from Hacker News

Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unreal Tournament Forever

by chocmake on 11/20/24, 3:15 AM with 116 comments

  • by modeless on 11/20/24, 5:32 AM

    I wish they would GPL it like Quake. Even if it was missing some proprietary dependencies I bet the community could replace them.

    I recently helped port ioquake3 to the web, complete with UDP multiplayer, and set up an online demo using the internet archive's copy of the Quake III demo: https://thelongestyard.link It would be cool to be able to do the same with Unreal Tournament.

  • by magicalhippo on 11/20/24, 4:48 AM

    Unreal Tournament multiplayer with mutators[1] was awesome fun, like the one that made the player avatar grow bigger when the player scored a kill, and vice versa.

    It's a shame later multiplayer games didn't pick up on the mutator concept. Being able to easily tweak the gameplay mixed it up and added extra challenge or fun.

    [1]: https://unreal.fandom.com/wiki/Mutator

  • by notamy on 11/20/24, 4:16 AM

    Fingers crossed UT2004 will end up in the Archive eventually. I still boot it up to play occasionally because nothing else has scratched the arena shooter itch that well.

  • by simonw on 11/20/24, 4:34 AM

    I spent so much of the early year 2000 playing Unreal Tournament instagib mode on Facing Worlds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facing_Worlds

  • by jonny_eh on 11/20/24, 4:45 AM

    No link to the actual downloads?

    Update, found it: https://www.oldunreal.com/downloads/unreal/full-game-install...

  • by calmbonsai on 11/20/24, 4:21 AM

    UT2004 in Onslaught mode on well-administrated private servers is still the best team-based arena FPS I've ever played.

    Here's hoping it can make a revival someday akin to City of Heroes https://www.polygon.com/gaming/471719/city-of-heroes-homecom... .

  • by Physkal on 11/20/24, 3:59 AM

    Man this game changed my life. I always preferred it to quake 3 mainly because of the brighter color palette and the assault mode. Also facing worlds was the most amazing maps I had ever seen.

  • by olliej on 11/20/24, 9:12 AM

    That's nice of them (esp given their track record of shittiness). It's always seemed absurd to me how companies refuse to just make old games that they no longer sell available for free, or just leave them available for cheap purchase. I just don't understand "we refuse to make this available, even for money" just because something is old.

    I can kind of understand the behavior in the case of non-game software, e.g if a company makes a tool to do X, and someone wants to do X, you want them to buy the new profitable version not the old one for cheap/free. But I just don't think that applies to games - even a "remake" that is literally just a graphics update (no gameplay, UI, or anything changes, just increased asset resolution) people prefer the updated graphics so will generally buy that when it becomes available, but in the absence of such an update the old game is not competing for new ones.

  • by anotherhue on 11/20/24, 5:18 AM

    A recent engine recreation : https://github.com/dpjudas/SurrealEngine

    Quick start instructions also pull UT from the archive https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/337069

  • by RajT88 on 11/20/24, 5:40 PM

    I remember my freshman year of college playing Unreal.

    I had worked all summer to be able to buy myself a computer for college (and made sure it had a decent video card).

    I recall, some weeks into my Freshman year, one Saturday night getting a call from a friend of mine who lived down the hall, "Hey I'm at this party, and my friend (Jenny or some other common lady name) wants to talk to you". So he puts this girl on the phone.

    Her: "What are you doing?"

    Me: "Playing Unreal."

    Her: "So, you're going to be doing that all night?"

    Me: "Yes."

    Her: "OK... I guess I'll talk to you later"

    All these years later, I still think I made the right decision.

  • by tosmatos on 11/20/24, 8:23 AM

    I will never forgive Epic for not trying to finish their alpha of the latest Unreal Tournament. I had so much fun on that alpha. Unfortunately the dev team got put to fortnite when that started printing money. Logical, but still sad.

  • by deknos on 11/20/24, 7:51 AM

    Is there a working 64 bit linux version for Unreal/ut 2004? :(

    We should make a petition that they opensource the code at least for these two ones. i still have the CDRoms.

    i even would buy it again, if that would make this more likely.

    That being said, xonotic is a bit like it (and opensource) and there are maps like Facing Worlds available, but sadly no good npc / npc-way-mapping for it.

  • by nanna on 11/20/24, 9:54 AM

    I made a UT level (DM-Charge) and it got onto the PC Gamer CD as part of a competition. An UT designer reviewed it but was pretty critical which as a teenager made me feel like I didn't have what it took to go further. Shame. These days I look back and think I did pretty damn well to teach myself without any help at all what it took to build a level, one that was good enough to get onto PC Gamer's CD and that I would occasionally see people playing online, even if it wasn't perfect, and wish i had had the confidence to take the criticism on the chin. Something to bear in mind - a lot of talented kids and people out there just need a bit of encouragement and may take criticism harder than you intend it to be.

  • by paulryanrogers on 11/20/24, 4:01 AM

    I wish they'd go further and offer maintained versions on their store, ideally free or very low cost as GOG.com and Steam have done.

    That said, it's appreciated.

  • by gadtfly on 11/20/24, 4:13 AM

  • by danpalmer on 11/20/24, 10:28 AM

    Epic also retracted my purchase of UT2004 on the Epic games store so I can no longer download it.

  • by pests on 11/20/24, 6:44 AM

    I just want to make a top level comment noting how many people (myself included) have mentioned the Facing Worlds map. I think everyone here agrees it's a fond memory.

  • by pavelstoev on 11/20/24, 4:19 AM

    Love both games spending countless hours, Unreal single player story was great (for its time). Are there any servers still online for UT?

  • by uslic001 on 11/26/24, 4:03 PM

    Used to love Unreal and UT. Too bad all the bots ruined the game. Low gravity sniper servers were my favorite mod. Used to be on the NTHZ team.

  • by 8f2ab37a-ed6c on 11/20/24, 6:07 AM

    Would love it if Epic made the source to UE actually public so that LLMs could be trained on it and provide better help when learning the engine. The source code is semi-public already, you can see it if you register an account, seems like a small step to have it be much more accessible as a learning resource through LLMs.

  • by saithir on 11/20/24, 7:06 AM

    Or, "How To Get Some Public Appreciation With Minimal Effort: An Attempt".

    If they actually cared they'd host (and more importantly, supported since they probably don't run on modern systems without some fiddling) those games themselves.

    Not like they don't have a store with games or anything.

  • by astlouis44 on 11/20/24, 4:54 AM

    Slightly related thread, Unreal Engine 5 runs in WebGPU now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42190897

  • by yakshaving_jgt on 11/20/24, 6:54 AM

    Does it work on MacOS? Or do we still need to do some Wine thing?

  • by DerSaidin on 11/20/24, 5:57 AM

    Imagine if they added something like this to UE5 licensing:

    If your game has not been updated in N years... 1) Internet Archive can distribute it for free 2) Let people distribute modified versions that does not need license key or whatever copy protection.

    Harder but extra cool: To get a UE royalty discount, put source code in escrow set to release it if game not updated in N years.

  • by PittleyDunkin on 11/20/24, 4:56 AM

    Why not just release to the public domain?

  • by Andrew_nenakhov on 11/20/24, 7:54 AM

    Forever?

  • by blackeyeblitzar on 11/20/24, 4:58 AM

    The Golden era of PC gaming ..,