoScript, uBlock Origin or a similar alternative which only allows the javascript that you want to allow on websites, which in this case blocks the white box completely (I don't understand how one can surf the web without such a tool today. Every time I'm on a computer without it, like my sisters iPad, I get annoyed by most websites really fast).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 95.2 ms ] threadI remember going through the file system as a kid and looking at all the nicely arranged but weird files in Unreal Tournament. I liked the music from the game and wanted to play it, but i didn't know what the weird UMX file was, but i knew it was music thanks to being placed in the Music directory (A nice change to Quake 3 where all i found was a giant PAK file). A Google search and a winamp plugin later and i could play it. Looking at the winamp plugin i realized that it was not like an MP3 or wave with everything baked in but more like a midi, there was a whole UI in the plugin which displayed the instruments and timeline of the song being played. It was a really fun thing to learn about on top of instagib matches on Deck16.
Looking it up now i see that Alexander Brandon is the composer of Go Down, the music for Deck16. I guess ill have to go and find a nice source of the music from UT and have another listen. It'll be nearly impossible to deal with a UMX file these days!
It's all on youtube these days. I'm loving Unreal's ambients for programming work.
http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_artist_modules&...
speaking of changing formats, Unreal Tournament 2004 was the first place i saw an Ogg file too.
http://schismtracker.org/
I too have fond memories of going through all the directories for games and demos looking for cool stuff (graphics and sound files). Nostalgic shout-out to "Jonas' Mega Ripper", a tool which would go through data files and executables looking for image/sound chunks and save them to separate files.
Living in Waterloo now. I was walking home from work with my friend when we met a guy flying a drone. After briefly talking, my friend mentioned that he was a developer #2 on Unreal back in the day. Must have been Schmalz! Crazy to think you just meet your heroes like that...
When I was 15 when my brother got me a disc of pirated games. On it was an Unreal directory which contained a tech demo of sorts. a castle with marble walls and eyeballs you could place with the mouse. Even then the realtime 3d rendering was really solid. I wonder how far along development was at that point and how this demo was leaked to BBS' at the time. Do you have any information on that?
Out of everything, I remember the music the most. Unreal's music has always been fantastic. Deus Ex, too! Thanks!
>The latest version is available as open-source
https://www.unrealengine.com/html5/
I'll always hold a special place in my heart for Alexander Brandon and his work on Deus Ex's score. It still remains one of the most immersive game soundtracks ever made. Tyrian's score was equally magical.
As an aside, anybody know the best way to get Tyrian running on a modern win machine with modern gamepads? I tried tyrian2000 and open Tyrian and no dice.
https://www.gog.com/game/tyrian_2000 is the only one I've seen working.
What issues did you have?
Tempted to see if I can get the joysticks working in Destruct mode. No destruct joystick is a bit disappointing.
Epic Pinball to me is still the best pinball game in history and I played One Must Fall for hours on end despite not actually being a fan of the genre.
EDIT: The soundtrack to OMF (1994) is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UGRR6MkVmE
EDIT2: Different company but same area: The Crusader series (No Remorse (1995)/No Regret (1996)) had a pretty awesome score as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2xs8pQBcZk
And of course C&C Tiberian Dawn (1995): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TkyB3kTiPQ
EDIT3: For sake of completeness, here's Jazz Jackrabbit 1 (1994) and 2 (1998): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6L78lXPHro
EDIT4: OMF was declared freeware at some point and works in DOSBox so you can play it online in the browser at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/msdos_One_Must_Fall_2097_1994
If anyone knows enough to debug why it's crashing, let me know.
Another composer who had a similar music style was Chris Hülsbeck (Turrican, Giant Sisters, etc): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0FaAs4M3d0
https://bitbucket.org/opentyrian/opentyrian/wiki/Home
voltagex_ already mentioned the freeware version
https://www.gog.com/game/tyrian_2000
and if you just want the music
http://alexanderbrandon.bandcamp.com/album/tyrian-original-s...
It looks like he's working on System Shock 3, and there's also a remake of the original System Shock in the works by another studio, assuming I've read these correctly.
[0] http://www.pcgamer.com/warren-spector-joining-otherside-to-l...
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock
Now developers are either beyond reach or stick with mediums where it’s more like a sounding board for them to talk at you than for both of you to have serendipitous discussions.
Unreal: The Backstory During the development of Tyrian, Jason, Robert allen, Daniel Cook and I visited the Epic office in Rockville, Maryland, which at first was a fairly small place, only a few rooms. These were used for the growing shipping and customer service departments. By departments I mean one person each. There was a room where Tim had his office, and a larger room that doubled as a conference room and, in the case of our first few visits, the room where the last phase of Jazz Jackrabbit was completed. Arjan Brussee was present along with Cliff Bleszinski. The two had a funny "smack talk" rapport. When I called Arjan "Ahr-yahn", he turned and said "thanks! For once someone who can pronounce my name right!" to which Cliff responded "oh, so no appreciation for people who've tried this whole time to get it right, ARR-JAAN!" <collective laughter>
The next office was the whole floor of a small office building, also in Rockville but more out of the way, rather than in an office park the building was more surrounded by trees (I don't remember the address). The shipping department grew into a few people, same with customer support, with a very small supply chain room with boxes of diskettes, envelopes and various printing label machines. But quite a few offices were devoted to development. And Tim took the largest corner office. We figured out most of Tyrian's development decisions in here, fed mostly by Domino's pizza and water from the local water buffalos out of red plastic cups.
In these days Tim had something pretty cool going on. The title at the top of the window said "Unreal". And it consisted of polygonal 3d experiments, among the first of which was a red dragon, which started life as a flat texture that got folded around the mesh. 3d art was created in interesting ways back then, with UV mapping, wrapping and unwrapping and binary trees being widely used terms. Tim also got a Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 workstation with Alias PowerAnimator. Several developers rendered cinematic single frame artwork for cutscenes using these systems, and you can see some examples in "Traffic Department: 2182", which was the first Safari Software release (Epic's sister company).
Unreal seemed neat. 3d levels sprang up, and the effort was jointly between James Schmalz and Tim. James operated out of Waterloo, Canada, and had a small team that eventually would turn into Digital Extremes, the folks who brought us Warframe and Dark Sector. But from the start it looked special, as the games garnering the most attention in 3d at the time (1995) were Doom and the following year, Quake.
Given that I'd heard the great orchestral MOD composing of Michiel Van Den Bos on the Epic published, Triumph developed "Age of Wonders". I asked him if he wanted to pitch Tim on doing the music of this new effort. He said "sure!" and both of us being at the Epic office at the time, we walked into his office and I asked if we could write the score. Tim said "yeah" positively and that was it. We were onboard.
Given that it would be about 3 years before the game got released, we ended up writing a lot of music. Now, I honestly don't remember what Michiel's deal was but to the best of my knowledge it was separate from mine. Given that percentages were how we worked things on Tyrian, I asked if the same could be done for Unreal and the first contracted amount was 4%. Eventually, the game grew and grew and the amount shrunk to 2% or 2.5%, something like that. By the time I asked for a buy out because I owed money for taxes that year, I had pulled in around $100,000 total. So clearly the game did pretty well. At first, Michiel and I wrote a theme that still isn't in the game, but is found on YouTube (it was called Underworld and we worked on it jointly). Theres also a longer...
You, the people, have to understand that you must not use that freedom destroying web service when you want to keep your freedoms.
It has gone much too far and we have to take consequences, this is a serious question about your real life freedoms, not a game or a simulation.
Or you can use NoScript, uBlock Origin or a similar alternative which only allows the javascript that you want to allow on websites, which in this case blocks the white box completely (I don't understand how one can surf the web without such a tool today. Every time I'm on a computer without it, like my sisters iPad, I get annoyed by most websites really fast).
Nevertheless, I agree with your comment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV8enCp651c