Things That Make You Go Boom?

Courtesy of BeyondUnreal, splendid use of Unreal Tournament 2004, many explosives barrels and the 1812 Overture follows. Also, how the creator did it...

The creator turns up in the beyond unreal comments thread, saying plenty of stuff. Including...

There is a limit to how many emitters the emitter system in UE2.5 can handle. It's however many emitters come out of about ~28,000 exploding barrels. You know those clips at the end of the video where ALL the barrels blow up at the same time? I tried to do that to Dria. The Dria lakebed has almost 300,000 barrels. UT2004 couldn't even GPF. The UT2004.log said something about a critical in the emitter system... I figured I'd hit a hard limit.

As for making the maps, there wasn't any secret, it just took time. Place a few barrels, duplicate, place those, select all, duplicate, repeat repeat repeat until the map is full.

I did not shoot this in realtime. Nothing you see in the video was rendered at 30 fps... except maybe the opening fly-throughs, I didn't check. With barrels, it was anywhere between 20 frames per second to 10 seconds per frame.

More there. He also links to the full Dria lake bed explosion...

Cut and paste is an artform. We should all understand this.