X-COM: ALLIANCE developer build



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.

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


It is here, in a 350 MB archive, self extracting, for your enjoyment (unpacked size is around 1.1gb). Extract to C:\Alliance and run levels through UnrealEd, where you can launch the map to try in game. Otherwise, the game has main menu, from where you can try several missions. The third option is -nofe switch in unreal.exe, which means no frontend, then you can choose maps. Since its a complete dev build (without src), it has many testmaps, and almost all levels for the game which were planned.

edit:

download 2:
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).


moderators, please feel free to move this post to proper section if necessary. its good for preservation. thx