GA-Source has an interview with Craig Sparks of NGUSA, the guys behind all those nifty player statisitcs in Unreal Tournament. (Which are currently offline, but the local stats still work)

PlanetUnreal has scored a few new screenshots of the Unreality project which may impress you.

3dfxgamers has posted an interview with Mark Rein of Epic Games. Take a wild and crazy guess what they talk about.

GameSpot UK has posted a massive amount of Unreal Tournament screenshots from what they claim is a final version of the game.

PlanetUnreal has word of an undocumented "mutation" of Unreal Tournament which strips down a level of all the powerups etc making for the "true" deathmatch experience. Check out The Mutation Device.

Here you guys go, word from Mark Rein on the next version of the Unreal Tournament demo release, which will include support for D3D and OpenGL along side Glide. Ripped right from their page at UnrealTournament.com

We're working hard on getting the next version of the demo finished. It will feature support for D3D, OpenGL, Metal, Glide and software rendering. It will include another map but we haven't decided conclusively which map it will be. To use our D3D code will require DirectX Version 7 which Microsoft expects to release on their web site on Wednesday. We'll keep you posted on their progress. We definitely will not ship the demo before Microsoft releases Dx7 for downloading so don't expect the new demo any sooner than Wednesday or more likely Thursday or later.

Brent Metz sends word that he successfully got Unreal Tournament to work under Linux with WINE. To quote Brent: "I personally used the development version straight out of CVS dated 9/19/99 on http://panter.soci.aau.dk/~dailywine/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" class="external but I bet other versions would work too. The sound is a _little_ skippy but otherwise mouse and 3DFX support works 100%. And of course net play works great too. Feel free to share your experiences getting this to work. (I don't have a linux install at home right now, sorry guys)

Final word on the lack of a grappling hook which was being discussed on the Shack UT Board in UT CTF has been posted by PlantUnreal. Here is a bit of the word from Mark Rein:

First of all we're NOT doing a grappling hook. Period. We've discussed it to death and decided it's not our thing. We like the translocator and we think you'll learn to like it too. We've got lots of heavy-duty CTF players at Epic and DE and we've played and played and played and played UT's CTF to ensure it's right. You guys are going to love some of the other CTF maps. But remember we're trying to do things our way not copy someone else's game. If you really love games you'll learn to appreciate the variety available to you not chastise it.

GreenMarine and CliffyB from Epic and the boys are chatting a bit on the Shack UT Messageboard. The latest topic GreenMarine brought up was asking if UT should have 'hit feedback tone' telling a player when damage is inflicted. It looks like GM is gonna put it in the next version thanks to you guys. Also while on that topic GreenMarine sends posted to the GT board (Thanks UnrealUniverse) that there will be no grappling hook in UTCTF. But my messageboard is better. :P

3DGameGeek has word on what to do for dedicated UT servers in a multihomed environment. (Running Win98 SE connection sharing or through a proxy using ip masq etc.

The GA-Source guys have grabbed a hold of the DirectX7 features and slapped em up for you guys to read. On that note DX7 is in fact one of the hold ups for the D3D demo of Unreal Tournament. The Epic guys are waiting on DX7 to go public so they can include the function calls DX7 makes available. We should hopefully see DirectX7 released from Microsoft this week. Thanks Ant

The Unreal Technology page has an update a lot of 3D sound fanatics have been asking for. The current UT demo does not contain 3D sound! Good news is that the next version will in fact contain the sound enhancements so dont sweat it. Also there is a note to server admins asking to turn off the "Tournament Mode" check box which is causing problems.

3D sound acceleration is absent from the Unreal Tournament 3dfx demo while we sort out some recent code changes, but will be in the full demo coming next week.  A big thanks to the A3D guys, Skip McIlvane and Scott Etherton for helping us get the code back up and running.

Also, since it's just crazy UT coverage the last few days I've added the Shack UT messageboard (which is quite busy) link to the right menu.

Some bummer news today for those of you who havent already noticed. It looks like those cool NGUSA UT stats are going to be offline until the next version of UT is released. Have a look at GreenMarine's .plan update over at fingershack.com for details.

Taking WorldStats down will allow NetGames to upgrade their database (they had a new database architecture in the works that will be ready for deployment in a couple days) and allow them to upgrade the machine that does the batching and database management.

The guys at PlanetUnreal have word on how to get some of the non-DM maps to work in DM for the UT demo. Here's the trick:

- Make copies of CTF-CoretDEMO and DOM-SesmarDEMO. These are located in the C:\TournamentDemo\Maps folder.
- Rename the copies to DM-CoretDEMO and DM-SesmarDEMO.
- Now you can join any server that is running these maps in DM mode.

While you're hacking around, you might want to fire up UnrealED which lets you mess around with UT maps according to cannibal.

An interview with GreenMarine of Epic Games that took place recently at ECTS (Well, a lan party during the event) should interest some of you guys.

A bit more word on the D3D version of Unreal Tournament from Mark Rein from Epic here. Here is a bit of what Mark had to say:

As for D3D it's looking like it will be toward the end of next week. We really want to release for DX7 instead of DX6 and that means waiting on Microsoft to release the downloadable version on their site. We're not sure when that is but we hope to have an exact answer from them on Monday. One of the main reasons for doing the demo is for testing and as we plan to ship the retail game with DirectX7 it would be a shame not to ship the demo/test with DirectX7. Although I think our D3D performance is excellent, DX7 provides yet another nice little performance boost that's worth the wait. I'm hoping I can convince the guys to release an extra map that should help ease the pain of the couple of days we might spend waiting for DX7.

he remote admin fix mentioned earlier in Brandon's .plan update is now available on the UT Tech page. Keep in mind this patch is only for server admins and if you aren't running a server you dont need this thing. Dig on this: (Thx Blue)

I've made a fix for the WWW-based Remote Administration - In version 322 this seems to crash some machines instantly and works fine on others.  One of my machines had no problems but the other would crash as soon as I logged in.  If you're a Server Administrator you should download this file and extract it into your TournamentDemo\System directory.  Server administrators only, please.  No-one else needs this fix.

A number of people have been trying to figure out how to get UT to work if you don't have a 3dfx card. Well the tactic I mentioned earlier in comments seems to have been successful. All you have to do is create a blank text file (notepad works) and save it as glide2x.dll in your windows/system/ directory. You wont have 3D accleration of course but you'll at least get to play UT in software mode.

With the UT demo release yesterday Brandon Reinhart of Epic made a couple of .plan updates at fingershack.com. First off he has a tip for those of you who dont like using the orders menu with the V key. Secondly Brandon mentions a fix made to the UT master server which should speed up querying servers for internet play. He also has word on the remote admin tool stuff:

I believe there is a problem with UT creating a new WorldStats account for players each time it starts. I'll look into that and either prepare a solution or integrate a solution into the next demo. Jack has fixed some nasty issues with remote administration. Thanks to Smokey for giving us the heads up on that one. A new remote admin tool will probably be available soon.

The first UT demo review I'm sure of many. Richard Smith of Webdog gives us his 2 cents.