Well, I can finally post some news of a mod I've been working on for some time now. I know, it's not a Doom3 mod and this is Doom3World but I want to spread the word a little bit and even though I've been a very loyal Doom3 follower, we really had no other choice for this mod in the end.

So here's some links for the mod and I hope some people here does own UT3 to check out the little mod/demo..

http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread. ... st27105317

http://www.moddb.com/mods/bountyarms

But... but... it's not Doom 3, this is Doom3World, not Unreal Tournament 3 world!!!!

This mod looks pretttttty amazing, obihb! I love the design of it all.
Good stuff!

Wow, looks fantastic and going by the screens it could also be a lot of fun. to bad i don't have UT3 here at the moment to test it

what exactly did you contribute to this mod?

edit: ok, just watched the video. All I have to say is, that this is one of the most impressive mods I've seen in a long time!!

Looks awesome. I might pick up a copy of UT3 for this.

Cool, thanks guys.

We were basically at most 6 people to work on this with 2 programmers at some stage and 4 artists. I did many things including some character models, most rigs and some animations, static meshes and I was the main level builder.. basically I did 95% of level building, kismet scripting and I did all special effects like particles. I did not really do any textures, maybe 2 I think..

In the end the modelling was spread over all 4 artists which included lots of high poly modelling of course. My main concerns was with low poly in game models although I did some high poly stuff as well and also others did a bunch of low poly stuff. The animation done by me and another guy and texturing done by 2 of the other guys.

Really amazing what you can achieve with a small team of talented people. Are there any plans of switching over to the UDK and maybe make a standalone game out of this?

We hope to get this in the UDK and as stand alone demo. We just don't have the programming people to get it going at this stage. The programming we had for this version of the mod was extremely limited in what they could offer in a decent time period and it was all learned from scratch to deal with UT scripting. It was a very bumpy road..

Going to the UDK is somewhat problematic for us in terms of programming since we don't have any more programmers to take a look into that for us. But it's something we would consider if someone offered to help out with it. Converting all assets over is doable and models, textures, materials and particles does seem to translate over quite seamlessly. We do have a version of the level inside the UDK but it's not a clean transition as far as the kismet stuff goes, it seems to me, it does come with some problems here and there so it's not 100% working in there, even just the level. Admittedly I haven't really dug deep into it yet to really see what's what there.

Looks fantastic. I hope you make it standalone. As I'm interested in playing this, but not UT3. :p

EDIT: I DO have GOW though. Hint hint, nudge nudge.

OH and I can't believe I forgot to mention our concept artist. He's just super brilliant and designed characters, weapons and some level props and various things. The art shown is just the tip of the iceberg this guy did for us. So, there.. the concept guy really should get much credit for his contribution.

About a "Gears version".. that unfortunately will never happen. Gears was my first choice of games to use created with UE3 because it would have contained a lot of "ready made" things for us to draw from scripting but it has like.. zero mod support. UT3 is very open to mod on the other hand and uses also an updated version of the UE3 compared to Gears. The UDK again is much updated version of UE3 and I really would like to convert this over to UDK if possible.

that looks pretty cool! I don't have UT3 either, and the more UT3 engine games I play the less & less I'm impressed by it & the more it looks like Q3A engine with high res models & textures.

But the mod looks pretty cool.

Amazing visuals you have there!

Looks nice. Old game styles are coming back it seems.

It looks really great! I like the idea, the models, the settings,... everything.
The background seems a bit too blurred to me, though.

Nice engine choice btw. I always liked how things look in UE3.
This makes me wish to learn UDK (or to buy UT3

), but I know I'll never have the time for this :cry:

Good luck for your project!

Thanks guys, I appreciate the good comments.

The UE3 is pretty cool, I agree. It's got it's good points but also bad points. But, generally, it's a pretty enjoyable engine and editor to work in.

This does look pretty good. However, I've always been curious as to why so many people started mods for UT3. Barely anyone plays it and the game tanked.

Because it's material system is much more robust than just about anything else out there.

TelMarine wrote:

This does look pretty good. However, I've always been curious as to why so many people started mods for UT3. Barely anyone plays it and the game tanked.

because it's popular & people want to get paid for their work, so the bets way is to have a name drop.

And of course the inevitable.. why UT3... and not Doom3.. I added the "and not Doom3 because that's the real question right?. It's quite simple though, Doom3 is too old and has no graphical features I wanted for this mod which mostly is down to post processing type features. But it's also about some freedom in the materials and level scripting for me personally. I'm no coder and I can't script to save my life and that can drag the dev time to a halt.

There is no engine I like more than Doom3 just because of what it did and when it did it but trying to live in the past doesn't help you in the games business or 3D business as a whole. The UE3 is a good and established engine and used by many games. The only game completely open to mod for there is UT3.. or rather was UT3 until the UDK was released.

Unfortunately UT3 is a failed game but that was the trade off. Being able to possibly convert to UDK is a good thing though so the choice was right. The UDK's timing just suck for our mod. Six months earlier and it would be a different story.

It's all about what you envision and what you can afford to do when you want to do it. UT3 was the best fit and would have had the shortest dev time to get through, which for this was roughly a year and a half but only a year of that spent on the UT engine implementing the game in there. So yeah, that sounds like a long time but usually mods run for many years.

I'm not gonna go on too much about it but the bottom line about the choice here for me was efficiency and like it or not the UE3 is very quick to get some stuff in there and looking decent. This in some key places like materials, particles, and even the kismet scripting allows for quite a fast work flow in areas that are quite important.

obihb wrote:

And of course the inevitable.. why UT3... and not Doom3.. I added the "and not Doom3 because that's the real question right?. It's quite simple though, Doom3 is too old and has no graphical features I wanted for this mod which mostly is down to post processing type features. But it's also about some freedom in the materials and level scripting for me personally. I'm no coder and I can't script to save my life and that can drag the dev time to a halt.

There is no engine I like more than Doom3 just because of what it did and when it did it but trying to live in the past doesn't help you in the games business or 3D business as a whole. The UE3 is a good and established engine and used by many games. The only game completely open to mod for there is UT3.. or rather was UT3 until the UDK was released.

Unfortunately UT3 is a failed game but that was the trade off. Being able to possibly convert to UDK is a good thing though so the choice was right. The UDK's timing just suck for our mod. Six months earlier and it would be a different story.

It's all about what you envision and what you can afford to do when you want to do it. UT3 was the best fit and would have had the shortest dev time to get through, which for this was roughly a year and a half but only a year of that spent on the UT engine implementing the game in there. So yeah, that sounds like a long time but usually mods run for many years.

I'm not gonna go on too much about it but the bottom line about the choice here for me was efficiency and like it or not the UE3 is very quick to get some stuff in there and looking decent. This in some key places like materials, particles, and even the kismet scripting allows for quite a fast work flow in areas that are quite important.

I'm not trying to get down on your work (you've always done great stuff) or anything, that's number 1. It not being for Doom3 wasn't really it, moreover that UT3, even when it was clear it wasn't that good (well, I just plain don't like UT but A LOT of UT players didn't like it which is what I'm basing that off of), and not as many people got it (having numerous problems that seem to have been somewhat solved by patches), there was/are a lot of mods for it. Doom3 didn't seem to have that type of enthusiasm behind it, maybe because it was single player with multiplayer basically being there for mod authors to mess around with or it was too different/hard from Quake3 and before, I don't know, those are my guesses. We all remember the 1000x complaints about the lighting system, remember when Kiltron eventually caved and threw a hissy fit about that too on planetdoom.com and here? (was it him being satirical/joking? I couldn't tell).

I suppose I still hold the belief that all mods are done for the love of the game so to speak (I'm talking in general here, not about you). Which clearly hasn't been the case for quite a while now. There are some that still remain of course.

Cool.

I'll still maintain that I think the number of mods for it is because of how good it is to mod for. I'm also not a UT player, back in the day I played Quake3 and that's about it. UT3 I got just to get it. This mod is not because to push UT3 further. It's really a TC. It's meant to be a game demo in essence.

But besides that, as purely a mod platform, I put UT3 high up on the list. I think using UT3 as a mod platform is much more about getting into the industry, showing what you can do. Not that this can't be done with another game, but UT3 is pretty good for that, and the tools it provides is top notch really.

But, with that said as well I think the UDK takes it's place now and allows for stand alone games to be produced with the same tools set and the same engine underneath and everything. This makes UT3 redundant on that front which means it's pretty much redundant anyway. For our mod, it's a timing thing, we just had a bad timing.

Great work, it's never easy to get a mod to this state....congrats

Mod looks great man. Congrats.

I agree with many things obihb said about modding in general. It all comes down to why you mod and your overall goal with modding in general. People do it for different reasons whether you agree with them or not.

obihb wrote:

And of course the inevitable.. why UT3... and not Doom3.. I added the "and not Doom3 because that's the real question right?. It's quite simple though, Doom3 is too old and has no graphical features I wanted for this mod which mostly is down to post processing type features. But it's also about some freedom in the materials and level scripting for me personally. I'm no coder and I can't script to save my life and that can drag the dev time to a halt.

I wasn't trying to get down on your work either, and didn't mean to put in the "and why not doom 3?" question if that was the way it was taken. From reading why people choose games to mod @ moddb.com, it almost always comes down to "if you mod for engine X you'll get noticed more & a better chance for a job" not "it has the features you'll want". Ironically, when that question comes up, the answer is normall either a id GPL engine or doom 3.

Cool thanks!.

Yeah, Friar you know I guess getting noticed should be the major reason and really it is about that but also for us we had extremely limited programming support going into this project and I'm not gonna write a whole story but again it comes back to UT3 has the features we need that doesn't need to be programmed. I didn't read back my other posts if I mentioned but this demo was not supposed to go public like this but we were kind of forced by circumstances to do it. The original decision about UT3 engine does not include.. public release at all.

It's also a choice between what I know and what other people in the team knows about various engines to hit the actual game engine with a flying start in stead of downloading tutorials. I'm really the only person on the team with any mod knowledge since I've done it since the original Doom games. I don't dabble in every engine, I get to know one or two of them well enough to get around. Sure, knowing one makes learning the next easier.. etc. But lets say another good choice would be Crysis. I open that editor and I don't know where to begin. It would take time to become fluent in there for me. Efficiency as I've mentioned before is quite a big deal to me.

It's always better in hindsight to realize what you should do, or should have done. But to be honest here, I'd still use UT3 or UDK.

Well, I can finally post some news of a mod I've been working on for some time now. I know, it's not a Doom3 mod and this is Doom3World but I want to spread the word a little bit and even though I've been a very loyal Doom3 follower, we really had no other choice for this mod in the end.

So here's some links for the mod and I hope some people here does own UT3 to check out the little mod/demo..

http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread. ... st27105317

http://www.moddb.com/mods/bountyarms

But... but... it's not Doom 3, this is Doom3World, not Unreal Tournament 3 world!!!!

This mod looks pretttttty amazing, obihb! I love the design of it all.
Good stuff!

Wow, looks fantastic and going by the screens it could also be a lot of fun. to bad i don't have UT3 here at the moment to test it

what exactly did you contribute to this mod?

edit: ok, just watched the video. All I have to say is, that this is one of the most impressive mods I've seen in a long time!!

Looks awesome. I might pick up a copy of UT3 for this.

Cool, thanks guys.

We were basically at most 6 people to work on this with 2 programmers at some stage and 4 artists. I did many things including some character models, most rigs and some animations, static meshes and I was the main level builder.. basically I did 95% of level building, kismet scripting and I did all special effects like particles. I did not really do any textures, maybe 2 I think..

In the end the modelling was spread over all 4 artists which included lots of high poly modelling of course. My main concerns was with low poly in game models although I did some high poly stuff as well and also others did a bunch of low poly stuff. The animation done by me and another guy and texturing done by 2 of the other guys.

Really amazing what you can achieve with a small team of talented people. Are there any plans of switching over to the UDK and maybe make a standalone game out of this?

We hope to get this in the UDK and as stand alone demo. We just don't have the programming people to get it going at this stage. The programming we had for this version of the mod was extremely limited in what they could offer in a decent time period and it was all learned from scratch to deal with UT scripting. It was a very bumpy road..

Going to the UDK is somewhat problematic for us in terms of programming since we don't have any more programmers to take a look into that for us. But it's something we would consider if someone offered to help out with it. Converting all assets over is doable and models, textures, materials and particles does seem to translate over quite seamlessly. We do have a version of the level inside the UDK but it's not a clean transition as far as the kismet stuff goes, it seems to me, it does come with some problems here and there so it's not 100% working in there, even just the level. Admittedly I haven't really dug deep into it yet to really see what's what there.

Looks fantastic. I hope you make it standalone. As I'm interested in playing this, but not UT3. :p

EDIT: I DO have GOW though. Hint hint, nudge nudge.

OH and I can't believe I forgot to mention our concept artist. He's just super brilliant and designed characters, weapons and some level props and various things. The art shown is just the tip of the iceberg this guy did for us. So, there.. the concept guy really should get much credit for his contribution.

About a "Gears version".. that unfortunately will never happen. Gears was my first choice of games to use created with UE3 because it would have contained a lot of "ready made" things for us to draw from scripting but it has like.. zero mod support. UT3 is very open to mod on the other hand and uses also an updated version of the UE3 compared to Gears. The UDK again is much updated version of UE3 and I really would like to convert this over to UDK if possible.

that looks pretty cool! I don't have UT3 either, and the more UT3 engine games I play the less & less I'm impressed by it & the more it looks like Q3A engine with high res models & textures.

But the mod looks pretty cool.

Amazing visuals you have there!

Looks nice. Old game styles are coming back it seems.

It looks really great! I like the idea, the models, the settings,... everything.
The background seems a bit too blurred to me, though.

Nice engine choice btw. I always liked how things look in UE3.
This makes me wish to learn UDK (or to buy UT3

), but I know I'll never have the time for this :cry:

Good luck for your project!

Thanks guys, I appreciate the good comments.

The UE3 is pretty cool, I agree. It's got it's good points but also bad points. But, generally, it's a pretty enjoyable engine and editor to work in.

This does look pretty good. However, I've always been curious as to why so many people started mods for UT3. Barely anyone plays it and the game tanked.

Because it's material system is much more robust than just about anything else out there.

TelMarine wrote:

This does look pretty good. However, I've always been curious as to why so many people started mods for UT3. Barely anyone plays it and the game tanked.

because it's popular & people want to get paid for their work, so the bets way is to have a name drop.

And of course the inevitable.. why UT3... and not Doom3.. I added the "and not Doom3 because that's the real question right?. It's quite simple though, Doom3 is too old and has no graphical features I wanted for this mod which mostly is down to post processing type features. But it's also about some freedom in the materials and level scripting for me personally. I'm no coder and I can't script to save my life and that can drag the dev time to a halt.

There is no engine I like more than Doom3 just because of what it did and when it did it but trying to live in the past doesn't help you in the games business or 3D business as a whole. The UE3 is a good and established engine and used by many games. The only game completely open to mod for there is UT3.. or rather was UT3 until the UDK was released.

Unfortunately UT3 is a failed game but that was the trade off. Being able to possibly convert to UDK is a good thing though so the choice was right. The UDK's timing just suck for our mod. Six months earlier and it would be a different story.

It's all about what you envision and what you can afford to do when you want to do it. UT3 was the best fit and would have had the shortest dev time to get through, which for this was roughly a year and a half but only a year of that spent on the UT engine implementing the game in there. So yeah, that sounds like a long time but usually mods run for many years.

I'm not gonna go on too much about it but the bottom line about the choice here for me was efficiency and like it or not the UE3 is very quick to get some stuff in there and looking decent. This in some key places like materials, particles, and even the kismet scripting allows for quite a fast work flow in areas that are quite important.

obihb wrote:

And of course the inevitable.. why UT3... and not Doom3.. I added the "and not Doom3 because that's the real question right?. It's quite simple though, Doom3 is too old and has no graphical features I wanted for this mod which mostly is down to post processing type features. But it's also about some freedom in the materials and level scripting for me personally. I'm no coder and I can't script to save my life and that can drag the dev time to a halt.

There is no engine I like more than Doom3 just because of what it did and when it did it but trying to live in the past doesn't help you in the games business or 3D business as a whole. The UE3 is a good and established engine and used by many games. The only game completely open to mod for there is UT3.. or rather was UT3 until the UDK was released.

Unfortunately UT3 is a failed game but that was the trade off. Being able to possibly convert to UDK is a good thing though so the choice was right. The UDK's timing just suck for our mod. Six months earlier and it would be a different story.

It's all about what you envision and what you can afford to do when you want to do it. UT3 was the best fit and would have had the shortest dev time to get through, which for this was roughly a year and a half but only a year of that spent on the UT engine implementing the game in there. So yeah, that sounds like a long time but usually mods run for many years.

I'm not gonna go on too much about it but the bottom line about the choice here for me was efficiency and like it or not the UE3 is very quick to get some stuff in there and looking decent. This in some key places like materials, particles, and even the kismet scripting allows for quite a fast work flow in areas that are quite important.

I'm not trying to get down on your work (you've always done great stuff) or anything, that's number 1. It not being for Doom3 wasn't really it, moreover that UT3, even when it was clear it wasn't that good (well, I just plain don't like UT but A LOT of UT players didn't like it which is what I'm basing that off of), and not as many people got it (having numerous problems that seem to have been somewhat solved by patches), there was/are a lot of mods for it. Doom3 didn't seem to have that type of enthusiasm behind it, maybe because it was single player with multiplayer basically being there for mod authors to mess around with or it was too different/hard from Quake3 and before, I don't know, those are my guesses. We all remember the 1000x complaints about the lighting system, remember when Kiltron eventually caved and threw a hissy fit about that too on planetdoom.com and here? (was it him being satirical/joking? I couldn't tell).

I suppose I still hold the belief that all mods are done for the love of the game so to speak (I'm talking in general here, not about you). Which clearly hasn't been the case for quite a while now. There are some that still remain of course.

Cool.

I'll still maintain that I think the number of mods for it is because of how good it is to mod for. I'm also not a UT player, back in the day I played Quake3 and that's about it. UT3 I got just to get it. This mod is not because to push UT3 further. It's really a TC. It's meant to be a game demo in essence.

But besides that, as purely a mod platform, I put UT3 high up on the list. I think using UT3 as a mod platform is much more about getting into the industry, showing what you can do. Not that this can't be done with another game, but UT3 is pretty good for that, and the tools it provides is top notch really.

But, with that said as well I think the UDK takes it's place now and allows for stand alone games to be produced with the same tools set and the same engine underneath and everything. This makes UT3 redundant on that front which means it's pretty much redundant anyway. For our mod, it's a timing thing, we just had a bad timing.

Great work, it's never easy to get a mod to this state....congrats

Mod looks great man. Congrats.

I agree with many things obihb said about modding in general. It all comes down to why you mod and your overall goal with modding in general. People do it for different reasons whether you agree with them or not.

obihb wrote:

And of course the inevitable.. why UT3... and not Doom3.. I added the "and not Doom3 because that's the real question right?. It's quite simple though, Doom3 is too old and has no graphical features I wanted for this mod which mostly is down to post processing type features. But it's also about some freedom in the materials and level scripting for me personally. I'm no coder and I can't script to save my life and that can drag the dev time to a halt.

I wasn't trying to get down on your work either, and didn't mean to put in the "and why not doom 3?" question if that was the way it was taken. From reading why people choose games to mod @ moddb.com, it almost always comes down to "if you mod for engine X you'll get noticed more & a better chance for a job" not "it has the features you'll want". Ironically, when that question comes up, the answer is normall either a id GPL engine or doom 3.

Cool thanks!.

Yeah, Friar you know I guess getting noticed should be the major reason and really it is about that but also for us we had extremely limited programming support going into this project and I'm not gonna write a whole story but again it comes back to UT3 has the features we need that doesn't need to be programmed. I didn't read back my other posts if I mentioned but this demo was not supposed to go public like this but we were kind of forced by circumstances to do it. The original decision about UT3 engine does not include.. public release at all.

It's also a choice between what I know and what other people in the team knows about various engines to hit the actual game engine with a flying start in stead of downloading tutorials. I'm really the only person on the team with any mod knowledge since I've done it since the original Doom games. I don't dabble in every engine, I get to know one or two of them well enough to get around. Sure, knowing one makes learning the next easier.. etc. But lets say another good choice would be Crysis. I open that editor and I don't know where to begin. It would take time to become fluent in there for me. Efficiency as I've mentioned before is quite a big deal to me.

It's always better in hindsight to realize what you should do, or should have done. But to be honest here, I'd still use UT3 or UDK.