X-COM: Alliance Beta 219

[Delacroix]

Greetings.


Many of you have been waiting for this day. Well in my timezone, it's Christmas, or more precisely, the Boxing Day when you get to open your Christmas gifts.


Here is one from Lord Victor Albert Sebastian Delacroix, the Dark Lord of the Glyphs, Unreal Engine Archivist and Historian.


Ladies and Gentlemen of this noble community... I give you...


X-COM: ALLIANCE


Being in concept since 1995, in development shortly afterwards, X-COM: Alliance was to revolutionize the X-COM franchise by combining the strategic and tactical elements known from the first X-COM/UFO games with the in-your-face gaming scheme of a first person shooter. Developed on the reknowned Unreal Engine, practically simultaneously with Unreal, it was first announced for release in 1999, then 2000 and finally 2002. Sadly, the release never took place, the game met its demise most likely soon after the closure of Microprose UK and, what's worse, its assets were later re-used for the most horrible atrocity known to X-COM fans... Enforcer, the dumbed down, simplistic, straightforward, non-climatic, arcade-ish shooter. The ambitious Alliance was lost.

Or so it seems. Leo(T.C.K.) and myself tracked down one of the Microprose LDs, whose name we are not in the liberty to give you. This gentleman has provided us everything he had on Alliance, including a beta running on the Unreal build 219 codebase, an initial conversion alpha on the Unreal build 220 codebase and plethora of sources, documents and related materials.

Today I'm going to share the most important piece with you: the 219 beta.

Code: Select all

http://www.multiupload.com/9IS9KY2NFY

It is here, in a 350 MB archive, self extracting, for your enjoyment. Extract to C:\Alliance and run levels through UnrealEd's autoplay function. Otherwise, the menu is not going to leave you alone.

Some system configurations can have problems with the Galaxy soundsystem or the game overall. Whereas we will *attempt* to provide support, I'd like to remind you that in no way we are obliged to do this -- this is in fact, beta software, leaked, to boot.

I am planning to assemble a team to turn this into a fully legal, freely available Unreal / Unreal Tournament total conversion in which I hope I shall succeed. For now, please enjoy the original beta.

[dezodor]

sad it's not 'original style' x-com genesis.. really dreamed about this game sometimes... still thanks for the release

[Gurluas]

The game asks me for the Cd files?

[Delacroix]

Extract to C:\Alliance or find CDPath in Unreal.ini and modify appropriately.

[Gurluas]

I can't get UnrealEd to run properly. I managed to make it open but it wont load any level(When I click open level or use a hotkey nothing happens=, and when I load a level manually it simply opens an empty map.

[Delacroix]

Install UnrealEdFix4 and try compatibility modes. UnrealEdFix4 is a commonly available fix for UnrealEd 1.0.

[Gurluas]

I managed to make the editor work, but even with it working I get this error if I try to play, no matter how I try to play:

Critical: ClientTravel
Critical: UGameEngine::Tick
Critical: MainLoop

That is with compatibility, without it, it simply says something about General Protection Fault and something about UGlideRenderDevice and OpenWindow.

[LEOTCK]

Or just rename any level you like to autoplay. That will work too.
The glide error might be becasue it is set to glide originally, either get a glide wrapper or change it to software rendering in the config file.

[Gurluas]

Thanks, putting Software mode on fixed it.

So do you have more to release related to X-Com?

[Delacroix]

Code: Select all

http://www.multiupload.com/YREXN8ZZXO

Another X-COM build. This has only three maps (unknown at the time whether the ones from previous build will work or not), but is on a more recent Unreal build, 220 as opposed to 219. Consider it an alpha.

Much of the issues with Unreal Engine development is that Epic was, is and will be constantly updating it. Some of these updates are drastic enough to make older resources incompatible, so that they need to be either just reimported, or sometimes recoded or whatever. That's one of the reasons why John Anderson left Unreal dev team (none of his maps survived, save one level for Unreal PSX, probably reused from the alpha and one level in the Unreal95 tech demo).

[Gurluas]

The earlier build was much more playable, but it is good, the more builds we get, the easier it might be to patch a working game together.

I certainly want to help this game become a reality. This is the real X-Com, not the "X-Whatever" that 2k is making.

[Delacroix]

These are the only two builds we get and as we were revealed, it's everything from the UK MicroProse branch. However, some stuff was reused in Enforcer, besides, in my posession there is an archive with complete design docs and humongous amount of resources -- even if we do not recover anything from the US Hasbro branch of the game's development, it's still possible that we complete it. I must know however, if you have any experience with Unreal Engine? If not, the only position I would have for you is betatesting/QA.

[Gurluas]

I do not, but I can probably help out with QA, testing, designing, implementation idea, and forum moderation if you ever get one.

Also do you think you could track down anything related to X-Com Genesis?

[Delacroix]

I didn't hope we could ever get that supplier of ours to give out Alliance, hell, I didn't expect anyone to HAVE it at all. So who knows? MAYBE there is someone that still has something left over from the game.

My MSN is: bruno.glening@windowslive.com, my XFire: lordvictordelacroix, my Steam: swordofheavens. If you have any of these, I'd appreciate direct contact whenever you are available on any of these networks. I have learned the hard way that if such project is to succeed, we must be available to other team members at all times.

[Gurluas]

I have added you on Steam and Msn.

[SLAYERMAGGOT]

@Delacroix: X-Com Build 220 is newer than 219, so how it can be an alpha if build 220 is already a beta?
The development stages are: alpha > beta > final

[Gurluas]

While it may be a newer build, it has much less content and is much less refined.

[SLAYERMAGGOT]

That shouldn't mean anything i guess. I remember trying dozens of STALKER dev-builds, and the content and quality of the builds varied very much.
Though the game got developed further and passed all the development stages until the final game came out.

[Delacroix]

Well, precisely, they just started converting to 220 and aborted midway. Hence I called it alpha, but frankly, this is not a test version at all, it's a development build, so more precise term for these two would be "development builds", not alpha or beta. Coz frankly, IDK what stage could this be described as.

[LEOTCK]

There is other way to open the maps without suffering through the glitchy menu and without renaming to autoplay and that is by using -NOFE option while running unreal.exe, means no front end.

[CommanderCoffee]

Hi guys,

As you may or may not know, I'm working on a replacement for the Unreal Editor written in Visual Basic. Currently, I'm have an early prototype up and running. Once complete, it will no longer depend on Visual Basic at all and there will be additional features available.

Most, if not all, of the games utilizing Unreal Engine 1 provide an interface that allows the editor to hook into the engine making editing possible. Of all the games that have this interface, XCom Enforcer has one that functions differently. Actually, it crashes when used. Even now that I know exactly how this interface works, it still crashes which means they development team changed something.

If you are interested in having a new editor for this game, I would appreciate access to the source code. All other games work fine. Undying, Deus Ex, Unreal, Wheel of Time, and even the Adventure Pinball from Digital Extremes.

Currently, I'm working alone on this project. This is preferable for me right now though I'm 110% open to ideas and designs pertaining to user interface functionality and anything else.

Anyways, let me know.

EDIT:
Now, this is unusual. Alliance works fine but Enforcer does not. In any case, the surface flags dialog works 100%. The green squares represent the presence of surface flags that ARE NOT shared amongst the entire selection. In Qt, this is the triple state check box. The original Unrealed would adjust the contrast of the check mark to reflect this particular situation.





Another level. This time all relevant surface flags are selected as expected. The class editor works as well.

[sexecutor]

Hello!

The download links appear to be expired!
Could you please upload the betas somewhere! I can't find out if there is a copy in the betaarchives' repository.

Thanks in advance!

[MichaelD]

Link appears to be dead for me too... but fortunately, I have 219 and 220 downloaded, as well as a fix for them. Let me find another site to upload them to and I'll get back to you.

[MichaelD]

X-Com Alliance 220
http://www.filedropper.com/alliance220

I'm having issues uploading 219. Working on it.

[Dr. Proton]

Apologies for the bump. I was looking through an old PCZ when I came across an old preview for Alliance. Does anyone still have the 219 or 220 builds available? The links are no longer active and I would love to check either out if it wouldn't be a hassle.