Unreal Tournament 3 Tweak Guide

[Page 4] Patches & Mods



Official Patches


Another major patch has been released for UT3, bringing it up to Version 1.2. The patch has a large number of changes in all areas, from gameplay and AI to interface changes, as well as a range of bug fixes. It also includes all the changes from the previous 1.1 patch. Most noticeably there are several new options added to the game Settings menus as of the patch, and these are clearly marked in the In-Game Settings section.


Importantly: Given the large number of changes in the latest patch, I strongly recommend deleting your existing UTEngine.ini, UTGame.ini and UTInput.ini files (See the Advanced Tweaking section for location details) and allow the game to create new ones, then you can tweak them again. If you don't do this you will notice a range of problems and glitches.


I will update this section accordingly with details of any future patches so check back often.



Click to enlarge

Copy Protection


UT3 doesn't use any copy protection as such, it is only protected via a serial key - a valid serial number is required to play online. There is no disc check component, so you do not need to keep your game DVD in the drive when playing UT3, and this is an excellent move by Epic.



Mods


Unreal Tournament is famous for all the modifications that have been developed for it over the years, whether to change certain aspects of its gameplay, or to turn the game into something else all together (total conversions). This is primarily because the game has always been based on the extremely solid and customizable Unreal Engine, and UE3.0 is no exception. Keep an eye on places like the Official UT3 Mod Forums and the BeyondUnreal UT3 ModWorks. I will provide more details of prominent mods here as they are released.


For the moment, it's worth noting that there is an official modification available for owners of PhysX cards - the UT3 PhysX Mod Pack which provides additonal custom levels in which the environment is fully destructible, and there are a range of PhysX-specific special effects. You can see a practical screenshot and video analysis of the various effects in this mod pack in this article.


Epic has released the first free UT3 Bonus Pack, containing 3 new maps including the classic Morbias and Facing Worlds.



The next section begins our detailed look at UT3's in-game settings.