sirarthurhipoint

I found it on eBay. This will be a conversation piece on my desk at work. As far as I know, all of the CDs and manuals have been scanned and archived. If not, please let me know what's missing and I'll see to it that the missing things get scanned or ripped. I've never played this game, and I never want to. Thanks for covering it, Ross.

https://www.eurogamer.net/payday-3-requires-an-always-on-online-connection To quote the article quoting the livestream: When asked if Payday 3 will have "an offline mode, like playing solo", Almir replied: "No. You will be able to play it by yourself, but I do believe you will have to have a connection in order to play because it's made in the Unreal Engine, it's using cross-progression, [and] cross-play. I do believe we need you to be online." I've been waiting almost a decade for this game, I can't tell you how disappointed I am. Yes, I know that there is the possibility of an End Of Life Plan, but I mean... let's be honest to ourselves about the chances of that happening.

When this video first came out, its thumbnail had Ross doing a sly winking face. Now it's him with a cold dead stare. Can Ross himself, or perhaps someone else, find this long lost thumbnail?

I don't know how or why I got so obsessed with this game. I found it one day when it was already like 10 years old (coincidentally when it became a small trend on YouTube for a little while there), gave it a try, disliked the control scheme and jankiness... But then suddenly about midway through, something just clicked inside my brain and I couldn't put it down. I mean, the art and music style is great, but I can't say that those are the specific things that clicked with me to get me hooked. Something just sort of... happened. Here I am with a minor obsession and to this day I can't explain why. This seems like one of those games where people go "oh yeah... that game, I think I have that somewhere". And then they keep coming back to it every now and again. Kinda like that meme about Deus Ex, where someone will reinstall it if mentioned. Anyone else have experience with this game? Side note too: my current obsession is figuring out modding this game. There were never any official modding tools released for it (Imagine making an Unreal Engine game and not having it be moddable... Cmon McGee, what the hell???) but I'm discovering more and more about how this game stores its cooked assets. With various Unreal unpacking tools and a hex editor, some things can be done, like audio swaps. I'd like some help, if anyone is interested and either understands Unreal Engine 3 or just has a knack for noticing patterns in things like hex editors.

Update on all of this. I didn't catch this before but just recently came across it. Source here: https://www.gog.com/forum/unreal_series/epic_to_turn_off_online_servers_and_services_for_games_including_ut_games/post26 From user EnforcerSentintel on the GOG Forums: So it looks like this might not actually be permanent. At least, the delisting part.

https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-is-delisting-almost-every-unreal-game-but-making-unreal-tournament-3-free/ The positive: Unreal Tournament 3 is getting rebranded as Unreal Tournament 3X, and will be free to play. The negative: Every Unreal and UT game has been delisted from Steam, GOG... everywhere. If you haven't bought it, you never can again. The rationale: Epic will be shutting down the online servers for the old games. Wait a minute... these games are not only capable of offline play, but can be played online via LAN or IP Direct Connect. Why did they do this? Epic Games just gave Unreal the Games As A Service treatment, even though these games were NOT Games As A Service.

I've been a lurker/watcher of the Game Dungeon channel over the years, and I've noticed Ross slip some Carmageddon 2 clips in here and there. So I figured I'd post this here since it kind of has to do with that. It's not Carmageddon 2 specifically, but for fans of the series overall this would still be great news. Carmageddon 1 is being actively reverse engineered into open source code. Links For Learning More: GitHub project: https://github.com/dethrace-labs/dethrace Twitter account for the project: https://mobile.twitter.com/dethrace_labs This Week In Retro covering it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jTanVXr2yEo Disclaimer: This is NOT my project, I am not one of the devs, I just knew about this for a while and I'm spreading the word a bit. Why/How This Happened: A more complete story can be found on the GitHub repo, but here's a quick summary. Basically, on the Splat Pak expansion disk, one of the devs left the debugging symbols for the game on the disk. To someone who knows what they're doing, these symbols are a great help in reverse engineering the game engine code. It's not like getting a flat out full dump of the actual source, it's more of getting a map of all of the functions in the program, their expected inputs, and their expected outputs. You as the developer still have to write new code to actually make things happen, but you know where to start and know where to stop. I believe a very similar thing happened with the original Diablo, where the devs left the debug symbols on the PS1 copy, which was used to make devilutionX. Why This is Legal: Well firstly, it's not our fault that a developer left those debug symbols on the disk. All we (as in the community/public) did was find them there and utilize them. Secondly, this is clean room reverse engineering. The original source code was NOT leaked or stolen. The guys doing the reverse engineering still have to write their own completely unique and original code to make this all work. All they know are expected input and output data types for each function. Thirdly, there is no game data in the source code. Even with the Dethrace reverse-engineer you still have to buy Carmageddon 1 to play the actual game. Think of this like Doom source ports. Just because you have GZDoom doesn't mean you have Doom, you still have to purchase the latter to play it in source ports. Basically, nothing going on here is illegal, so there's no threat of this being shut down unless the current IP holders REALLY want to be dicks about it. What This Can/May Eventually Entail: --Buildable source code on modern systems: not needing ancient compilers, etc. --Cross platform: PC, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, Console Homebrew (C1 on Wii anyone?) --Related to above: will run natively on modern systems, no DOSBOX needed --Bug fixes, like that fast timer glitch --WAY easier to mod --Working multiplayer: no more IPX wrappers --Preserving an important piece of gaming history (speaking specifically to GaaS Ross) Current State: Again, check the GitHub and Twitter for the most up to date news regarding the progress... But as of writing this post I know that car driving and physics work, opponents seem to mostly work, and the menus work. It's not totally done yet, but it is actively being worked on my multiple people (I am NOT one of them). Getting Involved: I don't want to speak on behalf of the devs, but I'm sure they would appreciate any help they can get from anyone out there experienced in reverse engineering and/or programming. Check the GitHub for the current state of the code, or join the Carmageddon Discord server and stop in the #dethrace channel to speak to the devs. They're pretty active and responsive for the most part. https://discord.gg/W5bcGzCn