I just ported Quake III to the web with multiplayer and mobile support: 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.
Ut2k4 is so fantastic, I still have a scar on my forehead from the first time I played the demo on a CRT sitting on a chair and my friend tackled me into it to "save me from a sniper". I would get up at 4am because I had a bedtime but no wakeup time and play 4 hours of CTF-Face instagib before school. Q3DM17 also holds a special place in my heart, I'm getting a tattoo of the "Impressive" emblem in a few weeks!
Not a day goes by that I don't pine for turn of the century FPS gameplay. (and maybe my turn of the century reflexes)
Haha this is incredible! I had a gap in my gaming years—I only enjoyed UT GOTY (a 2000 release?)—and sounds like the series carried the same kill streak sound bites over. Impressive is prob a safer tatt than HEAD SHOT!
UT2k4 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.
I did a new port of base ioquake3, and actually contributed changes back, so upstream ioquake3 now has decent Emscripten support. The multiplayer is using WebRTC DataChannel, based on HumbleNet but I had to make quite a few changes, as it was abandoned a long time ago.
I managed to play some ONS-Torlan this past weekend with my friend on a pure LAN (no Internet), it was fantastic and just as much fun as I remember. I enjoy turning on lots of fun modifiers like low gravity, big head mode, berserk, etc.
I'm half-way porting another turn of the century game engine to emscripten but I'm a little stuck on the networking so it's pretty cool being able to have practical examples to reference.
Multiplayer on the web is tricky. For non-action games you can get away with WebSockets but for arena shooters or other action games I think UDP is important, and you can only get that with WebRTC and all the baggage that comes with it. I'm using a library called HumbleNet to handle WebRTC, but I had to make a lot of changes for it to be usable. https://github.com/jdarpinian/HumbleNet
I think it was someone other than Carmack that was pushing for source releases and linux ports inside of Id. They stopped doing it a while before Carmack left even.
This 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.
My 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.
Seems 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.
Unreal 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…
I 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.
Definitely 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.
>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]
This is proprietary closed source mindset. Nobody is asking for bug free cleanly compiling and running codebase. Releasing with dependencies removed is enough, community would patch around it in no time.
Honestly in an era when so many companies are re-releasing and re-mastering and re-making their back-catalog, I'm shocked that Epic seems to have forgotten their roots.
Where's an Epic Arcade bundle of their 2D masterpieces like OMF2097 and Epic Pinball and Solar Winds? Why isn't Jazz Jackrabbit appearing in half a dozen mascot-themed Super Smash Bros ripoff?
Compare vs Capcom's remakes of all their classic Resident Evil games (Unreal 1 and 2 could get this treatment) and rebundles of all their arcade fighters and beat-em-ups. Or Id's annual rebundling of Quake 1-3 for new generations.
And it's not just big companies like Capcom doing that. How many times has little Croteam re-released Serious Sam 1st and 2nd encounters?
Meanwhile can you even buy UT2004 anywhere anymore?
That would be absolutely great if it were to happen, especially if they'd choose more liberal license such as BSD.
I'm a sucker for software rendering and unreal engine 1 has even more advanced features in that department compared to the original Quake (1 and 2) engines.
Would love to port that to wasm if this ever happens.
It'd be nice if they released the code to their old DOS game catalog. Probably piles of 16 bit assembly but it'd still be nice (assuming they still have it)
It took a very long time for the source code for e.g. ZZT to be published, precisely because they apparently lost the code. https://github.com/asiekierka/almost-of-zzt Even then that had some third party comments removed from it.
Unironically Splatoon 3. It's so fun once you master the motion-controlled aiming and Squid Rolls and all that. Clam Blitz especially is the most fun I've had in any multiplayer game in years and really scratches that old UT2004 Bombing Run / Tribes / TF2 itch: https://old.reddit.com/r/splatoon/comments/13eslyb/at_the_bu...
To make a game as complex as Unreal Tournament 3 you're looking at millions in dev salaries alone. Meanwhile UT3 is still available to play, if anyone wanted to.
Not being as complex as UT3 would be a good thing. I wanted to love UT3 but it's so graphically busy that it distracts from the game play. Even UT2004 — as great as it is — misses the *SOVL* of UT99's simple geometry and colored lighting.
Readit News
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-b...
Not a day goes by that I don't pine for turn of the century FPS gameplay. (and maybe my turn of the century reflexes)
I play regularly and the couple of servers I play on get full to the point nobody else can join...
The player base is small, and the skill ceiling is extremely high, but it's a shockingly solid piece of work for a free, open source game.
Seems like the genre is just not popular.
Honorable mention to UT2k3's menu music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IberpcWz9mU#t=0m10s
The NFL themes had nothing on it.
For the curious, FTEQW has an emscripten port as well, and FTEQW allows you to play Q1, Q2 and most Q3 maps: https://github.com/fte-team/fteqw/blob/1f9f3635f0aef3b2eed6b...
Also, the LvL LiveView is a great way to check Q3 maps in your browser: https://q3js.lvlworld.com/play/2043/media/633a9623b1b6458735...
What a time to be alive. :)
Code is here: https://github.com/jdarpinian/ioq3 https://github.com/jdarpinian/HumbleNet
Multiplayer on the web is tricky. For non-action games you can get away with WebSockets but for arena shooters or other action games I think UDP is important, and you can only get that with WebRTC and all the baggage that comes with it. I'm using a library called HumbleNet to handle WebRTC, but I had to make a lot of changes for it to be usable. https://github.com/jdarpinian/HumbleNet
And Epic's removal of titles from stores: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/12/epic-games-are-killing...
Hopefully you find something from the past that can bring even more happy memories!
The developer has a bunch of WIP videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dxu2424/videos
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.
https://kentie.net/article/dxguide/
>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://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches
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.
Where's an Epic Arcade bundle of their 2D masterpieces like OMF2097 and Epic Pinball and Solar Winds? Why isn't Jazz Jackrabbit appearing in half a dozen mascot-themed Super Smash Bros ripoff?
Compare vs Capcom's remakes of all their classic Resident Evil games (Unreal 1 and 2 could get this treatment) and rebundles of all their arcade fighters and beat-em-ups. Or Id's annual rebundling of Quake 1-3 for new generations.
And it's not just big companies like Capcom doing that. How many times has little Croteam re-released Serious Sam 1st and 2nd encounters?
Meanwhile can you even buy UT2004 anywhere anymore?
I'm a sucker for software rendering and unreal engine 1 has even more advanced features in that department compared to the original Quake (1 and 2) engines.
Would love to port that to wasm if this ever happens.
There is https://github.com/RedPandaProjects/UnrealEngine but I don't know what are the legalities and such...