Unreality has posted a brief chat log from a Mark Rein chat earlier this day. Epic's VP talks about various things related to Unreal Tournament 2003. Update: looks like the chat log was pulled.

The Unreal Technology page has been updated, offering information for third party server query tools wanting to support Unreal Tournament 2003. Full version and demo version server lists are now available through HTTP.

If some of you were wondering why the Unreal Tournament 2003 manual has orange text on a white background, it's an error. According to online producer Kyle Peschel, someone "was smoking crack" as the text was supposed to be black. Kyle promises to upload a PDF version of the manual, and will try to find out if people will be able to send back their manual to get a correctly printed one. Though he adds "(Personally I would think that you are now l33t for having an Orange one, and years from now it will be worth more. But that's just wishful thinking) ". Update: the PDF can be found here, thanks LoneStar.

HomeLAN Fed's Q&A of the morning is with Kevin Riepl, composer of the music in Unreal Tournament 2003. Kevin is asked about his background in music, how he got hired for Unreal Tournament 2003, if he's pleased with his work for the game, what kind of equipment he used and more.

The Unreal Technology page has been updated with an Unreal Tournament 2003 editor update, which is also mirrored on FileShack. This update fixes a crash when rebuilding AI paths. Also, coming soon: "the Unreal Development Environment, a powerful script programming IDE". Thanks HomeLAN Fed.

Unreal Tournament 2003 should be out on most shelves this weekend, but if you are lucky and have one of the few stores listed below in the area and extra lucky that they got stocked already, then... you're in luck! Here's a message from Mark Rein of Epic: (Thanks John Cook)

Infogrames told us that some stores should have copies as early as today. The chains I recall are: BestBuy, EB, Target, Wal*Mart and Gamestop - there might be others but I'm not at my own computer right now so I can't verify the list. From what I understand they can sell it the minute they get it. There is no "street date" for this game - at least not in the USA. I have no idea why they would hold it back in the UK or Europe - that would certainly NOT be our preference.

If you are some kinda goon and havent tried the demo, grab it from Fileshack, and the demo patch too!

PC.IGN has posted some first impressions of the full version of Unreal Tournament 2003, which should be showing up in stores any day now. A whole bunch of screenshots from the retail version levels are included with the article.

There's a very brief Unreal Tournament 2003 music Q&A on eXceed-News, where they got to talk to composer Kevin Priel about his work on the game.

A brief Q&A with Epic's CliffyB is up at XGR, guess what the questions are about! Cliff is asked about the UT2003 demo delays, changes to the game since E3, his favorite weapon in the game, best feature of the new editor and a few other things.

Check the official announcement right here.

Short version: The game will be 3CD's, include "over 35" (which probably means 36) levels, more gameplay types, mutators and player models. A linux client and server version is included in the box. Also included: Maya Personal Learning Edition, Karma Physics Authoring Tool, UPaint, UnrealEdit 3.0, UnrealScript debugger, and a Karma-vehicle tutorial for modmakers.

A free server for those that want to run a server but not buy the game is coming soon too.

Also, Epic's Steve Polge made a forum post with a partial list of changes made to the game based on demo feedback. Go here for the full map list.

The Linux UT2003 demo patch is now available for download over at FileShack, the change list is of course identical to the Windows UT2003 demo patch released just the other day.

The Unreal Developer Network site has been updated, offering more information and tutorials for the latest version of the Unreal engine. This will assist with the creation of mods for Unreal Tournament 2003.

Jason from Seriously! sends word of this thread on the BeyondUnreal forums, which have word on how to get the Redeemer in the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo. Another thread has instructions on how to get the Ion Cannon to work.

The Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo patch has just been released, it's a cute little 3meg patch that will make you say awwww! Here's the quick list of fixes included in the patch which you can of course download from FileShack:

- Fixed support for Voodoo3 / Matrox G400.
- Fixed initial framerate hitches in network play.
- Fixed the jittery screen updates in the server browser when sorting by ping.
- Fixed a possible DoS attack in the server code.
- Fixed a few other minor potential crashes.

For those of you who haven't quite figured out those special moves in the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo, check out this guide. Thanks koder. A tweak guide for the game is up at Tweak Town.

Well, its a safe assumption that a lot of you guys have checked out the UT2003 demo by now... You can still grab it over at FileShack without any wait times now, here are a bunch of notes on the demo from Epic:

• You need to have DirectX 8.1b installed to play the game successfully.  If you get a crash on startup or at a random time during gamplay, this is likely to be the cause.   Download it from Microsoft's DirectX site.
• We'll be releasing a small patch tomorrow.  This will fix a number of reported bugs, and also serve as the first public test of UT2003's new auto-update feature.
• There was a bug in the server browser that caused it to crash frequently under heavy load.  This wasn't triggered until thousands of servers came online.  We found a master server-side fix for this so the problem should be gone now.  Sorry for the inconvenience!
• Server admins, if running multiple servers on one machine, please give each server a port number differing from the others by at least 20: for example, 7000, 7020, 7040, ...   To work around the bug mentioned above, we had to ban servers that are running on consecutive port numbers.  Restarting servers using the new port number guidelines will bring them back online.
• The master server was intermittently down or unresponsive earlier because Epic's Internet connection was flooded.   We've moved it to a much faster server offsite and it should be running fine now.
• Several other crash bugs have shown up significantly in the bug reports.  We're looking into these.  Thanks to everyone who has submitted bug reports to ut2003bugs@epicgames.com.
• UT2003's global player statistics tracking system will be coming online tomorrow.   To use it, you'll need to turn on stats tracking from the settings menu, and choose a unique name and password.
• Yes, UT2003's Joystick support needs work.
• Be sure to read the UT2003 Demo Frequently Asked Questions for information on other known issues and workarounds

Also, support for ASE and Pingtool are coming 'shortly' according to Sweeney.

The NVidia website has an interview with the illustrious CliffyB talking about Unreal Tournament 2003 of course. Pretty interesting stuff if you havent been keeping up with the UT2003 happenings.

The Unreal Tournament 2003 demo was indeed released last night for download over at FileShack. You shouldnt have to wait more than about 10-20 minutes in line to grab the thing which isnt bad considering the huge demand. We had a hiccup last night for about 5-10 minutes in the system I'd like to apologize for. It was something that could have been easily avoided had Maarten not been on vacation, but well... he was, and Sander and I both simply werent familiar enough with a couple of things in the FileShack system that could have been addressed.

- Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo
- Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo Linux

If you feel the need to make BF1942 comparisons, dont. They are entirely different games and stupid "BF1942>UT2K3" style posts will just be nuked.. Have a look at what CliffyB had to say last night and leave it at that.

Here it is folks, the fabled UT2003 playable multiplayer demo for download. You can grab the demo from FileShack of course, it's about 97.2megs. Here's the other mirrors list. Have fun!

IMPORTANT NOTE: The download wait estimates are completely and entirely wrong. Jack hasnt had time to get those to be accurate yet, so if you're expecting them to be.... well dont. That's why we're calling it Fileshack BETA!

Linux users: Here ya go

*Twiddles thumbs* Yeah, hanging out all evening waiting on that UT2K3 demo. This is your official thread to describe the things you would do for CliffyB if he would just release the demo already.

We are confirmed to be hosting the demo on FileShack the moment it's made available, and we've actually bumped up some of our capacity to handle things. Of course the bummer though is FileShack has grown quite significantly in traffic levels and we're at over a quarter million registered users. So I imagine there will be lines, and as you guys know if there is one thing that we have that big red BETA sign on FileShack for, it's because our lines/estimates totally suck. :)

Keep an eye on FileShack.com as it will appear there first, and on Shacknews.com moments later. When will it be out? No clue, it might not even be this evening... but this evening sure would be convenient!

update! It's coming tonight for sure. Epic just finished uploading it to Infogrames, so now it needs to be disto'd to us.. and we wait for all the other mirrors to be ready and its release time. When will that be? Dunno.. within an hour or two sounds reasonable.