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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.
Premise
In the original title you take the part of a criminal aboard a prison transport spacecraft which has crash-landed on the
planet Na Pali. The natives of this planet have been subjugated by a collection or alliance of alien races, primarily the
Skaarj. Your primary goal is to locate and destroy the alien mothership and escape the
planet.
Competition with Quake series
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 3D design software called UnrealEd also came with the package.
About the game engine
Although the storyline and gameplay was nothing that could be considered new and exciting, the all-new Unreal engine provided tons 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
prerendered audio later on, one thing that set many of the Epic games apart from others was their use of module music, which used
stored PCM sound effects sequenced together to produce music. Epic has been using this
technology for other games such as Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall 2097 and has
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.
Sound Effects
Unreal is also possibly the first major first person shooter to use 44.1 kHz audio for sound effects. Many sound
effects took 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 wasn't the first major release with colored lighting (see Quake
II) it was the first to also have a software renderer capable of just about everything the hardware renderers (Most
commonly 3dfx Glide and Direct3D) were
capable of, to include colored lighting, but not bilinear filtering.
One of the limitations of the Quake engine was that large areas caused slowdowns in the game's framerate. The
Unreal engine's specialty was that it was capable of large outdoor areas without great reductions in framerate. Of course,
because Unreal was a newer and more resource-intensive game than Quake and Quake II, this meant that
framerates were lower overall, given the same computer is used to run it.
Unreal's method of creating maps differs in a major way from Quake's. Instead of starting with a void and
building rooms by adding primitive shapes to fill it, Unreal started with a completely solid world in which you extract
areas using the same kinds of primitves. Many map designers believed that this eliminated the tedium of matching up separate
walls, floors and ceilings.
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