Unreal Championship uses which Unreal engine?

I said "Is capable".

Very few maps use the engine much, for that very reason. When was the last time you bounced multiple crates off each other with your rocket launcher?

 

I dont recall seeing any crates in UT2k3...

 

My point exactly. The default maps don't include anything that could seriously strain the Karma engine (remember all those promises about things like realistic water?), because even mid-to-high-end systems would get mangled by them.

 

Are they to be found in mod's and user created levels etc?

 

Depends on how intelligent the map's maker is. Hop into UnrealEd yourself and check it out!

 

I would do but I don't feel like playing any games since I downgraded from a Radeon 9700 Pro to a GF4MX Int GPU (don't ask..). Maybe when I get my upgrade later on I will do exactly that Tag.

Thanks for the headsup all the same.

 

I remember a Dev saying some time ago, that one of the reasons the Unreal engine is so CPU limited is due to its roots as a software rasterizer, that is, that there's still a ton of legacy code in there, unlike Carmack who cleans the slate each generation.

Anyhow, IMO, Carmack is 10x the coder that Sweeney is, and if he handles the port, I think D3 on Xbox will be great.

 

zurich the bit about legacy code is not true

Just because the Unreal Engine keeps its name doesn't mean that it is built on top of the same UT engine. Even the Quake --> Quake 2 engine didn't share much code.

All the important 'bits' got ripped out and redone totally.

 

I can't remember the site, I will try to look it up later, but I read that they were coming out with an Unreal Tournament 2004, any truth to that? And if it is, what improvements will it have over 2003, or will it just be a patch?

 

Either that, or the engine is crappy for not making great use of the resources available. You can either rave about the engine or not, it still doesn't change the fact that obviously the Xbox CPU can't run it properly. So much for perception...

 

I think that an engine that does not run properly on today's hardware, even on high end CPU's, is not making use of the resources. if the resources just aren't there, then what is the point of releasing it? might as well release it when the hardware can cope with it. it's as if i release an engine TODAY that can push a billion polygons with 512MB of textures and 64x AA... what is the point if it's not gonna run on anything...

 

This is not about pushing polygons. As you may or may not have noticed, Karma is a physics engine (like havok or the open-source ODE). When a lot of complex constrained rigid bodies (i.e. ragdolls) collide you just need some serious cpu power, there's no way of coding around that. (you could use an iterative LCP solver, but then you're slower when there isn't much happening, and the commercial engines probably already do it anyway)

 

Well, we don't really know how well UC was really ported; maybe it doesn't use SSE to the fullest extent it could?

But still, you're clinging to straws here. Just because one game uses a physics engine that the devs knew could make a train wreck out of a 3GHz P4, doesn't automatically mean Xbox's CPU is inadequate. Very few games are going to use a physics engine as "overkill"-ish as Karma.

And as someone else pointed out, Splinter Cell uses a modified Unreal Engine.

"Is not making use of the resources" - heh, I'm sure the Karma engine is using as much of the CPU as it can... but the kind of physics calcs we're talking about are very calculation-intensive.

And why do you think there are so few Karma-enabled objects in UT2003's release maps? They knew the performance would be baaaad.

 

Actually, UT2K3 was the port. Epic said they built UC first and then extended UT2K3 from that.
And UC runs quite well after the XBL update which allows you to turn off AA.

 

What update? I just fired up UC for the first time in months and saw nil of an update.. all the people I talked to online knew of no such thing. I've HEARD that the DLC for UC will include said option, but as far as I can see its not out yet.