Once you’ve downloaded that file into your Bonus_Packs folder, close all of the open windows and go on to Chapter Two.
Chapter Two
“Starting from a clean slate”
I am assuming that you have some version of the UT game CD to install the game from. There were several versions released over the years. The most common retail version (2 disks) is the one I’ll use to describe how to set up a great player install. This will also be the base install process to build a UT game server. Don’t worry if this isn’t the version you have. You may have only one CD and that is fine too. The retail version that I have came with 2 CD’s. The first CD is all you need right now. The second CD only has additional texture files that were to be used if you had a certain type of a video card (S3), that isn’t made anymore. This does not make it worthless! Hang on to the 2nd CD if you are using the same version of the game that I have. It serves a good purpose much later when we get into the UT “Tweaking” chapter. I know that there is also a “Championship” version of the game and a “Game of the Year” version. Note that if you have the game of the year version, you will not need to install the UT436Patch as the Game of the Year version has the 436 patch already built in. This game also came bundled with some sound card driver software a long time ago and sometimes with other games. You may even already have the game installed on your machine right now. This is OK. I’m going to describe a way to install the game again but in a new place so as not to affect anything you already have installed. This way, if anything goes wrong, you can’t blame it on this manual and you can just go right back to your last install and start it up just like normal. In your C:\Play_UT folder make another folder and name it exactly like this: UnrealTournament. All one word. Double click to open it. From within the address bar above the folder, copy the path: C:\PlayUT\UnrealTournament or just copy it right from this document.
Here it is for you: C:\Play_UT\UnrealTournament
Now close that window and get back to your desktop.
Follow these directions closely step by step.
Insert your game disk into the CD drive and the install should start automatically.
The first screen is labeled Unreal Tournament options. Select “Install”
The next screen just confirms that you want to play in English. Click “Next”
The next screen is the end user license agreement. Click “I Agree”
This next screen is the destination folder screen. Delete whatever is listed currently and paste in the path you copied earlier which if you don’t know how to paste it in then just type in this: C:\PlayUT\UnrealTournament and click “Next”
Leave checks in all of the boxes for the components screen and click “Next”
Now it says that setup is ready to install, so click “Install”
Depending on how fast your PC is, it may take several minutes.
When it is done, you will be back at the Unreal Tournament Options screen where you started. Do not click Play. Click on “Finish” for now.
Now we’re ready to apply the 436 patch. Go to your PlayUT folder and open the UT_Patches folder. Double click on the UTPatch436NoDelta.exe file you downloaded earlier. This is called a self extracting zip file. It will unzip itself and begin the executable by itself.
On the first screen that pops up, it will again ask if you want to play in English. Select “Next”
This time, the destination folder is already correct since it always detects the last folder you installed any UT component to. Select “Next”
Now it asks if you are ready to install and all you do is click “Install”
Once it is done, which will take just a few seconds, you’ll be back to the screen you started on where it will ask if you want to play the game or go to the web site, etc. Do not click Play. Click “Finish” again.
Congratulations! The game is installed, and patched too. You can now take your CD out of the drive, as it is no longer required to play the game! Put the game CD in a safe place for future use.
Let’s install the Bonus Packs so that our installation will be complete! Select and open the "Bonus_Packs" folder. Double click the "UTBonusPacks134.zip" file. The WinRar program should open with the BonusPacks 1, 3 and 4 listed. A quick reminder that you should register your WinRar will appear. You can just select close. Double click the BonusPack1.umod file listed. The WinRar program should open another WinRar window but this one only has UTBonusPack listed. Another quick reminder that you should register your WinRar will appear. You can just select close again. Double click on the UTBonusPack.umod file. After a few seconds, another setup screen will appear. Select "Next" to get past the language option screen. Verify the destination directory is where you installed the game (it should already be correct by default), select "Next". At the "Ready to Install" screen select "Install". When it's done, select "Finish". Now repeat these same steps for Bonus Pack 3 and 4. Note: Inside UTBonusPack3 is a file called UTInoxxPack. That is not an error. That is what it is really called. After all 3 of the bonus packs are installed close all the windows so that you're back to your desktop. Reboot just to make sure everything sticks that you just did.
Chapter Three
“The final steps for installing the game”
This section is going to describe common settings for playing the game so you’ll want to do all of these things as I describe:
Select "Start", "Programs", "Unreal Tournament" and then select "Play Unreal Tournament". A screen will appear explaining that the game is detecting available 3D video devices. After a couple of seconds, it will display a list of compatible devices found and the one best suited to use will be highlighted in blue. Select the "Next" button.
Now a screen comes up describing what video card it found and it makes some recommendations about going out to the web to update latest drivers etc. Ignore all of that and select “Next”.
Now the screen will display what detail options the game determined it will use for the best playability based on your PC's ability. These options can be changed later. Here is just a personal note: If the 1st three items listed are preset to “High”, that is a very good sign. Note: I have yet to this day seen a setting higher for the 4th item listed other than “Standard” video resolution”. So don’t feel bad if that’s what yours says. Also don’t feel bad if any of the first three were listed as “Medium”. It will still be playable but you should get a better PC soon if you have a couple of the Quality settings defaulted to Medium or at least get a better video card. Let’s move on. Click "Next".
Last screen finally! Click "Run!" Get ready to turn down your speakers. A little graphic picture will appear that says "Unreal Tournament". It will sit there for about half a minute as the game loads into memory and starts to configure itself. You will have to be patient. Then you may see an outline of a window and then a full white screen for a second and then a black screen and then hopefully the blue word “Precaching”. Remember, this will usually take about half of a minute depending on the quality of your computer. The intro to the game finally begins. It’s like a little movie. (It’s called the CityIntro) You should be able to hear intro-music and an announcer in a female voice after a few seconds giving you the history of how UT was created while it plays the video. Just watch it until it starts over again. It is usually too loud and you should adjust the volume on your speakers, as you prefer. Once it has run through the whole intro once, it will repeat over and over again. Press escape at any time. This will load the UT Desktop. It has a file menu running from left to right across the top. I will cover a few basic settings for you now. Rule of Thumb: Hitting the escape button will always bring you back to the UT Desktop almost anytime during the game. It will also take you right back to the game if you hit it again.
Scroll over the menu to the "Options" box. The drop down menu will auto-open to let you see the options. Select “Preferences”. Depending on how much computer memory you have and the video card you are using, select a new video resolution. If you are on a great system, (500 MHz or better, with a good video card), I would choose 1024 X 768. Many computers will seem to lock at this point. Just wait about 15-25 seconds and the screen will refresh with the new settings asking you to "Confirm video settings change" Select "Yes" if you can see the dialog box asking you this question. If you can't see the box, then just wait 15 seconds and it should reset back to the original resolution of 640 X 480. If you were stuck at that resolution (640 X 480), I'd consider getting a better computer to play this game or again, at least a better video card. For us lucky ones, let’s move on. Just beneath the resolution setting is the Color Depth setting. Make sure if possible, that this is set to the same thing your regular windows desktop is set to. So if in Windows you are using a color quality of medium a.k.a. 16bit or Highest a.k.a. 32bit, please be sure that UT is set to the same quality. This will make a big difference later on, when you try to open a utility for tweaking, which I explain later in (Chapter 4). The GUI Mouse speed setting determines how fast the mouse moves while you're in the "desktop mode" in the game. You may want to slide it to the right if your mouse seems to be moving too slowly. Adjust it as you like to a speed you feel comfortable with. Leave the rest of these options alone but do not select the close button at the bottom right now. We still have several other option tabs to visit on this preferences tab window.
Select the "Game" tab now. Clear, (uncheck) the check box for “ngStats Local Logging”. You won't use this unless you compete against everyone else in the country that has this enabled. It keeps a national database of scoring based on your own player to determine who is best. Uncheck it. (The last I heard this feature doesn’t even work anymore, in any case.) Leave the rest of these options alone.
Select the "Input" tab now. Mouse sensitivity is preset to 3.00. This is how fast you look around in the game with the mouse. It also controls how fast your player turns to aim and shoot etc. I would leave the rest of the options alone until you really know what they do. Remember where this setting is because once you play for a while, you’ll want to come back here and tweak this setting to better fit your aiming and movement needs.
Select the "Network" tab. Click the little dropdown arrow next to where it says "Modem (28.8k-56k). Select the proper speed of your internet connection. Most of you with dial up modems need the top option. If you have a high-speed cable modem, DSL connection or satellite, choose the "Cable, xDSL" option. If you know you’re on your own LAN, select LAN. Don’t chose LAN if you’re not actually on one. Go to the next step.
Choose the Audio tab now. Move all of the sound adjustment slides to the middle. There are 3 total. Put a check in the "No Mature Taunts" box if you don't want to get in trouble for the robot players cussing at you. Leave the Hardware 3D Sound and Surround Sound off unless you're positive your system and soundcard are awesome and support these functions. If you turn them on and don't have the right soundcard, the game will play poorly. Leave them off for best results.
Select the "Controls" tab. These settings are pretty much good to go. If you know what they are and what you're doing, change them if you wish. I leave them alone. It would be good to look them before you play so you'll know how to use the keyboard a little better. If you do actually mess them up some how, you can always select the reset button at the top right of this option page to restore all of this page’s settings back to the default settings.
Select the "HUD" tab. This is your “Heads Up Display”. It determines what info is available to you while you play the game. Feel free to adjust this but I've always liked the default settings myself; I usually leave it alone. Click the close button at the bottom of the HUD screen's option dialog box.
At this point, you have most of everything you will need to play the game by yourself, or on-line. You may want to start a practice session, or start the single player Unreal Tournament. The tutorial offered with the Unreal Tournament option is actually one of the best I’ve seen. There is a lot more to know about this game and its settings, but this should easily be enough to really get you going in the right direction. Now that you are ready to play, I’d start off with the tutorial by Scrolling over to the “Game” option on your UT DeskTop and select Start Unreal Tournament from the drop down menu. The first screen to appear allows you to create a practice player. Type in a name and select a player class and skin and face and all and then click the red arrow on the bottom right side that is blinking. Now, you see a challenge tier and only Deathmatch is an option. Click that same red arrow again. Notice now that DM-Tutorial is highlighted in yellow even though there is an arrow pointing to a map named Oblivion. Click the same red arrow again and make sure your speakers are turned up so you can hear the female announcer voice. She will teach you the very basics of playing. Run through the tutorial at least a couple of times and Rule of Thumb: Pay attention to what she says!
First be sure to set up your player the way you want it to be. Go to "Options" in the file menu and select the player setup option to see what is available. People who you will eventually meet playing online will come to recognize you by the skin you choose. If you want to go straight for some good practice sessions, without playing against the challenge tier try selecting "Game" from the file menu on the UT Desktop and choose the "Start Practice Session" option. It's a blast and you get to be in control of which maps you play, how many kills before you win and how many bots you fight, and how good the bots are in the game. You should be good to go for playing at this point! Keep reading for game tweaks and other cool stuff.
Note: Sometimes errors do occur. No system is immune from this. Usually what will happen is the game will stop and boot you out to your desktop. Then several seconds later, you will finally see a Page Fault error of some kind or a General Protection Fault Error. It happens! Don’t fret. Reboot the game. Now if this error keeps happening, make sure you have the latest Direct X installed along with the latest video drivers for your video card and latest sound drivers for your sound card. If you still have problems, register for free at our website and ask us on the forum for help. We will help you!
Hopefully, everything went smoothly for you up to this point with this instructional manual. If you care enough like I do, and you found errors within this document, please report them to me at Hermskii@Houston.RR.Com. I’ll try to correct them promptly. Good luck with playing the game, and I hope to see you in our forum at www.RedeemerInsanity.com soon!
If you want to go into a few little tweaks for UT to improve frame rates or benchmark your video card etc, then please continue to Chapter 4.
Chapter Four
“Tweaks for Your UT Player Installation”
Benchmarking your system with UT:
For those of us geeks that like to compare our systems to ensure we are getting what we are supposed to out of our computers, there are several benchmark tools and programs around. One, that I want to mention in particular is the most standard one used in UT. It is called the “CityIntro” (frame rate count) Benchmark. CityIntro is that little UT movie that plays every time you start UT, unless you have figured out how to disable it already. This is a great benchmark because it will keep on playing over and over again, and is always exactly the same thing each time no matter what computer it is running on. Here's how you do it if you choose to compare your PC against others:
Start the UT game. Once the little intro starts to play press your tilde key (~) to get to the system console window. The system console has a command line at the bottom of it just like Internet Messenger programs have. Type "timedemo 1" without the quotation marks. Immediately, you will see a frame rate counter on the right side of your screen. Close the system console and let the timedemo 1, (CityIntro movie), run through about three times. Now press the tilde key again to bring back the system console and you should see about three lines stating the average framerate for each time demo that you let run. Close the system console to restore everything back to normal. Great! Now you know about what your average framerate is. Remember it so you can see whether the tweaks I show you help or not later. Write it down some where.
VSYNC:
VSYNC is a control built into the game that tries to equalize the refresh rate of the monitor to the framerate of your video card, as I understand it. Depending on how good your video card is can greatly affect the maximum framerate you might achieve with this setting. Here is an example: If you have a great video card on a great system, when you run a framerate benchmark, your results will usually max out at the speed your monitor’s refresh rate is set at which by default for most systems is 60. There are many video cards that can produce well over that amount of Frames Per Second (FPS). If you were to tell the VSYNC setting to ignore the monitor refresh rate, you would in effect remove the max speed limit from the video card and you would achieve higher frames per second which would usually mean a much smoother picture. Generally any thing above 60 FPS is considered excellent and everything above 60 is supposed to be invisible to the human eye. If you ran the benchmark described above, and were stuck at a flat 60 or 75 or whatever your monitors refresh rate is; then I suggest that you do the following and retest to see what your card can really do. If when you benchmarked earlier and you got a score of less than 60, I’d leave this setting alone for now until you get a better video card or computer. It is my opinion that the game is very playable at anything over 30 FPS.
One more note about this setting, and this has always been odd to me:
The default is set to “False”. We are going to set it to “True”, which when I read it would mean that we are turning it ‘on’, when in fact, we are turning ‘off’. Don’t ask me why, but this seems backwards to me.
How to Disable VSync to see what your video card can really do:
Start the game up and begin a practice match.
Hit the tilde (~) key.
Type the word preferences in the command line and hit enter. (Note: Some systems will crash right here if they have their Windows Screen Resolution and Color Quality set to a different setting than the UT Video Resolution and Color Depth settings. If this happened to you, go back up to Chapter 3 and reset these values and restart the game.)
Wait for up to 15 seconds on some machines for the Preference screen to open.
Click the + next to Rendering.
Click the + next to D3D.
Scroll to near bottom and change UseVSync=False to UseVSync=True.
(I also would also set Coronas to False and Volumetric lighting to False. I do this to get rid of the misty rings of light you see around lights in the game like the moon on a very humid night and I turn off the volumetric lighting too because it create a haze appearance which to me reduces visibility.)
Close Preferences window.
Close System Console window.
Close UT game.
Relaunch game and run CityIntro Benchmark again to see the Average Frame Per Second improvement.
How to use the OpenGL Renderer:
(Print these instructions if you can)
OpenGL is a rendering method your video card may be able to use to give you slightly better graphics in the game. Most semi modern cards can or do have this ability. It may be to your advantage to try the UT in this mode. If you want to give it a shot, just follow the directions below.
1. Go to your C:\Play_UT\UnrealTournament\System folder.
2. Rename the file called OpenGLDrv.dll to OpenGLDrvOriginal.dll
3. Go to this link and download this zip file to your computer:
http://cwdohnal.home.mindspring.com/utglr/utglr28.zip
4. Unzip the file and copy the OpenGLDrv.dll to your C:\UnrealTournament\System folder.
5. Start the game and from the UT Desktop select options.
6. Select Preferences.
7. On the Video tab, select the Video Driver "Change" button.
8. A “Change Video Driver” option window will open. Select “Yes”.
9. The “Unreal Tournament Video Configuration” window will open.
10. Click the radius for “Show all devices”.
11. Highlight “OpenGL Support”.
12. Select “Next”.
13. Select “Next” again.
14. Select “Run”.
Done!
Here is where the 2nd CD for UT can be used. It contains many 3D textures that will replace the corresponding standard 2D textures in the game, when installed. If you have the 2nd CD, put it in the drive. It will autorun, and you can then install the textures. They take up quite a bit of space (about 500mb), be sure you have room on your drive before proceeding. They are worth the space however, as the game looks much better with them installed.
If you are using the OpenGL driver and have the S3TC files installed from the 2nd UT CD, you enable them from within the game. Again hit the tilde key, and type PREFERENCES. On the menu that opens, select Renderers and then OpenGL Support. Now, find the section called USES3TC= False and change it to True. Close everything and reboot. Restart the game and check it out! You should have better frame rates and the picture should at the very least seem far more colorful!
If you don’t think it’s working properly, or if you decide that you prefer D3D as your renderer, then all you need to do is to repeat steps 5-14 while selecting D3D instead of OpenGL in step 11.
It is not necessary, but you may also change your OpenGLDrv.dll file back to the original one. Go back to your C:\UnrealTournament\System folder and delete the OpenGLDrv.dll file. Then just rename your original file back to its original name.
Making the game start a little faster: (Don’t do this step yet if you are planning on benchmarking any of the tweaks I listed using the CityIntro TimeDemo 1 benchmark)
One thing that you can do to make the game start a little faster than normal is to reduce the amount of memory that gets allocated to show you the intro clip in the first place. When you start the game, it always shows you a little intro movie. That entire movie gets loaded into your memory before it runs which explains that long delay before it starts and also explains that word “Precaching” that you see just prior to its start. Many players have disabled the intro movie to save a little bit of their resources and shorten the time it takes to start the game. By disabling the start up movie when you begin the game, it will just launch straight into a UT splash screen instead, at which point you will just hit the escape key to get to the UT Desktop. Here is how you do it:
Go into the folder where UT is installed.
Open the system folder.
Open the Unrealtournament.ini file.
Locate the section that looks like this which is at the very top of the ini file:
[URL]
Protocol=unreal
ProtocolDescription=Unreal Protocol
Name=Player
Map=Index.unr
LocalMap=CityIntro.unr
Host=
Portal=
MapExt=unr
SaveExt=usa
Port=7777
Class=Botpack.TMale1
Now, change the line that says:
LocalMap=CityIntro.unr
to read as
LocalMap=UT-Logo-Map.unr
Close the file, saving the changes. Restart the game to see how much faster it starts. You can just reverse this to return it to the original configuration in the event you choose to do more benchmarking using the CityIntro in the future.
So that is pretty much it as far as installing, patching, configuring and tweaking a good install of UT to play with. There are still tons of additional things that you can find on the internet that may increase the performance of your game. These are just the main things that I usually do whenever I set up a new install for my friends.
I hope this helped you and I encourage you to share this tutorial with friends so that this awesome game stays alive for many years to come. Many of the suggestions I make below in the server section of this manual can also be useful to you for installing skins, voice packs, additional maps more modern patches and even better weapons to your stand alone player install. Many of your questions that haven’t been cleared up may still be answered later in this document so feel free to read on. I bet you learn something you didn’t know even if you’re an old pro with this game.
I will mention several utilities that I have used over the years that have greatly improved my servers. These are tools and items that enable additional functionality in the game as well as tools to assist you in creating a server the easiest way possible. Some of these are just mods to the game that increase the scalability of the game like new gametypes etc etc. Keep reading into Chapter 5 and farther!
For right now, we’d really like to see you on our forum. Please drop by and tell us what you think of this user manual. We’re at www.RedeemerInsanity.com. This is a forum based around a gametype that is nothing more than DeathMatch but with Redeemers only! Our player base is several hundred in size and this group of people has been around for years and years. If you are a GodLike player and are looking for a smackdown, just show up on any of our servers while a regular is home and just try to hold on. You will certainly be severely defeated. Don’t ask us to reciprocate the favor either. We are all usually pretty old and don’t have the reflexes of you teenagers. So come and try to beat us old folk down! Yehaw! If you have a suggestion at this point, email me at Hermskii@Houston.RR.Com. Since this document was originally created, I have finally put up a small website. There, you can find all of the same links that are in this manual with historical references to each of my servers and additional ways to contact me. You can find all of this at the link below:
www.Hermskii.com
Chapter 5
“Setting up your UT Server”
Time to create another installation of UT. Install UT again but this time don’t install the bonus packs or tweak it in anyway other than applying the UT436NoDeltaPatch and when it ask you where to install it to, type in C:\UT_SERVER. This is important because you don’t want to try to run the server from the same set of files that your player install uses. Now go into your C:\UT_SERVER\System folder and scroll down to the UnrealTournament.exe file. Right click it and create a shortcut. Locate the shortcut which is usually going to be last file listed in this folder. Right click it and select cut. Close all of the windows so you’re back to the desktop. Right click on the desktop and select paste. Rename this shortcut to Launch UT Server or whatever you want to call it. Double click it. UT starts up. Hit escape once. Select Multiplayer from the file menu and select Start New Multiplayer game from the drop down. Notice this looks very much like your normal practice session screen but there are some differences. Let’s go through them real quick:
Match Tab:
Category: Here, there is no other option.
Game type: is self explanatory.
Map name: will be the first map the game will play once you launch the server. The map list button is special. This will list all of the maps you cycle on your server. There are limitations. This can only cycle about 32 maps. If you try to cycle more than that, it will kick them out. If you use MapVote which I will go over later, then the map list doesn’t matter at all here. So if you don’t use MapVote, then don’t try to use more than 32 maps. Mutator button is special too. You need to choose the mutators you want to use. Some don’t work with others so don’t be surprised if you choose three or four and only one or none work. Make sure to put a check in the “Always use this mutator configuration” box. Please do put a check in the Auto Change Levels box. This will ensure that your server will automatically try to use the other maps in your map cycle list. No one wants to play the same map over and over.
Rules Tab
Frag Limit: is how many kills someone must get in order to win the game.
Time Limit: will end the game after that many minutes. Make sure this isn’t set too high to avoid people getting sick on one bad map and leaving because the round never seems to end. This is especially true on big maps.
Weapons Stay: makes the weapons on the map stay available for other players as well, even if a player runs over them to pick them up, another will be there immediately for the next player. This is usually good to leave on as I’ve seen clans come in and pick up all of the weapons leaving you with nothing but a pistol.
Tournament: Leave this blank. If you put a check in here, the game will never start unless the specified amount of players join. Only use this if you are really having a tournament.
Max connections: This is a very important setting. This is how many people can connect to your server. This should be based on the amount of upload bandwidth you have. This number should usually be about 1 player for every 36kbps of upload bandwidth you have. So, if you have measured your upload bandwidth and got 360, then you should be able to support about 10 players.
Max spectators: these still count as players as far as bandwidth goes but this allows a person to be in the game but invisible and not playing. They can study every player from this mode so I leave it off.
Force Respawn: this means the second a player dies, they respawn automatically somewhere else rather than having to hit the fire key to respawn. This is good to have a check in if you want to be fair to all of the players especially in a game type like Last Man Standing though I’m sure it is automatically set to force the respawn there.
Settings Tab:
Game Style: has three options I only use Hardcore. Turbo is as you would suspect very fast gameplay. I don’t know what the Classic setting does. Send me an email and tell me. Game Speed: is exactly that. The more experience players prefer this setting to be higher than the default 100%. This setting makes me wonder why there was a Turbo setting under the Game Style section.
Air Control: this lets you determine how much ability to direct a landing of your player when jumping down onto something or falling from something. To be realistic, none of us can control the direct we fall. In this game, you can. Try different setting here. I like to take it down as low as it can go but my players hate it low so I leave it at the default 35%. Translocator: Put a check here if you want them to be a default weapon that all players have just like the Impact Hammer is. Note: some maps can actually disable this feature no matter what you set it one. Just be aware so you don’t freak out when suddenly on a certain map you no longer have your trusty translocator. I used to hate them but once you get good killing with them you’ll wonder how you every played without on. They are great to get players in hard to reach or impossible to reach spots without a translocator.
Bots:
Base skill: How good do you want them to be? Set it here. Don’t make the bots too tough or people won’t play on your server. At the same time, people want a challenge so don’t make them too easy. I have found the experienced or skilled settings work the best usually.
Min Total Players: This means if you have it set to 6 and only 2 real people are playing, the server will add 4 bots in order to meet the minimum setting of 6. Too many bots can cause lagg and/or clutter a map. Not enough makes for a boring time having to hunt for people to frag. You’ll figure this out on your own I’m sure. The configure button is so you can rename bots and set them each up individually. If you have the time I say do it! Auto Adjust Skill: If you put a check here, the bots will automatically play at your level based on how well you are playing.
Random Order: This will use the full cycle of available bots rather than just the same first however many you picked for minimum player load during the game. Put a check in this box or you’ll only see the same bots over and over.
Server:
Finally! We made it to the most important of your setting from within the game!
Server Name: Call it whatever you want.
Admin Name: that should be your player name. This way they know you run the show and they will tell you things that might help your server during the game.
Admin Email: This should be accurate if you want to be alerted to problem players, the server crashing, player special request and all of that stuff. I made this manual based on a request I got from someone who got my email address from this field.
MOTD line 1-4. This means message of the day. When people connect to your server, they get to see a little message pop up for about 3-5 seconds. This message is anything you want them to see but there are restrictions. You get 4 lines and each line can only hold about 35-40 characters of information and even less if you use all capital letters. Advertise Server: Very important! Put a check here if you want your server name to be seen when others search for online games under the Game Type tab you specified earlier. Many people forget to do this and then can’t figure out why their server won’t show up in the list. Put a check in it!
ngWorldStats Logging: This doesn’t work anymore I’m told. It used to send the record of the match to a big server somewhere so people could tell how good they were compared to other players. I would leave this blank since I hear it causes longer delays between maps at the end of each game.
Optimize for LAN: Leave this blank unless you are actually playing on a closed LAN like a LAN party. I don’t know exactly what it does but it affects the network server tick rate to ensure people with awesome pings have an even better connection. Leave it blank if you are planning on having people from all over the city, country or world connect to you server!
Game Password: Maybe you don’t want a bunch of unknown random people playing on your server. Maybe it’s just for you and your clan or just your buddies. You can put in a password here and if someone tried to connect to your server and they aren’t supposed to, they won’t be able to connect without knowing the password.
Admin Password: This is the password that the admin or whoever you gives rights to act as admin on your server must use in order to access special features that regular players can’t get to. One of these is the all too popular KICK or BAN feature. An admin need only to log on as admin while in the game and they will then have command line functions that can alter the game right then, real time!
WWW Username: This is a feature that allows you to log into the Server console of your server. It gives you access to change maps, boot players, effect virtually all aspects of the game from a web based tool. This is very handy to use. Be sure to set a username and password here so that some rotten little punk doesn’t get in on your server and louse it all up for you.
WWW Password: See WWW Username.
Web Server Port Number: This is the port that must be open in order for you to connect to your Server Console from computers any where in the world. I’ll explain this further in Chapter 6.
Dedicated Start and Close buttons: Dedicated is what you should choose in order to completely launch your server. When you hit this button, the server will start up and the game will seem to minimize down to the system tray where you’ll see a little UT icon next to the time in the task bar. If it goes down there and stays on then you’re doing something right. If it minimizes and goes down to the system tray then suddenly disappears, then you are doing something wrong. I will explain these possibilities in Chapter 6. If you choose the Start button instead of the dedicated button, then you have just launched the server and the game at the same time. This is called a listening server and by many standards isn’t as good as a dedicated server. The advantage is that you get to start the server and the game at the same time. The close button will do exactly that. It will close the whole game and server. If I recall, no changes will be saved so don’t go and set up the whole thing and then hit close. At least try to launch it and then just right click on the little UT icon in the system tray and choose Exit UnrealServer. So, if you selected dedicated earlier and the server started and is still running down in the system tray, then you should be able to, after one minute or so, start the player install and search for the game under the tab of the Game Type you chose earlier. NOTE: If you have a firewall installed there is a great chance that you won’t be able to see your own server. Turn it off for right now just so you can see if you have everything else set up right. ADDITIONAL NOTE: If you have a software type firewall, you may have to stop it before it ever even starts in order to see your server in the list with all of the other servers. So, for right now, do whatever you have to do to start up your computer without the software firewall running. Do this quick little test to see if you see your server and if so, just turn the server right off again and turn your firewall back on if you are that paranoid. You must wait one minute or the server listings won’t see your server even if it is there. If you can see it, double click to connect to it and see if you can play. If you can, then exit the game after you look around a bit. Then stop the server by right clicking the icon in the system tray and select Exit UnrealServer. I’m asking you to stop because we have a couple more things to go over. A quick warning that so far, all of this has been pretty easy and doesn’t leave many questions unanswered. Now, we are getting to a part of this where you really need to know how your computer and firewall actually works. Many people choke right at this spot. They say they can’t find their server in the list of servers. This is always because they have a firewall that they don’t know how to configure properly in order to allow packets from the game to reach the internet and vice versa. Don’t send me request to help you with port forwarding on your personal firewall as all of them are different and I won’t be able to help you more than the base load of info I will provide below. See Chapter 6.
Chapter 6
“Additional Considerations”
Considerations: Do you have your computer connected directly to the internet? Is it going through a firewall? Is it a software or a hardware firewall? Do you know what ports are? Do you know what port forwarding is? Are you planning on playing on connecting to play to your own server? Will you be doing that from a different computer or are you planning to play and serve from the same computer. Do you know what redirects are? Are you using any additional mods or skins other than the ones that came with the game? Are you using a dial-up modem? Have you ever seen the Web-Admin Server Console that is built into UT? These are all questions to items that can cause your server not to work at this point. I will be updating this manual to include answers to each of these statements. Until then, you need to do one thing to your server if you are planning to ever play on it. We need to change the default port that it uses so that it isn’t using the same port that your player install uses. Follow along here: Go to C:\UTFILES\UTSERVER\UnrealTournament.ini. Here, you will find a section that looks like this:
[URL]
Protocol=unreal
ProtocolDescription=Unreal Protocol
Name=Player
Map=Index.unr
LocalMap=UT-Logo-Map.unr
Host=
Portal=
MapExt=unr
SaveExt=usa
Port=7777
Class=Botpack.TMale1
Change the Port from 7777 to anything else so long as it isn’t with 10 port numbers of 7777. For instance, set it to 7767 or 7787. My server uses 7757 and my player uses 7777. This will keep traffic through the server ports separate from traffic from the player install ports. This might not be perfect science but it is and has been working well for me and the rule about keeping ports at least 10 ports apart from one another was documented somewhere. Now what we have done by doing this is ensure that the game uses one port range of 10 while the server uses a different port range through the same firewall. Additionally, because we are using 2 totally different installs, we will avoid file sharing errors that may have occurred otherwise. Let me explain another thing about this 10 port range: If the player is using a port of 7777 as they all do since it is the default port to use in UT, then the game will up to the next ten ports in order to broadcast packets to other PCs on a LAN using a port like 7778 and then 7779 may be used to connect to a certain master game server while the next port 7779 will connect to a different game server etc etc. These ports will self adjust if you set the base port to a higher increment of 10 meaning if you set the base port to 10 higher than the default, that would be 7777 + 10 = 7787. So then, the game would use 7788 to connect to PCs on the LAN and 7789 to connect and advertise to master game servers while 7789 would do the same. So hopefully I brought this little example to life for you a little and you can better understand why you can and would want to do this.
Firewalls:
Note: it is usually better to run a server from one box while playing on your server from an entirely different computer. Hopefully you have more than one computer and can do this since hopefully again, you have a multiport router. Back to topic, Firewalls: These can be software or hardware. They basically do the same thing. They are designed to stop unsolicited packets from reaching your computer. All Windows operating systems are hell bent on chattering to the network. They scream out to everyone on the network that they are there and they are willing to talk to anybody. A firewall catches those screaming packets before they get out of your house so no one knows your computer is there. Then it also catches all of the screaming packets from other computers to your house before your computer can hear them and scream back. By doing this, there is no communication between your computer and theirs. This is good for your protection. Now, if you request to see a certain web page, your firewall will let out only that one request to the internet because it is actually doing something for you. It will additionally only let that packet come back home to your computer. (I’m making this far simpler than it really is but you are hopefully understanding this so far). When that one packet gets back, the firewall pats it down, searching for any little cling on hidden packets that may have attached to the one packet you sent out to get a web page. Once the firewall is pretty sure your packet only has what it is supposed to have, it lets it and only it pass back into your computer. This all happens in split seconds provided you are on a high speed connection. Now, if you are trying to advertise to the world that you have a server and you failed to give your server packets permission to pass the firewall, it may or may not allow the packets to even leave your computer and if it does, it may not let them back in so the result would be that when you go looking to see if you can see your server, you won’t be able to see it because the firewall may have blocked your server’s packets from ever going to the advertising master game server. How could you advertise for a home business using bill boards on the highway that you built and painted yourself if the firewall wouldn’t let you out of the house in the first place? If this example doesn’t make sense, then you should stop here and give up on having a server if you have a firewall and don’t know how to configure it. For the rest of you, keep reading.
Read your owners manual for your router/firewall. Software firewalls are sometime hard and other times very easy to configure depending on which one you have. Hardware firewalls are usually a little tougher at first but are almost always easier to better to use in the end. Hardware firewalls for one, don’t use your computer’s cycles to run. They run themselves. The usual way to tell your firewall to allow packets to and from the internet for UT to be able to advertise as a server is to read and follow the directions that came with your router which explain “Port Forwarding” Some people refer to this as opening ports in the firewall. This allows certain programs to send certain types of packets through certain ports in the firewall. This allows the computer to keep itself pretty well hidden from the rest of the world while still being able to talk to UT players and other UT servers. Another example of this is that there are always certain windows to sneak out of your house at night through than other windows. These are usually the same windows you would come back in through too. With all of that said, I’m about to give you a list of ports that you would want to open in order for your firewall to allow a player install to reach the internet and a server install to do the same. Say that I have my player set to use port 7777 (default player port). I would then want to set my firewall to “port forward” ports 7777 – 7787. Many firewalls are specific down to the type of packet to allow through these ports. These 10 ports that we just opened need to be UDP packet type. You would also want to open port 27,900, 8,777 and lastly 9,777. All of these would need to be UDP ports. If you plan to use your web admin tool that is very sweet to use, then you will also have to open the one port you selected above for “Web Server Port Number” This one port will use the TCP packet type. I will not be explaining how to use your webserver so Google it and get the directions from someone else. If time permits, I will eventually POSSIBLY write up something on how I use mine.
I have one PC that is my server. It is a plain PC and I have run my UT server from a computer as bad a s a Pentium 200 before and didn’t get too many complaints. The computer you use as a server doesn’t have to be awesome. It can be an old piece of junk. My server broadcast out to the world that it is a server right through my firewall. I have another computer that I play from. It is also connected to the same router/firewall that my server connects to in order to reach the internet. My player PC is pretty good and should be in order to run this game properly. When I check to see if my server is advertising, this is what I do. I start up the game on my player PC. I go to the file menu on the UT desktop and select multiplayer. From that menu, I select find internet games. Then I select the tab for LAN Servers. Instantly, I see a list that should show me my server. If it does, then I know that the server is at least broadcasting that it exists to my private network. That means that so far I have my ports set up mostly right. I click on it one time. That highlights it in blue. Then I right click on it and add it to favorites. Then I go to my favorites tab and it should be there. Now, I select the DeathMatch tab since that is the type of server I run. At that point, the server list begins to populate. I wait until it finishes and I am able to tell by watching the bottom left section of the window. There, it says that it is pinging servers and how complete it is as far as this task is concerned. When it finishes, it will say how many servers it found running the Deathmatch gametype and tell me how many players total are on those servers. I then click on the little box above all of the servers names. This alphabetizes them. Now I start scrolling down looking for my server’s name. Note that special characters are listed before letters so provided you used regular letters only in naming your server, you may have to scroll for quite some time. Eventually you should reach where your server should be listed. Once I can see my server, I know that everyone else can to and I must have everything set up right to this point. Special Note: I have found that I always have trouble if I play on my server by selecting it from the DeathMatch tab. Don’t do it. For some reason, the pings start increasing until the server crashes over time. So, I highly recommend that you do as I did above and just add your server to your favorites from the LAN Server tab. This will save you tons of time too since you won’t have to wait for the entire server list to populate in order to play on your own server. Another note: If you do add it to favs from your LAN tab, just because you can see it in your favs doesn’t mean everyone else can see it. It is very possible that you can see your server on your network but no one else can on theirs. This is usually because a firewall is blocking it from advertising to the internet but allowing it to advertise to your own network. If you want to be sure others can see your server, you have to be able to see your server from the game type tab (DeathMatch, Capture the Flag, Assault etc. etc.). If you can’t see it there, no one else can either.
If you can’t see your server on the list:
1. Hit F5 to refresh the list because maybe you checked the list too fast after starting up your server and it didn’t have long enough to advertise and update all of the master game server’s lists. If the list doesn’t populate at all, see number 3 and 4 below.
2. Make sure that the advertise server box is checked in the setting on the server tab before you launched the game. See Chapter 5 Advertise Server section
3. Ensure you have “Port Forwarded” the correct ports through your firewall/router using the correct packet types (TCP/UDP).
4. Make sure you have a live connection to the internet. I’m on a cable modem and my connection fails often. Can you surf the web right now? If you can’t there is no way you can push game content out to other players much less advertise your server.
5. Can you see your server on the LAN Server tab? If not, turn off your firewall or recheck the ports that you’re using to make sure they are correct.
If you can see your server on the game type tab, then you are in business! Now you need to play on your server and see what works and what needs help. There are tons of sites available with tutorials that can get you through almost any problem. Remember, this was just a quick and hopefully easy example of how to get a basic server up. The rest isn’t that much harder but it can become tedious so let’s move on if you’re up to it but I’d think that you would want to have your buddies test what you have to this point as everything we do from this point forward is based on you having all of this right up front. If everything is running great and you are ready to apply some skins or voices or new maps or redirect downloads for super fast file downloading from you server, then read on!
Chapter 7
“How do you do this? How do you do that?”
At this point you are either very excited and have a decent server running or you are about to just say “I quit!” I don’t blame you. Try typing this all up from memory. OK, I’m guessing you tested and are happy but your friends say it takes too long to download your files. Why do some servers send them fast and others don’t? Maybe they are upset that the new super cool skin they installed works when they practice on their PC or on someone else’s server but not on yours. Maybe you have a certain mutator that you want to run on your server but you don’t know how to make it work. Let me say that this game is so robust and scalable that there is no way I could ever tell you how to do everything. I will try to talk you through many of these issues listed above.
The main issue that will quickly stop people from wanting to play on your server is that files download to them too slow. What is this all about? Answer: When you connect to a server to play, your PC ask the server for permission to play. The server will say that your PC must have at least all of some certain files to play and will check your PC for them. If it finds that you are missing a file such as a map that you don’t have or a texture to a map or music from a map, the server will start to send your computer that file. Once your computer has all the files that the server dictates you must have in order to properly enjoy playing on it, it will then allow your PC to connect to the game. So if the server has a Bonus Pack and you don’t, then it will force you to download the files from the bonus pack that it is using prior to you being able to play. Some servers send these files at a remarkably fast rate and others seem to take forever. Why? The reason can be a few different things. Maybe the server is hooked up through a 56k modem in which case no matter what you do, it will never ever ever ever send the files quickly. Maybe they are on a slow connection or maybe you are on a slow connection. Try to view a slow connection as a bad road or a road with traffic on it. I don’t care if you have the fastest car in the world; you are not going to be able to go fast on a poorly maintained road or one with too much traffic on it. This is true of slow or poor internet connections. The servers that sends the files to the players at lightning speeds are servers that have utilized a tool that is built into Unreal Tournament called UCC. It is a compression tool that smashes files to half of their original size if not more. Then they upload that / those files to a webserver that is able to send them to other players many many many times faster than the fastest high speed Cable Modem / DSL connection can. Usually these server administrators have had to pay for web space out of their own pocket in order to enable their own server to utilize this option. This option is known as “Redirection”. Some people just call them “Redirects.”
I suggest you stop here unless you enjoy pulling your hair out trying to find the slightest typo which will cause your server to crash every time you start it. I’m being honest. One mistake and there is a good chance that each time you boot up the server, it will crash. The only good news about this is that there is a log that will indicate to you what went wrong. It won’t tell you how to fix it but it will tell you what failed and crashed your server.
First I’m going to explain the simplest of redirects using a fictional map called DM-TestMap.unr. Say that you have this map and you love it and want to share it with the world because you made it and you think it’s the best map ever. That’s great because we always need more mappers. The more maps, the better. Actually, let’s say that you downloaded this map from a website and you want to use it. This will keep it simple since you’ll be able to download them long before you’re able to make them. A map can be a single file map like it will be in this example or someone may have gone to lots of trouble and made it a really killer map with custom textures and music and all of that. So there you are. You have this map file you downloaded on your desktop. You want to be able to practice with it before you put it on your server. So like all of the rest of us, you right click on DM-TestMap.unr and select cut. You go to your C:\UnrealTournament\Maps folder and you paste it in there. You start the practice session. You select the map from the list and you’re playing it. Great! If you start up your server and set it to start with that map and then try to connect to it from your Player install, you will find that even from a PC 2 feet away, the download speed of that map from your server takes forever depending on the size of the file. Here is what you have to do. Buy some web space or get some from a friend. Do this one example before you try to do everything. This way you will see how much work you’re in for before you start and can back out. If you have a true web space somewhere then do the following. Install UT again but this time install it to a folder that is in the root of C: and call it UZ4UT. Install the 436 patch to it and stop there. Go into that UZ4UT folder and make a folder in it called UZ. Copy that super cool map into it and leave it there. Go your programs menu and select run. Type in command and hit OK. A DOS box opens up with a prompt that looks something like c:\docs and settings\YourUserName>. At this point type cd.. and then hit enter. Yes, that says CD.. (like cd period period with no spaces). Do this until you are at the root of c which looks like c:>. Now, type in cd UZ4UT (that is CD space UZ4UT) and hit enter. Then type cd system. Now your prompt looks like this: c:\UZ4UT\system. Type this:
C:\UZ4UT\system ucc compress..\UZ\DM-TestMap.unr
Hit enter. The file compresses and it finishes in usually about 20 seconds with some files taking 20 minutes.
Type “exit” without the quotes.
Go to the UZ4UT\UZ folder you made and now there should be another file in there called DM-TestMap.unr.uz
Tada! You compressed the map. Notice how much smaller it is than the original. Copy it up to your webserver space. Don’t try a ton of files all at once yet as you need one to work before you can figure out how to make the rest of them work.
Go to your server’s system folder and open the unrealtournament.ini file. Scroll down to the section that looks like this:
[IpDrv.HTTPDownLoad]
RedirectToURL=
ProxyServerHost=
ProxyServerPort=3128
UseCompression=True
Modify it so that it looks like this: (Note that proper case is imperative)
[IpDrv.HTTPDownLoad]
RedirectToURL=http://YourWebServer.com/FolderWhereYouPutTheCompressedFile
ProxyServerHost=
ProxyServerPort=3128
UseCompression=True
Save it and close. Start the server up. Set this map as the map to play first. Go to your Player Install of UT folder and delete the cache folder if there is one and all of the files in that folder that end with a file extension of.tmp like cache00001.tmp etc etc.
Start up your player install and connect to your server. It should force your player install to download that map and it should download fast fast fast! If it doesn’t, there is a problem that will be either you used the wrong case for a character in a map or file path name. They have to be exactly what they are in you map folder as what they say they are on your webserver.
This is the entire process for every file you need to redirect. This example was easy in that this map had only one file which was the map itself. Had it been a multifile map, you would have had to compress all of the files using the steps above but there is a shortcut sometimes. If you have several maps for instance, you can use a wildcard in the compression command. It would look like this to compress more than one map at a time:
C:\UZ\system>ucc compress..\UZ\*.unr
Some maps have additional files like say ours had music too. It may have been called DM-TestMapMusic.umx. Maybe it would have had a texture as well: DM-TestMapTexture.utx. Each of these would have had to have been compressed separately since they don’t all share the same file extension. Notice on ends in UMX and the other ends in UTX. If you have a map made of several files, they must all be first copied into the proper folder on the server thus maps into the map folder and music into the music folder. Then a copy of these files must be compressed and then the compressed version has to be uploaded to the webserver. Talk about pain in the butt!
If the server crashes, go into the server folder and then into the system folder. Find the file called server.txt and open it. Scroll to the last section and there it will give the name of the error that may have caused your server to crash. It may say something like failed to load DM-testMap.unr. Hmmm? That would be because we didn’t make sure the T was capitalized in the file name. Correct the error. Restart and try again. Keep doing this until you have worked out all of the bugs with file naming case issues. Finally at some point, it will download fast unless the problem is that your path in your UT.ini file has the typo. It must be the same characters as the path on the actual webserver.
This is all I have to this point. I will continue making this as time goes by so email me for updates. Later! I hope this helped some!
By the way, I will try to keep a link to the most recent copy of this form on my web page at www.Hermskii.com. There you will also find other helpful links and information.
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