Unreal
Encyclopedia
Unreal is a first-person shooter
video game developed by Epic MegaGames
and Digital Extremes
and published by GT Interactive (now owned by Atari) in May 1998. It was powered by an original gameplay and computer engine that now bears the game's name
, one that had been in development for over three years in founder Tim Sweeney
's garage before the game was released.
Since the release of Unreal, the franchise has had one sequel and two different series based on the Unreal universe. One official bonus pack, the Epic-released Fusion Map Pack, can be downloaded free of charge.
Unreal Mission Pack I: Return to Na Pali was released June 1999, and added new missions to the single player campaign of Unreal. Unreal and Unreal Mission Pack I: Return to Na Pali would later be bundled together as Unreal Gold. Additionally, the games were updated to run on the Unreal Tournament
version of the game engine.
on the planet Na Pali, home of the Nali, a primitive tribal race of four-armed humanoids. The Nali and their planet have been subjugated by the Skaarj, a race of brutish yet technologically advanced reptilian humanoids. Skaarj troops board the downed Vortex Rikers and kill the remaining survivors, save for Prisoner 849, who manages to find a weapon and escape from the ship.
The planet Na Pali is rich in "Tarydium", a mineral that is found as light blue crystal
s, which possesses a high energy yield, whose utility is the reason for which the Skaarj have invaded. The ship has crashed near one of the many Tarydium mines and processing facilities that the Skaarj have built. Prisoner 849 travels through the mines, meeting Nali slaves and eventually entering the ruins of Nali villages and cities, where the extent of the Nalis' suffering and exploitation are made clear.
Throughout the game the player stumbles across the remains of other humans, often with electronic journal
s that detail their last days and hint at the cause of their demise. Usually the tales are of desperate struggles to hide from the Skaarj or other bloodthirsty inhabitants of the planet. The player never meets another live human aside from a wounded crew member on the bridge of the prison ship who gasps and dies immediately. Prisoner 849 is likely the only human alive in the planet Na Pali throughout the game.
Prisoner 849 continues to make her way through a series of alien installations, a second crashed human spaceship, and ancient Nali temples infested with Skaarj troops and their minions, eventually arriving at the Nali Castle. Inside the castle, the prisoner locates a teleporter that leads to the Skaarj Mothership. The mothership proves to be a vast labyrinth
, but Prisoner 849 manages to find the ship's reactor and destroys it, plunging the vessel into darkness. After navigating the corridors in the dark, the player arrives at the Skaarj Queen's chamber and kills her. Prisoner 849 jumps into an escape pod as the mothership disintegrates. Although the prisoner survives the Skaarj, the escape pod is left to float into space, with slim hopes of being found.
s titled Hard Crash and Prophet's Power were published, expanding on the premise and story first introduced in Unreal. Prophet's Power, the second book in the series, is actually a prequel to the first, Hard Crash, thus it is harder for readers to understand what happened in the story.
, though the real plan is revealed to be maintaining the secrecy of the mission by killing the prisoner immediately after the information is secured.
Upon arriving at the Prometheus, Prisoner 849 finds the secret weapons log, but soon after, she finds a working radio communicator nearby. The prisoner listened to a recently recorded and archived conversation between the Bodega Bay and a nearby space station, the UMS Starlight, exposing the military's treachery. As Prisoner 849 transmits the research log, a squad of marines beam onboard the ship, intending to eliminate the prisoner, who manages to escape into a nearby mine system.
Once again, Prisoner 849 is forced to traverse a series of alien facilities and Nali temples in an attempt to locate another way off the planet. Eventually the prisoner ends up at another Nali Castle, where a small space shuttle is stored. After fighting through Skaarj, the prisoner manages to take off in the spacecraft. However, the Bodega Bay is waiting in orbit, and launches a missile at the prisoner's ship. The prisoner outmaneuvers the missile, and leads it back on a collision course with the Bodega Bay. The large ship is disabled by the ensuing blast, and Prisoner 849 escapes into space.
was seen as a major rival to id Software
's id Tech 2 engine, and the Unreal game itself was considered to be technically superior to Quake II
, which was out on the market at the same time (between December 1997 and May 1998). Originally, Unreal was going to be a Quake-style shooter—earlier screens showed a large status bar and centered weapons, similar to Doom and Quake.
As development progressed, various levels were cut from development. A few of these levels reappeared in the Return to Na Pali expansion pack. A number of enemies from early versions are present in the released software but with variations and improvements to their look. One monster that didn't make the cut was a dragon. One of the weapons shown in early screenshots was the "Quadshot"—a four-barreled shotgun. The model remains in-game, while there is no code for the weapon to function (several player-made mods bring the weapon back in the game). Another weapon shown was a different pistol, however this may have just been an early version of the Automag. At one point the rifle could fire three shots at once, which is wrongly stated as the alternate fire in the Unreal manual that comes with the Unreal Anthology.
Since Unreal came packaged with its own scripting language called UnrealScript
, it soon developed a large community on the Internet
which was able to add new mod
s (short for "modifications") in order to change or enhance gameplay. This feature greatly added to the overall longevity of the product and provided an incentive for new development. A map editor and overall complete modification program called UnrealEd
also came with the package. Epic Games
has encouraged its community to contribute to creating modifications through sponsoring big dollar contests, including one for Unreal Tournament for $150,000 in cash and prizes, and another for Unreal Tournament 2004
for one million in cash and prizes.
, Unreal brought to life not only highly-detailed indoor environments, but also easily the most impressive outdoor landscapes ever seen at the time. They improved the lighting and surrounding in the game, giving them a grittier darker look. This graphical splendor brought with it the side effect of requiring powerful hardware to run the game fast enough to play. The minimum requirements stated that a Pentium 166 MHz
with 16 MB RAM and no 3D accelerator would be capable of running the game.
The Unreal engine brought a host of graphical improvements, including colored lighting. Although Unreal is not the first major release with colored lighting (see Quake II), it is the first to have a software renderer
as feature rich as the hardware renderers of the time, including colored lighting and even a limited form of texture filtering referred to by programmer Tim Sweeney
as an ordered "texture coordinate space" dither. Early pre-release versions of Unreal were based entirely around software rendering. SIMD
technology is integral to allowing the software audio and 3D graphics engines to perform as well as they do. Unreal uses several SIMD technologies, including AMD's 3DNow!
along with Intel's MMX and SSE
(known as "KNI—Katmai New Instructions" within Unreal).
Unreal was one of the first games to utilize detail texturing. This type of multiple texturing enhances the surfaces of objects with a second texture that shows material detail. When the player stands within a small distance from most surfaces, the detail texture will fade in and make the surface appear much more complex (high-resolution) instead of becoming increasingly blurry. Notable surfaces with these special detail textures included computer monitors and pitted metal surfaces aboard the prison ship, and golden metal doors and stone surfaces within Nali temples. This extra texture layer was not applied to character models. The resulting simulation of material detail on game objects was intended to aid the player's suspension of disbelief
. For many years after Unreal' s release (and Unreal Tournaments release), detail texturing only worked well with the Glide
renderer. It was, in fact, disabled in the Direct3D renderer by default (but could be re-enabled in the Unreal.ini file) due to performance and quality issues caused by the driver and present even on hardware many times more powerful than the original 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics.
Because of Unreals long development time, the course of development occurred during the emergence and rapid progression of hardware 3D accelerators. So, along with the advanced software 3D renderer, Unreal was built to take advantage of the 3Dfx Glide API
, which emerged as the dominant interface towards the end of the game's development. When Unreal was finally released, Microsoft's Direct3D
API was growing almost exponentially in popularity and Epic was fairly quick to develop a renderer for their game engine. However, the Direct3D renderer, released initially to support the new Matrox G200
, was less capable and slower than the Glide support, especially in the beginning when it was unstable, slow, and had many graphics quality issues. The Glide renderer's superiority can be seen in a review of the 3dfx Voodoo 5
, where it outperformed every other card in Unreal Tournament
(same engine as Unreal), due to its native Glide support. Even video card
s which consistently defeated the Voodoo 5 5500 in other games could not win against Glide's greater efficiency. Unreal also had official OpenGL
support.
Galaxy supports rudimentary software-based 3D audio positioning as well as hardware 3D sound support (although this is quite buggy). In software mode, sounds are only stereo-panned. Phase shifting and band-pass filter
ing are used to imitate changes in position and distance. The sound system is limited to mixing and playing back a maximum of 64 channels, but the default is 16 channels because of CPU power limitations.
In hardware 3D audio mode, the engine is designed to support sound cards with hardware 3D audio
mixing and positioning capabilities. At the time of release this included primarily the Aureal
Vortex line of audio cards. In this mode, the sound card takes over sound placement with the game providing only positional information to the hardware. If the game uses more channels than the sound card supports, then the extra channels will be run on the game's software engine; this can cause sound consistency problems.
If the processor Unreal is running on lacks MMX support (i.e. a Pentium Pro
), then the game will automatically reduce sound quality to low. Quality can be turned back up to full, but the audio engine is less efficient without MMX support. On non-MMX machines, the sound code does make some quality and speed trade-offs by limiting sound effects to having only 64 volume levels. This limitation can be heard by setting up an ambient sound effect with a high radius in an otherwise quiet area; the discrete steps between volume levels are quite audible. Epic also noted nearly a twofold speed boost with MMX code.
The sound system supports both the legacy WinMM sound system, and DirectSound
. DirectSound generally achieves the lowest latency
, while WinMM works on Windows 95
without DirectSound or Windows NT 4.0
machines.
in the early 1990s to CD audio and pre-rendered audio, many of the Epic games used the less common system of module music
, composed with a tracker, which used stored PCM sound effects sequenced together to produce music. Epic had been using this technology for other games such as Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall: 2097
, which allowed relatively rich music to be stored in files usually smaller than one megabyte. Naturally, this technology allowed easy implementation of dynamic music for mood changes in Unreal. The Unreal soundtrack was written by MOD music authors Alexander Brandon
and Michiel van den Bos
with a few selected tracks by Dan Gardopée
and Andrew Sega
. Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos were also responsible for the soundtracks for Unreal Tournament
and Deus Ex
, which also use the Unreal Engine; Michiel van den Bos also produced the soundtrack for Age of Wonders
.
Unreals music engine also supports CD audio tracks.
Unreals method of creating maps differs in major ways from that of Quake. The bundled UnrealEd
map editor uses the Unreal engine to render scenes exactly as they appear in-game, as opposed to external editors like Worldcraft attempting to recreate it with different methods. Whereas Quake maps are compiled from a variety of different components, Unreal maps are inherently editable on the fly. This allows anybody to edit any map that is created, including the maps included with the game.
The last update for the Mac OS
port was version 224b, which breaks network compatibility between it and the PC version, as well as lacking support for some user-created content made for 225 and 226f. Westlake Interactive, the company responsible for the port, claimed that previous patches were produced voluntarily in their free time, beyond their contractual obligations. They also stated that they did not receive the code for the 225 patch and that it had become unavailable due to Epic moving on to develop version 226.
was created by several users of icculus.org, which allowed the Unreal Singleplayer game content to be run as a modification for Unreal Tournament
. The online retailer Tux Games
at one point sold a box set including the Linux version.
First-person shooter
First-person shooter is a video game genre that centers the gameplay on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through first-person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other...
video game developed by Epic MegaGames
Epic Games
Epic Games, Inc., also known as Epic and formerly Epic MegaGames, is an American video game development company based in Cary, North Carolina. Its most recent success has been the Gears of War series of games, although it is also known for its Unreal Engine technology. It is the parent company of...
and Digital Extremes
Digital Extremes
Digital Extremes is a Canadian computer and video game developer founded in 1993 by James Schmalz, specifically noted for its part in the highly successful Unreal series of games...
and published by GT Interactive (now owned by Atari) in May 1998. It was powered by an original gameplay and computer engine that now bears the game's name
Unreal Engine
The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first illustrated in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. Although primarily developed for first-person shooters, it has been successfully used in a variety of other genres, including stealth, MMORPGs and RPGs...
, one that had been in development for over three years in founder Tim Sweeney
Tim Sweeney (game developer)
Tim Sweeney, born in 1970, is a computer game programmer and the founder of Epic Games, being best known for his work on ZZT and the Unreal Engine....
's garage before the game was released.
Since the release of Unreal, the franchise has had one sequel and two different series based on the Unreal universe. One official bonus pack, the Epic-released Fusion Map Pack, can be downloaded free of charge.
Unreal Mission Pack I: Return to Na Pali was released June 1999, and added new missions to the single player campaign of Unreal. Unreal and Unreal Mission Pack I: Return to Na Pali would later be bundled together as Unreal Gold. Additionally, the games were updated to run on the Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament is a futuristic first-person shooter video game co-developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes. It was published in 1999 by GT Interactive. Retrospectively, the game has also been referred to as UT99 or UT Classic to differentiate it from its numbered sequels...
version of the game engine.
Plot
The player takes on the part of Prisoner 849, an otherwise anonymous person, however it is possible that the Prisoner 849 is a woman named Gina, as the default character is her in the player setup. The Prisoner 849 is aboard the prison spacecraft Vortex Rikers. The ship was under way to a prison moon, but was pulled to an uncharted planet before reaching its destination. The ship crash-lands on the lip of a canyonCanyon
A canyon or gorge is a deep ravine between cliffs often carved from the landscape by a river. Rivers have a natural tendency to reach a baseline elevation, which is the same elevation as the body of water it will eventually drain into. This forms a canyon. Most canyons were formed by a process of...
on the planet Na Pali, home of the Nali, a primitive tribal race of four-armed humanoids. The Nali and their planet have been subjugated by the Skaarj, a race of brutish yet technologically advanced reptilian humanoids. Skaarj troops board the downed Vortex Rikers and kill the remaining survivors, save for Prisoner 849, who manages to find a weapon and escape from the ship.
The planet Na Pali is rich in "Tarydium", a mineral that is found as light blue crystal
Crystal
A crystal or crystalline solid is a solid material whose constituent atoms, molecules, or ions are arranged in an orderly repeating pattern extending in all three spatial dimensions. The scientific study of crystals and crystal formation is known as crystallography...
s, which possesses a high energy yield, whose utility is the reason for which the Skaarj have invaded. The ship has crashed near one of the many Tarydium mines and processing facilities that the Skaarj have built. Prisoner 849 travels through the mines, meeting Nali slaves and eventually entering the ruins of Nali villages and cities, where the extent of the Nalis' suffering and exploitation are made clear.
Throughout the game the player stumbles across the remains of other humans, often with electronic journal
Diary
A diary is a record with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, and/or thoughts or feelings, including comment on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone...
s that detail their last days and hint at the cause of their demise. Usually the tales are of desperate struggles to hide from the Skaarj or other bloodthirsty inhabitants of the planet. The player never meets another live human aside from a wounded crew member on the bridge of the prison ship who gasps and dies immediately. Prisoner 849 is likely the only human alive in the planet Na Pali throughout the game.
Prisoner 849 continues to make her way through a series of alien installations, a second crashed human spaceship, and ancient Nali temples infested with Skaarj troops and their minions, eventually arriving at the Nali Castle. Inside the castle, the prisoner locates a teleporter that leads to the Skaarj Mothership. The mothership proves to be a vast labyrinth
Labyrinth
In Greek mythology, the Labyrinth was an elaborate structure designed and built by the legendary artificer Daedalus for King Minos of Crete at Knossos...
, but Prisoner 849 manages to find the ship's reactor and destroys it, plunging the vessel into darkness. After navigating the corridors in the dark, the player arrives at the Skaarj Queen's chamber and kills her. Prisoner 849 jumps into an escape pod as the mothership disintegrates. Although the prisoner survives the Skaarj, the escape pod is left to float into space, with slim hopes of being found.
Novels
Two novelNovel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
s titled Hard Crash and Prophet's Power were published, expanding on the premise and story first introduced in Unreal. Prophet's Power, the second book in the series, is actually a prequel to the first, Hard Crash, thus it is harder for readers to understand what happened in the story.
Expansion plot
The expansion, Return to Na Pali, picks up not long after Unreals ending; Prisoner 849 is found by a human warship, the UMS Bodega Bay. Upon learning of the prisoner's identity, the UMS (the Unified Military Services) conscripts her into service, forcing the prisoner to return to Na Pali in order to locate the downed ship UMS Prometheus. There, the prisoner is to retrieve some secret weapons research. In return, the prisoner will receive a full pardon and transportation back to EarthEarth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...
, though the real plan is revealed to be maintaining the secrecy of the mission by killing the prisoner immediately after the information is secured.
Upon arriving at the Prometheus, Prisoner 849 finds the secret weapons log, but soon after, she finds a working radio communicator nearby. The prisoner listened to a recently recorded and archived conversation between the Bodega Bay and a nearby space station, the UMS Starlight, exposing the military's treachery. As Prisoner 849 transmits the research log, a squad of marines beam onboard the ship, intending to eliminate the prisoner, who manages to escape into a nearby mine system.
Once again, Prisoner 849 is forced to traverse a series of alien facilities and Nali temples in an attempt to locate another way off the planet. Eventually the prisoner ends up at another Nali Castle, where a small space shuttle is stored. After fighting through Skaarj, the prisoner manages to take off in the spacecraft. However, the Bodega Bay is waiting in orbit, and launches a missile at the prisoner's ship. The prisoner outmaneuvers the missile, and leads it back on a collision course with the Bodega Bay. The large ship is disabled by the ensuing blast, and Prisoner 849 escapes into space.
Development
The Unreal game engineUnreal Engine
The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first illustrated in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. Although primarily developed for first-person shooters, it has been successfully used in a variety of other genres, including stealth, MMORPGs and RPGs...
was seen as a major rival to id Software
Id Software
Id Software is an American video game development company with its headquarters in Richardson, Texas. The company was founded in 1991 by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack...
's id Tech 2 engine, and the Unreal game itself was considered to be technically superior to Quake II
Quake II
Quake II, released on December 9, 1997, is a first-person shooter computer game developed by Id Software and distributed by Activision. It is not a sequel to Quake; it merely uses the name of the former game due to Id's difficulties in coming up with alternative names.The soundtrack for Quake II...
, which was out on the market at the same time (between December 1997 and May 1998). Originally, Unreal was going to be a Quake-style shooter—earlier screens showed a large status bar and centered weapons, similar to Doom and Quake.
As development progressed, various levels were cut from development. A few of these levels reappeared in the Return to Na Pali expansion pack. A number of enemies from early versions are present in the released software but with variations and improvements to their look. One monster that didn't make the cut was a dragon. One of the weapons shown in early screenshots was the "Quadshot"—a four-barreled shotgun. The model remains in-game, while there is no code for the weapon to function (several player-made mods bring the weapon back in the game). Another weapon shown was a different pistol, however this may have just been an early version of the Automag. At one point the rifle could fire three shots at once, which is wrongly stated as the alternate fire in the Unreal manual that comes with the Unreal Anthology.
Since Unreal came packaged with its own scripting language called UnrealScript
UnrealScript
UnrealScript is the scripting language of the Unreal Engine and is used for authoring game code and gameplay events....
, it soon developed a large community on the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
which was able to add new mod
Mod (computer gaming)
Mod or modification is a term generally applied to personal computer games , especially first-person shooters, role-playing games and real-time strategy games. Mods are made by the general public or a developer, and can be entirely new games in themselves, but mods are not standalone software and...
s (short for "modifications") in order to change or enhance gameplay. This feature greatly added to the overall longevity of the product and provided an incentive for new development. A map editor and overall complete modification program called UnrealEd
UnrealEd
UnrealEd is the level editor used to create levels for Unreal. It was also used for other games based on the Unreal engine, such as Deus Ex and Lineage II, although it has changed along with the engine for later games...
also came with the package. Epic Games
Epic Games
Epic Games, Inc., also known as Epic and formerly Epic MegaGames, is an American video game development company based in Cary, North Carolina. Its most recent success has been the Gears of War series of games, although it is also known for its Unreal Engine technology. It is the parent company of...
has encouraged its community to contribute to creating modifications through sponsoring big dollar contests, including one for Unreal Tournament for $150,000 in cash and prizes, and another for Unreal Tournament 2004
Unreal Tournament 2004
Unreal Tournament 2004, also known as UT2K4 and UT2004, is a futuristic first-person shooter computer game developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes...
for one million in cash and prizes.
Graphics
Unreal is known for boosting the expectations of 3D graphics considerably. Compared to its peers in the genre, such as Quake IIQuake II
Quake II, released on December 9, 1997, is a first-person shooter computer game developed by Id Software and distributed by Activision. It is not a sequel to Quake; it merely uses the name of the former game due to Id's difficulties in coming up with alternative names.The soundtrack for Quake II...
, Unreal brought to life not only highly-detailed indoor environments, but also easily the most impressive outdoor landscapes ever seen at the time. They improved the lighting and surrounding in the game, giving them a grittier darker look. This graphical splendor brought with it the side effect of requiring powerful hardware to run the game fast enough to play. The minimum requirements stated that a Pentium 166 MHz
Pentium compatible processor
A Pentium compatible processor is a 32-bit processor computer chip which supports the instructions in the IA-32 instruction set that were implemented by the Intel P5 Pentium processor family...
with 16 MB RAM and no 3D accelerator would be capable of running the game.
Software rendering
In the context of rendering , software rendering refers to a rendering process that is unaided by any specialized graphics hardware, such as a graphics card. The rendering takes place entirely in the CPU...
as feature rich as the hardware renderers of the time, including colored lighting and even a limited form of texture filtering referred to by programmer Tim Sweeney
Tim Sweeney (game developer)
Tim Sweeney, born in 1970, is a computer game programmer and the founder of Epic Games, being best known for his work on ZZT and the Unreal Engine....
as an ordered "texture coordinate space" dither. Early pre-release versions of Unreal were based entirely around software rendering. SIMD
SIMD
Single instruction, multiple data , is a class of parallel computers in Flynn's taxonomy. It describes computers with multiple processing elements that perform the same operation on multiple data simultaneously...
technology is integral to allowing the software audio and 3D graphics engines to perform as well as they do. Unreal uses several SIMD technologies, including AMD's 3DNow!
3DNow!
3DNow! is an extension to the x86 instruction set developed by Advanced Micro Devices . It adds single instruction multiple data instructions to the base x86 instruction set, enabling it to perform simple vector processing, which improves the performance of many graphic-intensive applications...
along with Intel's MMX and SSE
Streaming SIMD Extensions
In computing, Streaming SIMD Extensions is a SIMD instruction set extension to the x86 architecture, designed by Intel and introduced in 1999 in their Pentium III series processors as a reply to AMD's 3DNow! . SSE contains 70 new instructions, most of which work on single precision floating point...
(known as "KNI—Katmai New Instructions" within Unreal).
Unreal was one of the first games to utilize detail texturing. This type of multiple texturing enhances the surfaces of objects with a second texture that shows material detail. When the player stands within a small distance from most surfaces, the detail texture will fade in and make the surface appear much more complex (high-resolution) instead of becoming increasingly blurry. Notable surfaces with these special detail textures included computer monitors and pitted metal surfaces aboard the prison ship, and golden metal doors and stone surfaces within Nali temples. This extra texture layer was not applied to character models. The resulting simulation of material detail on game objects was intended to aid the player's suspension of disbelief
Suspension of disbelief
Suspension of disbelief or "willing suspension of disbelief" is a formula for justifying the use of fantastic or non-realistic elements in literary works of fiction...
. For many years after Unreal
Glide API
Glide is a 3D graphics API developed by 3dfx Interactive for their Voodoo Graphics 3D accelerator cards. Although it originally started as a proprietary API, it was later open sourced by 3dfx. It was dedicated to gaming performance, supporting geometry and texture mapping primarily, in data...
renderer. It was, in fact, disabled in the Direct3D renderer by default (but could be re-enabled in the Unreal.ini file) due to performance and quality issues caused by the driver and present even on hardware many times more powerful than the original 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics.
Because of Unreals long development time, the course of development occurred during the emergence and rapid progression of hardware 3D accelerators. So, along with the advanced software 3D renderer, Unreal was built to take advantage of the 3Dfx Glide API
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
, which emerged as the dominant interface towards the end of the game's development. When Unreal was finally released, Microsoft's Direct3D
Direct3D
Direct3D is part of Microsoft's DirectX application programming interface . Direct3D is available for Microsoft Windows operating systems , and for other platforms through the open source software Wine. It is the base for the graphics API on the Xbox and Xbox 360 console systems...
API was growing almost exponentially in popularity and Epic was fairly quick to develop a renderer for their game engine. However, the Direct3D renderer, released initially to support the new Matrox G200
Matrox G200
The G200 is a 2D, 3D, and video accelerator chip for personal computers designed by Matrox. It was released in 1998.-History:Matrox had been known for years as a significant player in the high-end 2D graphics accelerator market. Cards they produced were excellent Windows accelerators, and some of...
, was less capable and slower than the Glide support, especially in the beginning when it was unstable, slow, and had many graphics quality issues. The Glide renderer's superiority can be seen in a review of the 3dfx Voodoo 5
Voodoo 5
The Voodoo 5 was the last and most powerful graphics card line that 3dfx Interactive released. All members of the family were based upon the VSA-100 graphics processor. Only the single-chip Voodoo 4 4500 and dual-chip Voodoo 5 5500 made it to market....
, where it outperformed every other card in Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament is a futuristic first-person shooter video game co-developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes. It was published in 1999 by GT Interactive. Retrospectively, the game has also been referred to as UT99 or UT Classic to differentiate it from its numbered sequels...
(same engine as Unreal), due to its native Glide support. Even video card
Video card
A video card, Graphics Card, or Graphics adapter is an expansion card which generates output images to a display. Most video cards offer various functions such as accelerated rendering of 3D scenes and 2D graphics, MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoding, TV output, or the ability to connect multiple monitors...
s which consistently defeated the Voodoo 5 5500 in other games could not win against Glide's greater efficiency. Unreal also had official OpenGL
OpenGL
OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL...
support.
Sound effects
Unreals "Galaxy" audio system is highly optimized for speed and quality, utilizing Intel's MMX extensively. It manages both music and sound effects. For sound effects it uses uncompressed waveforms in 8-bit or 16-bit monaural format. The engine is capable of playing back at all common sample rates but is set by default to 22 kHz playback to reduce CPU load on computers available at the time of release.Galaxy supports rudimentary software-based 3D audio positioning as well as hardware 3D sound support (although this is quite buggy). In software mode, sounds are only stereo-panned. Phase shifting and band-pass filter
Band-pass filter
A band-pass filter is a device that passes frequencies within a certain range and rejects frequencies outside that range.Optical band-pass filters are of common usage....
ing are used to imitate changes in position and distance. The sound system is limited to mixing and playing back a maximum of 64 channels, but the default is 16 channels because of CPU power limitations.
In hardware 3D audio mode, the engine is designed to support sound cards with hardware 3D audio
3D audio effect
3D audio effects are a group of sound effects that attempt to widen the stereo image produced by two loudspeakers or stereo headphones, or to create the illusion of sound sources placed anywhere in 3 dimensional space, including behind, above or below the listener.There are several types of 3D...
mixing and positioning capabilities. At the time of release this included primarily the Aureal
Aureal Semiconductor
Aureal Semiconductor Inc. was an American electronics manufacturer, best known throughout the mid-late 1990s for their PC sound card technologies including A3D and the Vortex The company was the reincarnation of the, at the time, bankrupt Media Vision Technology...
Vortex line of audio cards. In this mode, the sound card takes over sound placement with the game providing only positional information to the hardware. If the game uses more channels than the sound card supports, then the extra channels will be run on the game's software engine; this can cause sound consistency problems.
If the processor Unreal is running on lacks MMX support (i.e. a Pentium Pro
Pentium Pro
The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86 microprocessor developed and manufactured by Intel introduced in November 1, 1995 . It introduced the P6 microarchitecture and was originally intended to replace the original Pentium in a full range of applications...
), then the game will automatically reduce sound quality to low. Quality can be turned back up to full, but the audio engine is less efficient without MMX support. On non-MMX machines, the sound code does make some quality and speed trade-offs by limiting sound effects to having only 64 volume levels. This limitation can be heard by setting up an ambient sound effect with a high radius in an otherwise quiet area; the discrete steps between volume levels are quite audible. Epic also noted nearly a twofold speed boost with MMX code.
The sound system supports both the legacy WinMM sound system, and DirectSound
DirectSound
DirectSound is a software component of the Microsoft DirectX library for the Windows operating system. DirectSound provides a low-latency interface to the sound card driver and can handle the mixing and recording of multiple audio streams....
. DirectSound generally achieves the lowest latency
Latency (engineering)
Latency is a measure of time delay experienced in a system, the precise definition of which depends on the system and the time being measured. Latencies may have different meaning in different contexts.-Packet-switched networks:...
, while WinMM works on Windows 95
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...
without DirectSound or Windows NT 4.0
Windows NT 4.0
Windows NT 4.0 is a preemptive, graphical and business-oriented operating system designed to work with either uniprocessor or symmetric multi-processor computers. It was the next release of Microsoft's Windows NT line of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on 31 July 1996...
machines.
Music
While many game companies went from FM synthesis or General MIDIGeneral MIDI
General MIDI or GM is a standardized specification for music synthesizers that respond to MIDI messages. GM was developed by the MIDI Manufacturers Association and the Japan MIDI Standards Committee and first published in 1991...
in the early 1990s to CD audio and pre-rendered audio, many of the Epic games used the less common system of module music
MOD (file format)
MOD is a computer file format used primarily to represent music, and was the first module file format. MOD files use the “.MOD” file extension, except on the Amiga where the original trackers instead use a “mod.” prefix scheme, e.g. “mod.echoing”...
, composed with a tracker, which used stored PCM sound effects sequenced together to produce music. Epic had been using this technology for other games such as Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall: 2097
One Must Fall: 2097
One Must Fall: 2097 is a combat-oriented computer game for all IBM-compatible computers, programmed by Diversions Entertainment. It has a sequel, One Must Fall: Battlegrounds.-Background:...
, which allowed relatively rich music to be stored in files usually smaller than one megabyte. Naturally, this technology allowed easy implementation of dynamic music for mood changes in Unreal. The Unreal soundtrack was written by MOD music authors Alexander Brandon
Alexander Brandon
Alexander Brandon is a US musician, former member of Straylight Productions, who composed music mostly for games produced by Epic Games, or games based on Epic technology, including Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Deus Ex, Tyrian, Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and the cancelled game Jazz Jackrabbit 3D...
and Michiel van den Bos
Michiel van den Bos
Michiel "M.C.A." van den Bos is a Dutch musician who composes primarily for Epic Games, or for games based on Epic technology. He began composing on the Commodore 64 and Amiga before making the transition to composing professional soundtracks for critically acclaimed video games such as Unreal,...
with a few selected tracks by Dan Gardopée
Dan Gardopée
Daniel Gardopée aka Dan Grandpre is an electronic musician and former member of game music production company Straylight Productions...
and Andrew Sega
Andrew Sega
Andrew Gregory Sega , also known by the moniker Necros, is an American musician best known for tracking modules in the 1990s demoscene as well as for composing music for several well-known video games...
. Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos were also responsible for the soundtracks for Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament is a futuristic first-person shooter video game co-developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes. It was published in 1999 by GT Interactive. Retrospectively, the game has also been referred to as UT99 or UT Classic to differentiate it from its numbered sequels...
and Deus Ex
Deus Ex
Deus Ex is an action role-playing game developed by Ion Storm Inc. and published by Eidos Interactive in 2000, which combines gameplay elements of first-person shooters with those of role-playing video games...
, which also use the Unreal Engine; Michiel van den Bos also produced the soundtrack for Age of Wonders
Age of Wonders
Age of Wonders is a turn-based strategy PC-game often likened to Master of Magic. Originally titled World of Wonders, the game incorporated several role-playing video game elements that were dropped when simultaneous turns were implemented...
.
Unreals music engine also supports CD audio tracks.
Map editing
UnrealEd
UnrealEd is the level editor used to create levels for Unreal. It was also used for other games based on the Unreal engine, such as Deus Ex and Lineage II, although it has changed along with the engine for later games...
map editor uses the Unreal engine to render scenes exactly as they appear in-game, as opposed to external editors like Worldcraft attempting to recreate it with different methods. Whereas Quake maps are compiled from a variety of different components, Unreal maps are inherently editable on the fly. This allows anybody to edit any map that is created, including the maps included with the game.
Mac OS version
The Mac version was released in Parallel with the PC version. It supported RAVE hardware acceleration as well as 3DFX's Voodoo, built-in software rendering and, later on, OpenGL rendering. RAVE acceleration support allowed the game to support hardware 3D acceleration with just about every Mac that included it. It also supported Apple's Game sprockets.The last update for the Mac OS
Mac OS
Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...
port was version 224b, which breaks network compatibility between it and the PC version, as well as lacking support for some user-created content made for 225 and 226f. Westlake Interactive, the company responsible for the port, claimed that previous patches were produced voluntarily in their free time, beyond their contractual obligations. They also stated that they did not receive the code for the 225 patch and that it had become unavailable due to Epic moving on to develop version 226.
Linux
An unofficial content port of the Single-player maps to LinuxLinux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
was created by several users of icculus.org, which allowed the Unreal Singleplayer game content to be run as a modification for Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament is a futuristic first-person shooter video game co-developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes. It was published in 1999 by GT Interactive. Retrospectively, the game has also been referred to as UT99 or UT Classic to differentiate it from its numbered sequels...
. The online retailer Tux Games
Tux Games
Tux Games is one of the first still active online Linux game retailers, founded on January 1, 2000 by Michael Simms, who would later also found Linux Game Publishing...
at one point sold a box set including the Linux version.