The guys at 3DAudio Immersion have posted some Unreal Tournament benchmarks with different sound cardsw which many people dont realize has an impact on framerate.

3D Spotlight has a Unreal Tournament Tweak Guide, covering everything from video performance to netplay. So if wanna get a few more FPS out of the UT demo, check this out.

Not a whole lot went down this evening but a couple of .plan updates from GreenMarine on UnrealTournament on a couple of subjects. First off is a rune system for Unreal Tournament, you guys dig runes?

I'm working on a rune style system for UT. Instead of "runes" I'm calling them Relics. Anyone working on runes for UT will probably want to hold up and wait until the Relic system is ready. It'll allow mod authors to quickly make new types of Relics that server admins can download and add to their games.

He also touches on the use of bots on UT servers and padding stats. btw, tomorrow should be my first 'full day' back online. Apologies for things being so spotty since this weekend. I'll be flying home Friday evening.

Epic's GreenMarine updated his .plan with the advise not to set player limit above 32, as it will do no good.

I saw a CTF server running with a 50 playerlimit. Running servers with more than 32 players is a no-no because there are hardcoded assumptions about the max playerlimit. Maybe I'll talk with Steve about increasing it to 64. (I guess there isn't really any reason to choose programmer numbers like 32 and 64 for something like this.) I seem to recall at one point there being a very good reason for us keeping it at 32. Certainly server performance would be...ah...highly questionable at 64 players :) Anyway, running with more than 32 in the current demo will probably cause a lot of odd error messages to get logged when the 33rd person joins.

Unreality has a sniper-only mod for the Unreal Tournament demo, which has rewards for kills and special death messages.

Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart updated his .plan with the word that ngWorldStats aren't working if you use GameSpy, and that this will be fixed in the new release.

A new version of GameSpy shareware has been released with Unreal Tournament support.

If you are using a S3 based Savage4 card and wishing to play Unreal Tournament, you need to read this post with a warning about the chipset recognition stuff. Thanks VE

The Unreal Tournament page has a pretty big update following the successful release of the latest demo. Although there have been quite a few problems with the D3D and OpenGL code, they plan on another release once they fix those issues. Here's a bit:

The new demo has been a fantastic success from a testing standpoint. We've been able to isolate all kinds of problems and find some good solutions. Yes, yes, yes we should have done this for Unreal way back when. Lesson learned. Don't forget that we do fully intend to release an updated D3D patch for Unreal itself once we get the D3D performance to a level we're totally happy with. Unreal Engine licensees all get access to Unreal Tournament Engine source code so future games based on our engine should hopefully incorporate many of the improvements we're making now, and in the coming weeks, thanks to the release of this demo.

Tim Sweeney also follows up the update with some tips for TNT users looking to get some speed increases.

The latest Lilith&Eve show will feature an interview with CliffyB of Epic Games. Level designer, game designer, and fashion consultant. Cliffy talks about Unreal Tournament. There is also a chat scheduled to start in about an hour from this posting (6pm cst) on IRC chat.pseudo.com #allgames. Someone tell me where Cliffy scores those shirts with the light bulbs on them.

Here is a Newsday article James spotted giving a little bit of that mainstream press attention to Unreal & Unreal Tournament.

Mod Central has a few more UT Mutators for you to check out, Soul Harvest, double enforcer and infinite anything among others.

The Unreal Tech page has been updated by Tim Sweeney, who talks about Direct3D anomalies that have been occuring during testing:

We've been looking at the feedback on Direct3D performance and investigating some strange reports. Recently, we've mainly been testing on 96-meg and 128-meg machines (I have a Celeron 400, Jack Porter has a K6-2 450). On these machines, TNT1 performance is good -- average 28 fps at 648x480, 25 fps at 800x600. The TNT2 performance is significantly better.

However, upon removing some RAM and testing Direct3D on a 64-meg K6-2, the "precache" time increased by about 5X, and performance dropped to a few frames per second. These performance drops don't occur in the software renderer, and don't occur in Glide. Something is going wrong between Unreal, Direct3D, and the TNT's Direct3D driver, and we're investigating.

Overall, the feedback indicates a very wide variance in performance among TNT users, much more so than with any other card. Our internal testing has indicated this too; for example, we've found (and worked around) a lot of driver bugs that only happen on one machine, and not others with otherwise similar configurations.

He later updated with some more problems,

Jack and I have been tracking down the performance problems with the TNT on 64-meg (and lower) machines.  To our great surprise, it appears that the TNT is keeping duplicate system memory copies of all our textures--we saw system memory grow and shrink in almost exact proportion to our "supposed" video memory texture allocations.  Thus the game uses an extra 12-26 megabytes of system memory--a very inefficient allocation of resources. This is a big surprise, because the NVidia guys has always told us this isn't the case.

Problem in my code?  I don't think so, but I'd love to be proven wrong.  I'll follow up with our henchmen at NVidia and Microsoft and see if we can track this down...

There is also a possible fix available for people with Monster Soundcards who are experiencing slowdowns when they enable 3D sound.

The Epic guys have opened up a Bugs page for the Unreal Tournament demo which will list off any... bugs that game players find and submit. Before you decide to send off some email check that page to make sure they dont already know about it. Thanks [5k]G0l3k

Ok so now we have this demo and it's pretty snazzy, but when is Epic planning on releasing the full version? Evil Avatar called up Epic PR dude Mark Rein who says it'll be out well in time for Christmas, but didn't wish to be more specific. They are using the last few weeks to fine tune the game and fix any issues that have popped up with the release of the demo.

FiringSquad has posted a new Unreal Tournament editorial which is a bit more "cut loose" than the previous articles.

Missed this one yesterday while I was out, but the Unreal Technology page has word that the patch for the 3dfx demo to the latest UT doesnt include OpenGL support, you have to grab the full demo download for that one. Here is the release post.

Following the Unreal Tournament demo release, the UT Technology page has been updated with a few known issues for those of you with questions about the demo. Check this stuff out yo.

Direct3D
- You need DirectX7 to use Direct3D.  Get it on Microsoft's Download Page.
- Some users of Windows 98 + Sound Blaster live cards + NVidia video cards are finding the demo locks up on exit, sometimes with the music looping.  Restarting the computer or killing the TournamentDemo.exe application gets you free.
- In 16-bit color, weapons may interpenetrate walls when you get real close.
- If you have any problems, make sure you have the latest Direct3D drivers for your card.
Networking
- Occasionally when the server switches levels, users with high-ping connections may see the "Connecting..." screen appear twice, and reconnect to the server twice.
- When picking up a weapon, sometimes the animations flicker.
- In 3dfx Glide, if you alt-tab away from Unreal while connected to a server, you will time out and be disconnected. If running a listen server, all other clients will time out.
- We have many reports that internet gameplay performance sucks with all games for users with WebTV installed (particularly the version bundled with the Voodoo3 3500). Uninstall it.
Audio
- A3D support is back. For A3D support to work properly, you need the latest drivers from Aureal.
- EAX support is back.
Cosmetic
- Ping doesn't always align right in the scoreboard.
- Ping doesn't show up in scoreboard if resolution X size is less than 640

GameSpy with Unreal Tournament support has been released. It is only for registered users though so if you didnt register, you're screwed!

Here you guys go, word from the Unreal Tournament page of the full UT demo release which works with Glide, Direct3D, and OpenGL acceleration. Not to mention a software renderer for those of you who are 3D challenged. You can of course check out all of the changes made here. The Gigex guys have posted one of their download tools which are usually super fast. You can also grab the patch Make sure and check out the Shack Unreal Tournament messageboard.

update: A few more locations for the full demo. WarZone FilePlanet 3DGamers Unreal Universe 3DFiles and the patch: 3DGamers Unreal Universe FilePlanet. Thanks Blue

The full version of the new demo (55Mb) is now released. Modem users can download it from Gigex here - this is a resumable download so if your modem connection dies during the 55Mb download you can still get the file without starting the whole download over. Those using really fast connections and those behind firewalls should try here which is a more normal FTP-style download.

The patch for the existing 3DFX demo (10Mb) is also available now. Modem users can download it from Gigex at here - this is a resumable download so if your modem connection dies during the 10Mb download you can still get the file without starting the whole download over. Those using really fast connections and those behind firewalls should try here which is a more normal FTP-style download. 

Win some UT goodies: If you download either version through Gigex, and provide your email address, you could be one of 50 lucky winners (chosen at random) to receive a long-sleeve, black UT T-shirt or be the one lucky winner to get a very exclusive Unreal Tournament leather jacket! Details appear with the download.

Also, as many of you guys know AVault, and subsequently myself are responsible for posting a patch release which apparently was not intended for release. Sorry about that one, here is word from GreenMarine on that whole episode:

A few versions of the final demo that were not intended for release have been released on various news sites. We made these builds of the demo so that server operators could set up servers. Unfortunately, a few unscrupulous server operators decided to release these builds on webpages. This only causes to create confusion. We have been working with GT on synchronizing a release and have been working on final issues with the demo. Specifically, a test patch for upgrading the 3dfx only version of the demo was made available. This patch worked, but lacked the new DeathMatch map being released with the final demo. We pulled the patch, but various news sites had already made it available without our authorization.

File: UTDemo338.exe Size: 55,603,712 bytes Description: This is the final demo.
File: UTDemo338cPatch.exe Size: 9,892,864 bytes Description: This is the patch to update the 3dfx demo to the final demo.