Unreal: Bug Reports

Last Updated: 05/03/99

Common Q&A for Unreal 224

Q. Does this patch work with the version of Unreal that was bundled with my Voodoo3 card?
A. Yes.

Q. What drivers do I need to use Unreal on my Riva TNT.
A. You need the Detonator drivers from NVidia's web site.  Past versions of TNT drivers, as well as drivers direct from manufacturers have known bugs that cause Unreal to crash or cause severe texture corruption.  With the Detonator drivers, Unreal works on OpenGL and Direct3D.

Q. What cards have you verified working on OpenGL?
A. Riva TNT (with the latest Detonator drivers only), ATI Rage Pro (latest drivers only).

Q. What about 3D hardware support on my ATI Rage Pro / Intel i740 / Riva 128 / S3 ViRGE / Other 3d card?
A. All of these cards are slower than the software renderer and/or lack features which Unreal requires for rendering. They aren't supported and won't be in the future.

Q. Unreal crashes on my overclocked CPU and/or 3D card. What's wrong?
A. Disable overclocking and try again.  If Unreal works with overclocking disabled, instabilities resulting from overclocking are to blame.  Unreal may be more sensitive to overclocking than other games due to extreme texture usage and memory access.  Please, don't report crash bugs to us if your system is overclocked, try proper clocking first.   In my informal study, 6 out of 11 overclockers who reported crashes in Unreal found that the crashes went away when they clocked their system to spec.

Next Patch Status

There will be another Unreal 1 patch.  It will contain fixes for the bugs reported.  By popular demand, our focus on future Unreal 1 patches will be making bug fixes and small, incremental improvements.  So, we've split off the Unreal 1 codebase from the Unreal Tournament codebase, and won't be major new features added to the Unreal 1 codebase, just fixes.

We don't have a date for the next patch, but we expect to have it in the next few weeks.  The version number will be 225.

General Bugs & Issues

• Occasional "Out of virtual memory" / "FArray::Realloc" crash for some users when console remains pulled down for long periods of time.  Problem identified, and fixed for the next patch.  Cause: Bug with strings in UnrealScript switch statement.
• Creative Labs EAX support was accidentially disabled in this version, meaning that all sound is mixed in software.  EAX support will be back in in the next version.
• We changed the way turning accelerates in the keyboard and joystick controls.   We're not keyboarders, and we thought this approach would improve aiming.   Man, were we wrong!  Keyboarders and joystick players don't like this.   It will be changed back to the original Doom style control in the next version.
• Mod authors reported that we changed the scale or the TorchFlame mesh relative to 220.   You don't need to modify your maps!  We'll change this back to the size of Unreal 220 for the next version.

Problems We're Looking Into

• About 10 users have reported that running the patcher on their Unreal retail CD gives an error message saying that "The file UnrealI.u on the CD is not the expected version, therefore Unreal can't be patched".  2 of them report that trying again, or copying the Unreal CD to their hard drive and specifying that hard drive directory when asked for their CD path, fixes the problem.  We haven't tracked this down enough to know whether the problem is in the code (and fixable in the next patch), or a problem with the CD media (fixable by copying the CD to your hard disk).
• Some server admins are reporting that 224 uses significantly more bandwidth per-player than past versions.  I'm looking into this for the next version.  I'll also add some more detailed server-side stats to aid in diagnosing future problems of this kind.
• Some players are seeing jerky network performance on some servers (players warping around, etc).  I experienced this in about 1/3rd of the servers I visited last night, in the 6 hours following the release of the patch.  I got some useful, but still incomplete, stats.  Some of this is due to the servers people have put up this weekend not having enough bandwidth, or having too many copies of the server running on one PC.  I'll be gathering more performance stats over the next few days to see if I can do anything in the code to improve this.
• Some users are reporting the software renderer running more slowly than past versions.   If you're experiencing this, change the line in Unreal.ini:
      SlowVideoBuffering=True
  to:
      SlowVideoBuffering=False
  The SlowVideoBuffering option improves performance by 50-100% when transparent objects are visible, but slows down performance by 10-20% (depending on hardware) when no transparency is visible.  This is a tricky tradeoff, because in network play transparent object rendering dominates performance, whereas single player is usually the opposite.

Not Bugs

• The FOV command (sets your field of view) is disabled in network play, because it can be used to gain an advantage over other players, so many consider it a cheat.
• A3D 1.0 support in this version is disabled, while we work on the upcoming A3D 2.0 support (which has the side-effect of breaking 1.0 support).
• Carlo improved the reverb algorithm to make it sound more "spacey", with more focus on smooth sound propagation, and less direct reflections.  This has the effect of lowering the amount of reverb you here in the areas where we used it gratuitously.   So a gun "Bang" sound in a reverb zone now sounds more like "Baaaannnggg", instead of "Bang Ba Bang Ba Bank Ba Bang" (A Technical Term).
• The server browser slows down rendering significantly in the software renderer.
• To use OpenGL support on a Windows 98 multimonitor system, you must disable multimonitor support.  This is an unfortunate limitation in Windows 98 that we'd love to see fixed, but that's in Microsoft's hands.
• When running a dedicated server, the player count shown in the console window and tray icon include players who are downloading custom user maps from your server but who have not joined the game. Therefore, this number might be higher than the number of players reported by UBrowser and GameSpy, which only count players in the game.  We present different numbers because server admins generally care about total connections, and players generally care about total players in the game.
• Unreal version 220 and earlier savegames are not compatible with 224.  Attempting to load them might appear to work, but will cause subtle problems, such as potential crashes when switching levels, broken pause feature, and menus that don't function.

Other Bug Reports

The above issues cover about 80% of the bug reports we received at unreal224@epicgames.com (a list for reporting bugs, this is not a tech support email, please don't expect an individual reply).   These are all of the frequently-reported issues.  The reports that we received one or two instances of are lower priority and will be looked into after the frequent ones are addressed.

Bug Report Requests

Server administrators, if your dedicated server crashes, please email the \Unreal\System\Unreal.log file to unreal224@epicgames.com with a subject like "My dedicated server crashed".  I have 3 format bug reports of this kind, but I've heard about lots more on the net.  Please do send in your log.  The more data we have, the easier it is to track these bugs down.

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