Infogrames has just released the latest patch for Unreal Tournament 2003, upgrading the game to version 2225. Among the changes: an option for a visible center weapon, audio bug fixes and the removal of the CD check. There is also an official bright skins mod. According to Infogrames, "This particular mod will make the red and blue team skins much brighter and turn off the shoulder lights".

The guys at the Firing Squad have posted a Q&A with Epic's Tim Sweeney, asking him about 64-bit technology and AMD's Opteron. Epic is pretty hot for 64-bit CPUs.

HomeLAN Fed has a Q&A with Tom Dunne, one of the team members working on The Opera mod for Unreal Tournament 2003. The mod was previously released for Half-Life.

The Unreal Technology site is offering a new .dll for the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo, addressing a denial-of-service attack. Demo clients as well as server admins should apply the .dll.

The long awaited Epic Games bonus pack for Unreal Tournament 2003 has just been released, grab it from FileShack now. The 149mb download includes three new game types, ten new maps, two new adrenaline combos, new announcer voice options and an in-game music manager. You will need the 2199 patch installed before you can use the bonus pack.

Planet Unreal has reprinted an email from Epic's Steve Polge, who offers a few more details on the big Mod Contest Epic is planning for Unreal Tournament 2003. Not only can you win money or fame, it looks like the grand prize includes a full Unreal engine license. More should be announced in the coming weeks. In other UT2003 news, Steve Polge once again has an update on the long awaited bonus pack. Internal testing didn't reveal any problems but now Infogrames QA is going to test it and that will take at least three days. If they don't find any problems it should be released pretty soon.

A new Unreal Tournament 2003 dedicated server has been released, now at 2199 for both Linux and Windows. You can find a mirror of the Windows file on FileShack, the Linux version will follow later.

There's a list of tentative Unreal Tournament 2003 patch changes on the Infogrames Forums, with more changes to gameplay, weapons, networking and other areas of the game. Thanks Unreality.

Epic programmer Steve Polge posted on the Unreal Tournament 2003 forums, giving a status report on the upcoming bonus pack which Epic is working on. There's been some delays due to patches and the German version, but everything is moving along now. Thanks HomeLAN Fed.

The Unreal Technology page is now offering the latest game source code for Unreal Tournament 2003, based on the code from the recent 2199 patch. Thanks HomeLAN Fed.

Infogrames sends along an updated Unreal Tournament 2003 for Windows, as well as Linux. This new demo uses the latest gamecode and also contains an additional map (CTF-Orbital2). Full version clients can now also join demo servers again.

For all of you who are playing Unreal Tournament 2003 on Linux, we have the Linux version of the most recent patch now posted for you.

The UT2003 patch v2199 has just been released by the folks at Epic games. This patch is for the windows clients as well as servers. A linux build is expected "shortly".

This patch is completely compatible with the retail version and previous patches - servers and clients of any flavor can connect with each other. This patch will not overwrite your ut2003.ini and user.ini files, except to update settings as necessary.

There's a Tech TV article about the recent Unreal exploit news (as mentioned here), which goes over the whole story so far before offering a quote by Epic's Tim Sweeney who mentions that a patch to fix the exploit will be out soon: "The patch is in testing with the community, and release is imminent. We're aiming for Wednesday unless testing reveals additional problems. We're testing as fast as we can." Thanks Blues News.

A recently published report originally spotted by 3DGPU on the BugTraq listing has news of a vulnerability in Epic's Unreal engine that leaves machines open to participate in DDoS attacks and the popular spoofed UDP packets fun. The person who discovered the exploit privately notified Epic nearly 3 months ago which was a sweetheart thing of him to do. However Epic dropped the ball for a bit too long. Bluesnews has a quote and a fix list from Mark Rein on the subject:

I won't sugar coat this. We fucked up on this. Yes this is real and yes this was brought to our attention and yes we should have fixed it by now. We are working on fixing this now and we will have this fixed in an upcoming patch before too long

This exploit works on all Unreal/Unreal2/UT2003 engine based titles, and once Epic has the fix they will make it available to all licensees.

Epic's Unreal Technology page has been updated, offering this tweak guide for Unreal Tournament 2003. It tells you how to get the best possible performance out of the game with the 2186 patch installed.

For those among you who are Lunix gamers, the new Unreal Tournament 2003 patch is now out updating this version of the game to 2186 as well. If you run a Linux dedicated server you can grab this update, and if you run a Windows dedicated server, you can download the entire updated package.

If you're experiencing sound problems in Unreal Tournament 2003 after installing the 2186 patch, the Unreal Technology now has an older version of the sound driver which might fix those problems. Thanks GameSpy Daily.

Somewhat surprisingly, the newest Unreal Tournament 2003 patch has just been released, upgrading the game to version 2186. Among the many changes and fixes, there is now support for left handed weapons, flak shells are more visible, there have been spectating improvements and there's improved cheat protection. Windows release only for now, the Linux patch should be out soon.

A bit later than expected due to an extremely slow Digital Extremes FTP site, the first Unreal Tournament 2003 bonus pack has now been released. There are six new maps: BR-DE-ElecFields, CTF-DE-ElecFields, CTF-DE-LavaGiant2, DM-DE-Grendelkeep, DM-DE-Ironic and DM-DE-Osiris2. If manually extracting the files into the right directories scares you, there's also this auto installing UMod version of the bonus pack.