It's been over two years since I originally released a small piece of code entitled 'Warfare++', allowing for up to 128 players in Unreal Tournament 3's Warfare game mode, which mysteriously only allowed 32 players in a local offline instant action match, despite allowing up to 64 players in an online environment. This involved a surprisingly substantial rewrite of the Warfare game mode, despite the actual required changes being relatively small - a setback caused by the code setting those limits being buried quite deep in the class hierarchy. The mod was limited to 128 players, not because that in itself is the physical upper limit, but because the game would be guaranteed to freeze and crash at just under 160 players.
On and off over the past year or so, I've been working to circumnavigate the issue - now known to be caused (once again) by a tiny piece of code tucked away where it's hard to modify it; the game would get stuck in an infinite loop when it tried to spawn a new bot, but there weren't any new bots for it to spawn because the game had already created every named bot the game has - once on each team.
It's taken one hell of a rewrite to get around this limit, as it involved not only the original changes to Warfare, but also to a very significant portion of Unreal Tournament 3's core code base, as well as replacing a number of small native (therefore inaccessible) functions - but this has finally been cracked.
Warfare: Unlimited is pencilled in to be released on November 9th 2010, Unreal Tournament 3's third birthday, and will finally allow players to push their machines as far as they can possibly go, by allowing up to a staggering 1024 players (eight times the previous limit) in the Warfare game mode - providing it doesn't bring it to a halt first.
1024 sounds like an insane good time.
Wow. I'm in.
Thats really exciting!
Bravo!
Seems the ship date on this has slipped. Any hope of a release for Warfare: Unlimited???