The title could defiantly sum up the past week and a bit with work, play and everything else.

So to start things off, this Thursday is the UK’s launch for Unreal Tournament 3. Which should provide to be a really fun day since I’m hopelessly addicted to the entire Unreal franchise. Back in the days of Unreal Tournament 2004 I created UTAN which helped stop cheaters from ruining games and matches, after years of tweaking it was very successful. That aside back to the launch. So I’ll be going around Omega Sektor like a child on about 10 cans of red bull mixed with a random controlled substance professional.

So if im not banned from Omega Sektor after that, I’ll be returning there later in the month for a preview of Kwari. I’ve been keeping an eye on this since it has a very similar idea to Prizefight, and I have been invited along with other people from around the country to give it a play. It will be interesting to see how they handle the answers to the big 5 questions as so far they have been very skilfully dodged…

1. Lag, since the client/server code is generated by you, just how good is it?
2. Packet Loss, what happens with PL? Do I lose my ammo?
3. Bullet Recognition, again, just how good is it when working under different circumstances?
4. Anti-Cheat, I think it also speaks for itself…

Ok ok, its the big 4, I couldn’t think of a 5th.

Sandwiched between these 2 events I will also be at i32, which for those uninformed people is the biggest LAN in the UK and is held at Newbury Racecourse. Where I’ll be once again acting as Assistant Tournament Manager. It seems this time the schedule for the event has gotten even more crammed compared to last event. So this time I’m not even bothering to take my full rig as last event I didn’t even use it! Laptops ahoy!

Well, I seemed to miss this in the news while I was away at the weekend at Alton Towers. Needless to say, the second I saw this available for download I jumped on it. Contained within the zip file are 20 mp3 files, (so no longer the ogg format that Unreal Tournament 2004 used), but not all are music files, some are announcer sound previews. It appears that they have taken the announcer voice and added a slight reverb effect which adds to the surround sound effect.

Track Listing:

1. UT2007 MenuTheme (3:40)
2. ONS01Mix (4:20)
3. Announcer Male KillingSpree (0:02)
4. Mech8Mix (3:32)
5. Announcer Female PrepareForBattle (0:01)
6. GoDown Mix (3:06)
7. RomNecris02 BeatMix (1:24)
8. Taunts Malcolm AhHellNo (0:01)
9. UT2007 MenuTheme2 (2:52)
10. RomUT02Mix (4:00)
11. Announcer Male DoubleKill (0:02)
12. RomNecris01 AmbientTheme (2:12)
13. GoDown SuspenseTheme (1:11)
14. RomNecris02 VictoryTheme (1:48)
15. LockdownMix (4:48)
16. RomNecris01 VictoryTheme (1:12)
17. Announcer Female NewOpponent (0:02)
18. Outpost SuspenseTheme (1:27)
19. RomUT06 ActionTheme (0:50)
20. SpaceDnB VictoryTheme (1:00)

After listening to the first few tracks I can tell you now that Epic Games have defiantly gone back to their original Unreal Tournament roots, as the menu theme is a remixed original menu theme. Within the second menu theme there is a fantastic bass line which I think my neighbours will learn to like.

Throughout this soundtrack though there are other remixes of the old music, such as “Go Down” and “Mech8″ which sound amazing and all I now want to do is play the original and salivate in waiting of Unreal Tournament 3.

Download Link - Unreal Tournament 3 Official Soundtrack (34mb)

For those who know me for my World of Warcraft addons, you’ll know I created a very popular extension which was called EnemyCastBar. What this allowed you to do was to see your opponents casting bar for their spells, therefore allowing you to (and if you could) interrupt them at the last possible second. This was especially effective for rogues fighting any healing class so that they would save a stun for when they attempted to heal. Having this tool to see not only the length of a cast time, but also what they were casting at you made PvP a lot more interesting, as effectively everyone knew when you were doing something, and subsequently how to counter you…

“Ahh, Mr. Warlock there is casting Shadow Bolt, I’ll cast Shadow Ward to protect myself from part of the damage”

“Ahh, Mr. Priest there is trying to heal himself, I’ll fear him to cancel the heal”

However the addon didn’t start as a pure PvP mod, it started as a proof of concept addon just to see if I could do this. The idea was generated from the original Boss Mod scripts from CT_RaidAssist, which alerted you to when a certain boss event was about to occur. As all the raiding encounters in WoW are based on timed events, this meant showing warnings was very simple once the timings had been worked out.

I then “ported” over the Boss Mod scripts into EnemyCastBar to provide a full PvE raiding section, for the whole of Molten Core, Blackwing Lair and some of Ahn’Qiraj. These visual timers allowed for some encounters to be near trivialized as you knew exactly when an ability/event was about to occur. Where as before EnemyCastBar you only had about 5seconds notice, as all warnings were done in a text alert format…

“Fear in 5seconds!”

Providing a visual timer allowed you to monitor the situation completely, it also allowed you to keep checking when a special event was going to occur, so that you were not caught off guard at any time.

So why am I writing about ECB? Well, after I stopped playing WoW, I handed the maintenance of the addon to Natur so that it could still keep running after patch releases etc. He did a great job of maintaining it, and subsequently took my addon to levels I couldn’t imagine. But that isn’t, again, why I am talking about it.

In about 2months (maybe less), the expansion for WoW called The Burning Crusade will be released, and within this, there will be my addon, or rather my idea. As the idea behind EnemyCastBar has been integrated into TBC, this gives me mixed feelings regarding the whole situation. It means my coding or idea, no idea which, was good enough to be merged into the most popular MMORPG in the western market. Meaning that an estimated 7million subscribers to WoW will see my invention in their game play everyday now, rather than it being a percentage of the market who actively researched and installed addons.

As good as that is, as I am quite proud, but theres only one part of this which eats away at me. Which is the fact that I, nor Natur, receive any mention of the creation and maintaining of the addon in the first place that I can find. Ok, the integrated version will never compete with the version we make, but even then, a quick “hi, since your addon impressed us so much, and the fact its being widely used, we are going to merge it with the game for The Burning Crusade”. But no, Blizzard have sent me nothing of the sort, which is why I am slightly annoyed. Ok I agreed to the terms and conditions, and I knew that, but I thought Blizzard was a but more community oriented. Also I know I am no longer the official maintainer, and I don’t create releases anymore, this isn’t about that. It’s more just the general principle. I just really hope that they don’t screw it up completely, although they seem to be making a good attempt at killing off the addon community with the changes they are making for TBC.

Bottom line, they must respect the authors, creators and maintainers, even if its only a small amount, perhaps they think integration is good enough, I don’t. The respect is still needed because without us, addons such as CT_RaidAssist (probably the most downloaded addon for WoW), Scrolling Combat Text, and now EnemyCastBar, wouldn’t have existed in the first place for them to effectively.. “steal”.

On a final note, it will be interesting to see if other MMORPG’s will pick up on the idea of seeing enemy spell cast times, and to see if they put similar functionality into their games as well… damn me for not copyrighting it!