Unreal
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| Unreal {{#if:{{{image|}}}|<tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">{{{image|}}} | |
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| Developer(s) | Epic Games {{#if:{{{publisher|}}}|<tr><th style="background-color: #ccccff;">Publisher(s)<td>{{{publisher|}}} |
| Release date(s) | May 22, 1998 |
| Genre(s) | First-person shooter |
| Mode(s) | Single player, multiplayer {{#if:{{{ratings|}}}|<tr><th style="background-color: #ccccff;">Rating(s)<td>{{{ratings|}}} |
| Platform(s) | Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS {{#if:{{{media|}}}|<tr><th style="background-color: #ccccff;">Media<td>{{{media|}}} |
Unreal is a first-person shooter computer game developed by Epic Games and published by GT Interactive on May 22, 1998. It was powered by the Unreal engine which had been in development for over three years before the game was released. Since the release of Unreal, the franchise has had one direct sequel and two different series based on the Unreal universe.
Unreal Mission Pack I: Return To Na Pali was released on May 31, 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 repackaged as Unreal Gold. On August 30, 2001, Unreal was repackaged again as Totally Unreal featuring the contents of Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament.
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Premise
You take the part of a criminal aboard the prison spacecraft Vortex Rikers which has crash-landed on the lip of a canyon on the planet Na Pali, killing most of those on board. The natives of this planet (the four-armed, pacifistic Nali) have been subjugated by a collection or alliance of alien races, primarily the Skaarj, who kill off all survivors except you. Your primary goal is to locate and destroy the alien mother ship and escape the planet.
Unreal features a broad range of settings and artwork. In the course of the game the player explores the Nali iron age culture, a crashed research vessel (the ISV-Kran), the dizzyingly tall Sunspire, a floating city, Nali castles and villages, Skaarj bases, and ultimately the Skaarj mother ship. Several Nali documents refer to a messiah who will deliver the Nali from the Skaarj, with the obvious implication that the player is that messiah.
Creatures
Friendly
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Hostile
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Neutral
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Weapons
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Vehicles
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Competition with Quake series
Image:Unreal screenshot.jpg The Unreal game engine was seen as a major rival to id Software's Quake engine, and the Unreal game itself was considered to be technically superior to the Quake and Quake II titles which were out on the market at the same time. 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 mods (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 called UnrealEd also came with the package.
About the game engine
The all-new Unreal engine provided a plethora of possibilities to third-party content producers.
Music
While many game companies went from FM synthesis in the early 1990s and/or General MIDI straight to CD audio and otherwise pre-rendered audio later on, one thing that set many of the Epic games apart from others was their use 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-sounding 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. Alex Brandon was also responsible for the soundtracks for Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex, which also use the Unreal Engine; van den Bos also produced the soundtrack for Age of Wonders.
Sound effects
Unreal is also possibly the first major first person shooter to use 44.1 kHz audio for sound effects. Many sound effects take full advantage of the high frequency range capable with such a sample rate, as is evident when ammo is picked up or when the flak cannon is reloading, for example.
Graphics
Although Unreal is not the first major release with colored lighting (see Quake II) it is the first to have a software renderer capable of just about everything the hardware renderers (Most commonly 3dfx Glide, Direct3D and OpenGL) are capable of, to include colored lighting, but not bilinear filtering.
One of the limitations of the Quake engine is that large areas caused slowdowns in the game's framerate. The Unreal engine's specialty is that it is capable of large outdoor areas without great reductions in frame rate. Of course, because Unreal is a newer and more resource-intensive game than Quake and Quake II, this means that framerates were lower overall, when run on the same computer.
Map editing
Unreal's method of creating maps differs in major ways from Quake's. The bundled UnrealEd map editor uses the Unreal engine to accurately render the exact scene, 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 originals from the developers. Though UnrealEd loads quite a bit slower than most map editors, it runs maps smoothly and swiftly: hitting rebuild automatically finalizes the level within minutes, as opposed to the hours or (at the time) even days with a full Quake map compile.
In addition, Unreal starts with a completely solid world in which you extract areas with primitives instead of starting with a void and building rooms by adding primitive shapes to fill it. Many map designers believe that this eliminates the tedium of matching up separate walls, floors and ceilings.
External links
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