Unreal Tournament (aka UT) is a multiplayer, three-dimensional first-person shooter-type game in the style of the classic Quake games. The game is written and developed by Epic Games and published and marketed by GT Interactive.
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The OpenUT Project was formed to develop libraries, executables, and tools relevant to the Unreal Tournament engine. The project focuses on improving the quality of the UT Linux port through open source development.
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Epic Games were developing a Linux version of the game for some time before it was commecially released, and had hoped to provide the binaries on the same retail CD as the Windows version. The binaries were not quite ready in time, so they were released on the Internet afterwards.
In December 1999 Brandon Reinhart (aka 'GreenMarine'), a developer at Epic, announced their intention to open source certain parts of the Linux game engine in order to let the development community help to improve the code. Quote from his .plan around the time of the release:
"The bottom line is this: I like to play kick ass games. The Linux port of UT is not kick ass. I don't have the time to make it better, so instead of having it languish on my harddrive I'll give it out to anyone who wants it. You don't have to do anything with it. You could take it and write cool stuff and if you want you could contribute it to me. Its all voluntary."
The project was established at SourceForge in early January 2000.
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At present, only the Linux sound and graphics rendering code.
Daniel Vogel summarised the source release as follows:
The OpenUT project does NOT have access to the generic renderer, the game core, engine, server, editor, or software renderer.
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At the present time (May 2000), the project admins are Brandon Reinhart and Daniel Vogel.
There are a total of 15 developers with direct access to update the OpenUT CVS repository (see the project root at SourceForge for details). There are also others who contribute by submitting patches to the maintainers, but who do not have direct access to CVS.
Here is a list of people that have contributed to the OpenUT project in some form or another:
OpenUT programming (alphabetically ordered)
OpenUT tools / website / misc (alphabetically ordered)
Everyone is welcome to help with the project!
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Lots of ways ;-)
The website and the project root at SourceForge are the best starting points. The official website is at http://openut.sourceforge.net and more information can be found there.
Here are some things you can do to help us out.
Remember that you can also help us just by enjoying OpenUT, and telling us about it!
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Well, first of all, it works ;-)
A brief list of the improvements goes something like this:
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(from http://devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/)
Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power." Simple DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Win32, BeOS, along with ports in progress to MacOS, IRIX, Solaris, and FreeBSD.
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(from http://utah-glx.sourceforge.net)
Simply put, GLX is the X extension used by OpenGL programs, it is the glue between OpenGL (which is platform independent) and X.
The utah-glx project is building a hardware accelerated glx module for free Unix operating systems. Currently, we have support for 3D acceleration on the Matrox MGA-G200 and MGA-G400, nvidia's RIVA series, S3 ViRGE, ATI's Rage Pro (not Rage 128), and Intel's i810 for XFree86 3.3.x
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We have mailing lists and forums hosted at SourceForge.
The mailing list archives are accessible via Geocrawler or Pipermail:
There are forums for Help and Announcements accessible via the project root at SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=975
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