# UT2004 demo to be released today



## rbuenger (Feb 11, 2004)

Hi, I just heard that the Mac (PC and Linux too) demo of UT2004 will be released today 

I think you can download it here in a few hours:
http://www.unrealtournament.com/news/view.php?id=1389

Update:
Just found this info on the  games4mac.de page:

Quote:
"The UT 2004 Demo will be available at 6 PM Central on IMG Pro and Macgamefiles.com"

So happy downloading all


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## Zammy-Sam (Feb 11, 2004)

hmmmm, windows version seems out. Where is the mac one?


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## Arden (Feb 11, 2004)

Heh, I wonder what my 400 Mhz iMac would think of UT2K4.


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## gollum84 (Feb 11, 2004)

My 400Mhz iMac freaks out when I play Civilization II. ::ha::    ::sleepy::


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## Arden (Feb 11, 2004)

In OS 9 or OS X?  I have no problemin OS 9...


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## rbuenger (Feb 11, 2004)

You can start downloading. Found a very fast italian server:

http://www.lucianop.it/ut2004/ut2004-mac-demo.dmg.bz2


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## gollum84 (Feb 11, 2004)

It was because I needed to allocate more memory to Civilization II and didn't use Norton Utilities for about a half a year.  My whole iMac was slowing to a crawl.


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## Zammy-Sam (Feb 12, 2004)

rbuenger said:
			
		

> You can start downloading. Found a very fast italian server:
> 
> http://www.lucianop.it/ut2004/ut2004-mac-demo.dmg.bz2


broken


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## Cat (Feb 12, 2004)

Got mine from Macupdate, works fine.


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## Viro (Feb 12, 2004)

Cat said:
			
		

> Got mine from Macupdate, works fine.



Fine? As in fine, it runs and the file isn't damaged. Or fine its runs great with lovely smooth gameplay?

Please be the latter.....


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## Zammy-Sam (Feb 12, 2004)

in 8 mins I will know...


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## Viro (Feb 12, 2004)

Its been 3 hours. Zammy-Sam hasn't replied.... its either
a) The game runs so well he/she is hooked and can't make the time to post.
b) Gameplay was so bad that Zammy-Sam smashed his/her Tibook and ibook, and isn't able to post a reply.

Please be scenario a...


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## Damrod (Feb 12, 2004)

I could not find one damn working link! I hope I get  it tomorrow. Any links to working mirrors appreciated. 

Hope it works on my G4...


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## pwharff (Feb 12, 2004)

Damrod said:
			
		

> I could not find one damn working link! I hope I get  it tomorrow. Any links to working mirrors appreciated.
> 
> Hope it works on my G4...



I am downloading really fast now with BitTorrent, here's how:

Download this small file first and the open it with BitTorrent
http://www.filerush.com/torrents/ut2004-mac-demo-3120.dmg.bz2.torrent

If you already have the file, please join the swarm anyway, the more seeders we have, the better this will work. To join as a seed, just download the .torrent file and open it in your client of choice as normal, but point the location to save the demo, to the location of your already downloaded demo.

Will people please leave their torrent windows open once they've downloaded the demo, if at least for 5 minutes afterwards.

Suggested clients:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/bittorrent/BitTorrent_OSX_3.3a.dmg?download
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/azureus/Azureus_2.0.7.0_OSX.zip?download


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## naodx (Feb 12, 2004)

Runs awesome on my machine all video options set on highest available, running @ 1600 x 1200. I have an MDD dual 1 GHz, 2 gig memory, and an nvidia geforce 4 ti card.

Can't wait for the full version.....one more thing to spend my money on....


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## Zammy-Sam (Feb 12, 2004)

I can't second naodx impression. On my tibook no way to make it run smooth for even a min. EVERYTHING low and res at 640x480 and still laggy.. Am very disappointed. Made a short diashow to see the graphical highlights and I was impressed. But I can watch my iphoto pics much faster and they also have an impressive graphical detail...


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## Viro (Feb 12, 2004)

Well, at least the machines haven't been chucked out the window or something


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## Arden (Feb 12, 2004)

Sam, maybe you need more RAM.  Naodx has 2 GB and you only have 768... if you can cram it, maybe you should look for a 1 GB DIMM.


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## Zammy-Sam (Feb 13, 2004)

Arden said:
			
		

> Sam, maybe you need more RAM.  Naodx has 2 GB and you only have 768... if you can cram it, maybe you should look for a 1 GB DIMM.


My tibook is just accepting 512mb modules so that 1GB would be max for me. (not a huge difference to 768mb) Anyway, am just waiting for the G5 powerbook to come... 
And to be honest: am not really into gamings. For those short moments, the quake3 engine works amazing for me. Wondering why ut2004 needs so much performance or ram...


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## Viro (Feb 13, 2004)

Zammy-Sam said:
			
		

> My tibook is just accepting 512mb modules so that 1GB would be max for me. (not a huge difference to 768mb) Anyway, am just waiting for the G5 powerbook to come...
> And to be honest: am not really into gamings. For those short moments, the quake3 engine works amazing for me. Wondering why ut2004 needs so much performance or ram...



The graphics are much better. You get much better/smoother skeletal animations. The physics are awesome. Not sure how much they changed in UT2004, but in UT2003, they had to tone down the physics as it was taking too much CPU power. Just look at the way your player dies, and you'll see what I mean. Watch the limbs flail realistically, and the body crunch and crumple when you fall off a cliff or land after being blasted by a rocket.

Lovely...


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## ora (Feb 13, 2004)

I'm not gonna bother with the download (UT2k3 ran ridiculously slowly and I know this is gonna be wrose) but I have a question for those that have. In UT2K3 they had totally "wussified" the weapons (quoting IMG review, and i agreed). They were all he same, no really interesting firing tricks, and no skill to pick up with each one (unlike original UT where it was really important).
So what are they like in  UT2k4?


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## Zammy-Sam (Feb 13, 2004)

Viro said:
			
		

> The graphics are much better. You get much better/smoother skeletal animations. The physics are awesome. Not sure how much they changed in UT2004, but in UT2003, they had to tone down the physics as it was taking too much CPU power. Just look at the way your player dies, and you'll see what I mean. Watch the limbs flail realistically, and the body crunch and crumple when you fall off a cliff or land after being blasted by a rocket.
> 
> Lovely...


Yes, it's wonderful. But still surprising why it's still so slow once I actually turned off everything or set to low. In that state quake3 looks much better and still runs much faster..


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## Viro (Feb 13, 2004)

My guess is the polygon count of the models/world and the general details in the world. UT2K3 (and by extension UT2K4) have much more polygons in a scene than in Quake III. This might not be so obvious, as 2x the number of polygons doesn't mean something will look 2x nicer. Even on the lowest setting, in my experience the models in UT2K3 still looked really nice.


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## Cat (Feb 13, 2004)

Ora: e.g. if you load multiple rockets with alt-fire you can release them spiralling. I haven't yet found time to check out all the other options/candy.


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## btoth (Feb 13, 2004)

I've always noticed that games designed on the PC run much worse on Macs.  I don't know why. I think the only expception were the Blizzard games.  I'm downloading both the PC version and Mac version to compare the two out of curiosity.


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## rbuenger (Feb 13, 2004)

Just tested the ne 2k4 version and I'm very disappointed. They've got over 1 year for the new version and this stupid bug "jump and always straf right and never walk left again" they introduced in version 2k3 still exist. Not only that they haven't any bugfix for the 2k3 version no they even have it in the 2k4 version. 

So this simply shows me that first they are not interested in their customers and second 2k4 is a stupid update of 2k3. So if they won't fix this problem and gave me a bugfix for my 2k3 version this was the last UT game I've ever payed for.

And I think that 2k4 is not worth more than $20 for existing 2k3 owners. It's just an update and nothing really new. The original UT is still the best. UT2k3 has some nice features but gameplay never recht UT level. And UT2k4 just continues this. Graphics up and gameplay down. And with these bugs you even can't play it for more than a few minutes.


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## btoth (Feb 14, 2004)

Well, 2k4 ran just fine on my PowerBook 1.25Ghz at 1024x768 with everything on Normal.  Though, laptops just don't make good game machines (in my opinion), my fans were on high after 10 minutes and the keyboard layout stinks.  But, that's what the PC's for. I just dust it off to play the games.


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## Vash137 (Feb 14, 2004)

rbuenger said:
			
		

> Just tested the ne 2k4 version and I'm very disappointed. They've got over 1 year for the new version and this stupid bug "jump and always straf right and never walk left again" they introduced in version 2k3 still exist. Not only that they haven't any bugfix for the 2k3 version no they even have it in the 2k4 version.
> 
> So this simply shows me that first they are not interested in their customers and second 2k4 is a stupid update of 2k3. So if they won't fix this problem and gave me a bugfix for my 2k3 version this was the last UT game I've ever payed for.
> 
> And I think that 2k4 is not worth more than $20 for existing 2k3 owners. It's just an update and nothing really new. The original UT is still the best. UT2k3 has some nice features but gameplay never recht UT level. And UT2k4 just continues this. Graphics up and gameplay down. And with these bugs you even can't play it for more than a few minutes.



IMO, ut2k4 is very much worth the $50, or whatever the price will be.  I own ut2k3, and ut2k4 is a MAJOR update, its practically a new game.  Especially with all the new vehicles and the 2 new game modes.  Though I can't get over 20fps on my 1ghz TiBook w/a gig of RAM, the G5 plays it like butter.  I've had this jumping and being stuck strafing problem before, but only once or twice, and I play ut2k3/4 at least 2 hours everyday .  Maybe they just can't figure out how to fix it, or can't reproduce the bug on their machines, its not that big of a deal at all.


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## Zammy-Sam (Feb 15, 2004)

I tried UT2004 on a highend pc (2GB Ram, P4 3.2Ghz HT-E, NV 5900 256MB and 256Bit memory). It was really nice! Very smooth and the graphic looked so real. I am impressed. But does it make sense to pay almost 2000Euro ($2300) for a pc just to play UT2004? It wouldn't be good for anything else


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## Arden (Feb 15, 2004)

No, it makes very little sense.  If you want to play UT2K4 reasonably well, I'd suggest finding a LAN arcade in town or finding a *really* good friend with a nice Wintel box.


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## Viro (Feb 15, 2004)

Zammy-Sam said:
			
		

> I tried UT2004 on a highend pc (2GB Ram, P4 3.2Ghz HT-E, NV 5900 256MB and 256Bit memory). It was really nice! Very smooth and the graphic looked so real. I am impressed. But does it make sense to pay almost 2000Euro ($2300) for a pc just to play UT2004? It wouldn't be good for anything else



Yeah, that was something that I faced when I was actively playing games on the PC. Not only did I need a fast PC to get games to play well, I needed to constantly upgrade in order to get good performance. Video cards are the biggest culprits, getting out of date very quickly. An expensive top of the line PC will become obselete in about a year. By that, I mean you won't be able to max out the settings and play games at an acceptable framerate.

Easiest solution? I got a console. Console(with 2 games) and TV cost me only £250. And the console will last much longer than any high-end PC.


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## Damrod (Feb 15, 2004)

So true, so true...

That's the reason why I play almost no video or  Pc games anymore.


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## Arden (Feb 16, 2004)

I know, I know, consoles are built for games while computers are built to run everything and none of it well ... but I just don't like using the controller, at least for some types of games.


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## HateEternal (Feb 16, 2004)

Idk what you guys are talking about, but my 2 year old pc, Athlon XP 1800 512mb of PC2100 with a GF2 ti 200 has lasted me just fine. I have had to replace the video card because it wont even run a few new games, Deus ex2 and Prince of Persia, but i can stil run ut2k4 at 800*600 (hosting the server with bots as well) and still get decent frame rate, now i am using my roommates radeon 8500 until I buy a new card and it runs great at 1024x768. Not bad for a PC that cost me 900 bucks to build 2 and a half years ago.

Oh and btw, UT2k4 kicks some major butt, 2k3 really was just a graphic and AI improvement over the original all the weapons were basically the same with the addition of Bombing run(which is pretty damn fun)

I havent played much Assult yet, but I have spent hours upon hours playing the same demo map of Onslaught over and over again, i really cant get enough of it. I am planning on buying this game when it comes out. I think the last time i was this addicted to a game was back in the good old Counter-Strike days, except i havent yet reached the point of breaking my keyboard yet.


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## Viro (Feb 17, 2004)

Well, my old PC was an AthlonXP 1700 with 1GB DDR 333 RAM and GF4 ti4200. Pretty high end stuff. Yet in UT2003, I couldn't play at Max settings and above average AI as things would just get laggy. And yeah, I was playing at 800x600. Forget about higher resolutions.

I guess it really depends on what you expect out of your PC. What is unacceptable to me, might very well be acceptable to you. After all, I'm rather spoilt  But seriously, a GF2 isn't going to show you the true potential of UT2003, much less UT2004.


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## jonmichael23 (Feb 17, 2004)

but I had to for this. I got the demo two days ago and i think its pretty cool. UT 2003 in my opinion, wasnt that great of a game, although it was pretty cool and nice graphics of course. Then i bought unreal championship for xbox and stopped playing ut2003 because the graphics are much smoother, no lag, etc. UT2004 seems a lot better, and I experience no or little lag on the deathmatch and capture the flag maps (1 ghz G4, nvidia geforce 4 mx w/64 mb vram, 512 mb ram) and thats with everything up all the way, 1024x768. The onslaught level with all the vehicles was a much different story. Lagged like crazy first time i played it. Then i turrned off trilinear filtering, put some stuff down from normal to low , just 1 level down on the ones i did. And last I played it in 800x600. But after this it still lagged a little. Then I put it off of full screen mode, and it had no to little lag like the other maps. Im a little disappointed that I had to do this to achieve what i wanted, but I guess its better then nothing and that this is just the demo. Hopefully the final will be a lot better. Are there vehicles in unreal 2 the awakaning, for pc and xbox? Im thinking if ut2004 isnt great i might have to pick that up for xbox   .


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## HateEternal (Feb 18, 2004)

Unreal 2 is the story version of unreal tournament, from what i remember it doesnt have vehicles and it really closely resembles Halo.


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## Damrod (Feb 22, 2004)

So I test played the UT 2k4 Demo on my Mac (G4 1.25GHz single CPU, 768MB Ram, Radeon 9000, OS 10.3), and it works real nice. I can play it with the standard settings on 1024x768 without any problems. 

Nice game, the Onslaught mode is really fun.


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## Cat (Feb 22, 2004)

There's a small update to UT2k4 Demo.


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## chevy (Feb 22, 2004)

UT2004 has been optimized on Mac for dual proc machines.
Difficult to play on a single 1 GHz.


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## Zammy-Sam (Feb 22, 2004)

Damrod said:
			
		

> So I test played the UT 2k4 Demo on my Mac (G4 1.25GHz single CPU, 768MB Ram, Radeon 9000, OS 10.3), and it works real nice. I can play it with the standard settings on 1024x768 without any problems.
> 
> Nice game, the Onslaught mode is really fun.


This surprises me. I have a tibook with the same (almost) specs like your mac and it's really not smooth. As I mentioned before: you never know how well a game runs unless you have seen it on a perfect machine. And eventhough I can see what happenes in the game, it's far away from being called "play without any problems". Is there any way to do a benchmark with ut2004? That would surprise a lot of ppl saying it runs smooth.


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## Damrod (Feb 23, 2004)

Zammy-Sam said:
			
		

> This surprises me. I have a tibook with the same (almost) specs like your mac and it's really not smooth. As I mentioned before: you never know how well a game runs unless you have seen it on a perfect machine. And eventhough I can see what happenes in the game, it's far away from being called "play without any problems". Is there any way to do a benchmark with ut2004? That would surprise a lot of ppl saying it runs smooth.



Well, I also played it on the Pentium 4  3.somewhat GHz of my parents. It has a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, and 512 MB Ram. It runs just  a little slower on my machine. So  I guess it runs nicely on my machine. 

But I would like to know how to activate the FPS counter, to have a number to compare between those two machines.


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## Viro (Feb 24, 2004)

Get the scripts to benchmark UT2004 from http://www.hardmac.com/niouzcontenu.php?date=2004-02-14#1579

Just a quick note from the site http://www.barefeats.com. It shows that a G5 gets only 63 fps, when compared to an Athlon 64 that gets 153(!!!) fps. If a G5 barely handles 60 fps, you can forget about lowly machines like my G4 867 Powerbook ever handling UT2004.


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## hulkaros (Feb 24, 2004)

Can you spell sloppy a$$ programming for the Mac platform? This is unacceptable and the company that makes the game for the Mac should be ashamed... This huge speed gap is absolutely programming BS!  Here is hoping that a patch or something will solve this "problem"...


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## Viro (Feb 24, 2004)

Don't think it has to do with sloppy assed programming. Its just that the PowerPC line of processors really suck with floating point math, especially when Altivec isn't used. Benchmarks I've done indicate that the FPU of the G4 is about the same as the PIII.


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## hulkaros (Feb 24, 2004)

And why not use Altivec?  Nah! IT IS sloppy a$$ programming because in the Wintel/Amd world they have that demonic DirectX all while we are stuck with OpenGL poor a$$ ports... With UT2003 the first version was not a speed demon either and later on with a patch they got somewhat better! Still, the difference with the Wintel/Amds wasn't THAT huge! This time around they screwed things badly... Sloppy or not, a patch MUST be released in order to, at least, improve the situation


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## Viro (Feb 24, 2004)

Because Altivec requires that the data be 'packed' into chunks of 16 bytes each. Theoretically, Altivec can work with 8 double precision floating point numbers simultaneously. However, in real life, very few things can be parallelised that much. Things like signal processing (i.e. Photoshop, DivX, MP3, etc) benefit a lot from that, but other apps don't see any benefit.

3D transformation is something that would benefit from Altivec, but because most graphic cards have a transform and lighting engine built-in, Altivec isn't really going to be useful. Believe it or not, there are limits to what a patch can improve...


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## Zammy-Sam (Feb 24, 2004)

wouldn't it be smarter then to let the cpu do the transform and lighting calculations and give the gpu more air to breathe? I don't think this is an opengl thing, but more a game programming. I know directx somehow includes this all and it should be harder to move such instructions to the cpu. But opengl...
However, it seems to me that it's not the cpu that is the really weak part, but the gpu. Why? Reducing resolution and texture details gives a boost. These are typical gpu tasks. The cpu mostly handles the wireframe which is independent of resolution and texture details.
So, this makes me hope they will be able to patch it. It would be a pitty for such a nice game (which is still not worth to buy a good peecee just for this case)


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## Viro (Feb 24, 2004)

No, the GPU is far more able to perform the transform & lighting. That's its sole purpose of existence (well, not quite. But almost). This is even more so, with GPUs like the GF4 (non MX) and Radeon 9000+. These GPUs have the ability to execute small programs (called shaders) that do all sorts of cool effects that would just kill the CPU.

You got the part about being GPU bound correct. But on the mac, many games are bound by the CPU too. Among the chief reasons is because the sound processing is done by the CPU, instead of the sound card. Top of the line PCs have the SBLive Audigy(2) that handles the processing of sounds. Macs have to rely on the CPU to do that. They should be able to patch it to make the sound system more efficient, but it remains to be seen how much of an improvement in speed can be obtained.

But hey, that's progress. Games get better graphics, sounds, physics, etc. These cost processing power, and which is why many gamers get into the vicious upgrade cycle.


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## hulkaros (Feb 24, 2004)

I won't argue anymore because, simply, this will not lead us somewhere... I strongly believe that the UT2004 is a byproduct of sloppy programming and you believe that is simply a matter of hardware... Anyways, the UT2004 and any other similar game for that matter, aren't on my gaming radar! Nah!

Doom 3 however...


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## jonmichael23 (Feb 24, 2004)

i know this is about the ut2004 demo, but on hulkaros note i have to say we will see whether this is sloppy ass programming or not, seeing as Doom 3 god John McCarmack has glorified OS X and I even saw in a article from a while ago where he had said he had ported over all of his work to his mac to make sure the mac version is just as good as the pc one. Hopefully my little old 1 ghz iMac with nvidia geforce 4 mx, 64 mb vram and 512 mb ram will be able to play it at some level! If not, theres always the xbox version hopefully..........


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## Viro (Feb 25, 2004)

Well, call me jaded, but I've been rather disappointed with the way the G4 & G5 work, and with Apple's marketing department. The G4 is a nice chip, but it is no where near the performance of standard x86 chips in most applications. Neither is the G5. Sure, a few photoshop filters and some scientific apps, but that's about it. As a research student who runs a lot of simulations, I was rather disappointed. But I still love by Powerbook 

I'm hopeful that Doom 3 will run well on Macs too. John Carmack has said that the minimum spec is a 1Ghz machine and GF1/Radeon 75xx and 256 MB of RAM. Here's a link http://www.doom3portal.com/info/systemreq.php


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## hulkaros (Feb 25, 2004)

Viro, your statement of G5 being underpowered is surely jaded... If you must be disappointed with someone then make sure that someone is you! 

Last time I checked the 3rd FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTER on earth is a G5 based one... That beast ain't playing games and certainly isn't used for Photoshop  Is for scientific stuff which need every single bit of horsepower... That monstrous horsepower happens to be the G5 and not some P4/Athlon BS out there! 

If some/many gaming companies choose to code a lot better for the Wintel cartel out there that doesn't make G4/G5 slow procs  Damn, even ATI doesn't make any more specific drivers for OS X! They simply wrap the Windows ones and deliver 'em to us, supposedly with not THAT big performance penalty 

As for you being a research student with lots of simulations, you may need to research in other ways with your amazing piece of technology aka PowerBook  

As for the link of Doom 3 needing 1GHz CPU compared to the other Wintel/Amd games that got ported to Macs, yes, even the crap ported ones, I bet that for Macs will be a lower figure... But then again I could be wrong


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## Viro (Feb 25, 2004)

Hehe, you probably missed what I said about the G5 being good at *some* scientific apps and Photoshop filters. Who knows what Virginia Tech is running? Check this page http://developer.apple.com/hardware/ve/simd.html for why Altivec performance isn't that easy to accomplish. Look especially at the section on non-uniform vectors. Then remember that most data in applications can't be shoved into a vector, and operated on simultaneously. Let's just look at a very very simple mathematical equation.

C = A + B
D = B + C

Altivec is no help here, as you can't get C & D to be done in parallel since D depends on C. Plus, most of the data structures in programs are of the non-uniform type, its going to take a major rewrite just to make them Altivec compatible. This applies to my programs, and to games as well.

The G4 & G5 are only competitive with x86 only when Altivec is used. The Athlons have a triple pipelined FPU, while the G4's is single pipelined, and the G5's is double pipelined. That 1Ghz *minimum* that applies to x86 should apply to Macs as well (sadly). That means my Powerbook is going to struggle with Doom 3


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## RancherAZ (Feb 25, 2004)

Umm Demo's been out for almost 2 weeks now... watch where u download it from there are a bunch of bad links..... i got mine on Macupdate downloaded in and hour and works fine..... Oh and the Game .. AWSOME!!!!!!!!


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## Zammy-Sam (Feb 25, 2004)

what demo? Doom 3?


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## Viro (Feb 25, 2004)

Just went to Mac update. There isn't any Doom 3 there.... Where did you download it from?


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## hulkaros (Feb 25, 2004)

Guys! I'm sure he was talking about UT2004 Demo!


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## Zammy-Sam (Feb 25, 2004)

Hmmmm, why would someone post the "big news" when the title already says?


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## gollum84 (Feb 25, 2004)

Does the demo run slow for anyone else or is it just my network connection?  What are the system specs for UT2K4? ::evil::


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## Viro (Feb 26, 2004)

I think they recommend a G4 and 256 MB RAM and a GeForce class graphics card. Some maps kinda run okay on my Powerbook after I turn off all eye-candy, but maps like the assault map just don't run at all.


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## hulkaros (Mar 11, 2004)

Here are some good news regarding UT2004...
http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ID=9260

Take that Viro


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## Zammy-Sam (Mar 11, 2004)

Let's see when it is released...


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