Retro Unreal Engine Tech Demo vid

I spent a few hours last night digging up an old Unreal Engine technology demo that I remembered watching back in 2000. I've been looking for this on and off for years and decided to get really crafty with my search and get it over with. I scoured ancient news posts on Daily Radar, 3DNews.net, Voodoo Extreme, and Blues News in the wayback machine.

Epic took the UT99 engine and added various very nifty features. We have motion captured skeletal-built models, real landscape for the first time in UE, and spiffy high-detail modeling. UT99 was huge at the time and there was lots of excitement over where Epic would take the games next.

So I found the vid. It was encoded in high-bitrate MPEG1. I demuxed it and did some avisynth magic to bring the luma levels into shape (as well as possible) and resize it so Youtube will run it in HQ. Ironically x264 on a very high quality rate factor based setting created a smaller file even though it is 4x the pixel area. Audio track is untouched.

Anyone else remember this???


funny super-tall thumbnail on right is the Daily Radar news post about it.

Here's a download link to the improved encode that I made. Youtube is somewhat lower quality.
http://rapidshare.com/files/295671310/unrealtechdemo.mp4

 

Yup. Most people didn't seem to know what to do with CD2. Not surprising since only the Savage 3/4/2000 could use the S3TC textures until years later when the OpenGL and D3D renderers got reworked.

 

Cool. I couldn't remember whether or not they did. You would need a Voodoo4 or better though for S3TC support.