Grim reality: intelligent, lifelike warriors return to the bleak tournament-style arenas of the future in Unreal Tournament 2003. (Gaming).(Evaluation)

Little has changed in the lives of the enslaved humans depicted in the 1999 blockbuster PC game Unreal Tournament. In Epic Games/Digital Extremes' newly released Unreal Tournament 2003, players are once again fighting for their lives in the futuristic gladiator-style tournaments--a punishment inflicted on those who do not yield to the commands of their powerful alien ruler. Aside from this familiar story line, though, players will find little resemblance between the two titles. In Unreal Tournament 2003, they are introduced to extremely detailed environments and characters, as well as plethora of compelling visual effects, including advanced AI and physics technology powered by a completely rebuilt Epic game engine.

Matching--or even exceeding--the level of success attained by the original title was a hard-fought battle. Unreal Tournament almost immediately received industry accolades for its fast-paced style, quality graphics, multiplayer action, and super-charged Epic game engine, all of which helped elevate the game to a team sport among rabid fans and professional gaming leagues. "We wanted to raise the bar on every single level we could in UT 2003," says James Schmalz, creative director at Digital Extremes in London, Ontario. "So we focused on technology and game play improvements for both the single-player and multiplayer modes, to make an entirely different experience."

However, for players to experience the maximum effect the sophisticated graphics in Unreal Tournament 2003, Digital Extremes recommends they use at least a Pentium 4 PC with an Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti 4200 graphics card.

Unreal Modeling

The game action in Unreal Tournament 2003 occurs within 30 exotic indoor and outdoor environments, including Lava, Ice, and Jungle World, each with its own unique objects and high-resolution texture sets. The environments--which range from lush tropical regions to harsh war-torn areas--were created with Discreet's 3ds max and NewTek's LightWave, and textured by hand or through photographic sources using Adobe Systems' Photoshop, Procreate's Painter and Painter 3D, and Jasc Software's Paint Shop Pro.

Other textures were rendered in 3ds max and LightWave through a relatively new technique. Instead of using photographic textures and rendering them in a 2D package such as Photoshop, the artists created the textures by modeling the geometry and then rendering the textures directly in the 3D software. "This process was more involved, but we were able to produce crisp textures that are realistic," contends Pancho Eekels, lead designer. "The results were much sharper than photosourced textures, despite using a $15,000 camera."

By using Shaders, a new texturing process developed at Epic Games, the artists were able to combine multiple textures and alpha-blend them together to generate rich, robust imagery. The technique also allowed them to set a panning opacity map and apply a specular map to the material for even greater realism.