It's really starting to bug me how little information Epic is giving out on the internal workings of UnrealScript. Sure, they released their US reference guide, but where in there does it say that a rotator class makes a complete circle at a value of 65,536? If GetAxes() calculates the vector equivalent of a rotator, what exactly does GetUnAxes() do? Why were we able to find a more up-to-date version of 3ds2unr.exe on a site that hasn't been updated in almost a year as opposed to Epic's own Unreal technology page?

The mod community is what's kept Quake 2 alive all this time, and it certainly has brought Half-Life back to life. While I don't view Unreal Tournament as being quite as reliant on it as Quake3, surely they understand that a modern shooter's longevity is rooted in its mod community. Or maybe they don't? We're dealing with a completely new language here, not the old and familiar ANSI C. Does Epic not understand that the rest of us weren't there to tinker with the innards of UnrealScript?

Amazing how long it can take to make the important decisions regarding a mod, but time and time again it's been shown that a little planning beforehand can prevent a lot of pain later on. Now that we're approaching air-tight plans on nearly everything conceivable, we can move ahead without worrying about possibly changing our minds at a future date.

Models, skins, maps, sounds, code... these are the major components for any serious game conversion. But trying to work on them before you have a concrete game plan is just a bad idea. Fortunately, that first step is basically over.

By the way, I've played Infiltration for UT and I'm sorry, I'm just not that impressed. Most of the models are okay, but the skins are substandard. The weapon models don't sit well with the player models, but I'm not sure how easy Unreal Tournament makes fixing that. My suggestion to the UT community (and Epic) is to stop drooling over the first mod available for the game. Have some standards, for crying out loud.

On my current gun wish list:

• Stainless Steel Ruger Vaquero (cowboy revolver) chambered for .45 Colt with a 4 inch barrel
• A .357 snubbie revolver (2 inch barrel), probably a S&W, Taurus, or EAA
• 1911 in .45 ACP, maybe a Para-Ordnance for a matching set
• Sharps 1874 replica in .45-70
• Double-barrel coachgun (with or without external hammers)

Whoops. My news program here was suffering from a Y2K problem of sorts. Each entry is an individual file where the name is the date and time it was written (year first). Unfortunately, I wrote the script to look for files starting with a "1", and now that we're in 2000, new files start with a "2". Now I have to go and repair the several incarnations of this script that have spread around the web.