This is the public repository for OldUnreal's Unreal Tournament 99 patches. OldUnreal took over maintenance of the Unreal Tournament code base after reaching an agreement with Epic Games in 2019.
Our patches fix hundreds of stability, security and performance problems in the game client, the server, and in Unreal Editor. They also add support for modern platforms and operating systems (such as macOS Catalina), and add new 3d renderers, audio drivers and minor features (such as raw input and high-resolution font/GUI scaling) to better leverage the capabilities of modern gaming systems.
Patch releases hosted here are considered stable enough for widespread use, but they are by no means a finished product. We still release updates on a regular basis.
Legal Disclaimer: This project was approved by Epic Games, but it is not an official Epic project, nor has it been reviewed or tested by Epic.
This repository contains development snapshots as well as official releases.
If you are a modder or beta tester and you would like to test our latest changes, then simply use git to check out this repository. Note, however, that development snapshots may be less stable than the official releases.
Our official patch releases can be found on the Releases Page. If you are a regular player or if you want to play online, then please use official releases only.
[!IMPORTANT] If you want to test out our patches, but maintain the possibility to uninstall them, we strongly urge you to create a backup of your entire UT folder before installing the patch.
We distribute our patches for modern Windows systems in multiple formats. We recommend that you run the exe installer to patch your game.
However, you can also simply unpack the zip package on top of an existing installation of Unreal Tournament. No other actions are needed to install the patch.
The legacy Windows version of our patch is only available as a zip package. You can install this patch by unpacking the zip file on top of an existing installation of Unreal Tournament. No other actions are needed to install the patch.
[!NOTE]
- Some features may be unavailable for Windows XP and Vista systems.
- The patch for Windows XP and Vista is experimental and (mostly) untested.
- Windows XP and Vista support will be removed from future patches.
The Linux version of our patch is only available as a tarball. To install, unpack the tarball on top of an existing installation of Unreal Tournament.
Alternatively, to spare you the pain of using Wine to install the Windows version, you can unpack our patch into an empty directory, which we will refer to as the game directory. You can then install the rest of the game as follows:
[!NOTE] The directory names below are Case Sensitive!
1) Mount the UT (GOTY) cd/image or unpack the GOG distribution with the innoextract tool. We will refer to the root directory of your game cd/image or GOG distribution as the distribution directory. 2) Copy the Music and Sounds directories from the distribution directory into the game directory. 3) Copy the contents of the Textures directory from the distribution directory into the existing Textures directory within your game directory WITHOUT REPLACING the existing files.
[!CAUTION] Make sure you do not overwrite the Texture files that came with the patch, otherwise the in-game text will render incorrectly. 4) Create a Maps directory within the game directory and copy over the unpacked Maps (i.e., map files with a .unr extension) from the distribution directory. 5) Extract all compressed maps (i.e., maps with a .uz extension) into your game's Maps directory as follows. If there are no compressed maps in your game distribution folder, you may ignore this step.
for i in <path-to-distribution-directory>/Maps/*.uz; do <path-to-game-directory>/System/ucc-bin decompress $i; done mv ~/.utpg/System/*.unr <path-to-game-directory>/Maps/[!CAUTION] Please ensure that you do NOT copy the contents of the System directory in your cd/GoG image into the game directory, otherwise the game will not launch!
At this point you're all set.
To install the content from the GOTY cd 2 or bonus packs: 1) Repeat the procedure above with the Maps, Sounds, and Textures directories. 2) Copy the .u and .int files to the game's System directory.
[!NOTE] Our patch includes several 3rd party libraries, including SDL2 and OpenAL-Soft. These libraries were built and tested on Debian-based systems. However, if you run a non-Debian-based distribution and if you run into any trouble (e.g., audio not working), we highly recommend that you delete libSDL2 and libopenal from your UnrealTournament/System folder and install your distribution's version of SDL2 and OpenAL-Soft instead. Please contact your distro maintainer for instructions.
No other actions are needed to install the patch.
The macOS version of our patch comes as an application bundle. You should drag this bundle into your applications library. If you're installing our macOS patch for the first time, you will also need to copy the data files from an existing UT installation into your Application Support Library. To install the data files, you need to do the following:
[!CAUTION] Please ensure that you do NOT copy the contents of the original game's System directory into ~/Library/Application Support/, otherwise the game will not launch!
After installing the data files, you should be able to launch the UnrealTournament app!
This YouTube clip shows you what the installation procedure is supposed to look like on macOS.
Windows and Linux systems will need a CPU with SSE2 instruction set support. In practice, this means all 64-bit x86 CPUs, all Intel CPUs since (and including) the Pentium 4, and all AMD CPUs since (and including) the Athlon 64 are supported.
Windows systems will need to run Windows 7 or later, although a custom stripped-down patch is available for Windows XP and Vista.
Linux systems will need GNU libc 2.19 or later.
macOS systems will need a 64-bit x86 or Apple Silicon CPU and Mac OS X Mavericks (10.9) or later. Some rendering features may be unavailable on macOS.
Besides fixing hundreds of bugs, the OldUnreal UT patches also add features such as:
A full list of patch features and changes is available in the Release Notes.
While the OldUnreal patches preserve compatibility with the original game as well as most mods made for the original game, there are a couple of compatibility issues people should be aware of.
All UnrealScript mods for UT v451b or lower will continue to work in OldUnreal's v469 or later. The following native (C++) mods for older UT versions will not work in v469:
Most UnrealScript mods for UT v451b or lower will continue to work on OldUnreal's v469 or later servers. Some old anti-cheat mods such as CSHP4 and AnthChecker will reject v469 clients, however.
The following native (C++) server mods will not work in v469:
OldUnreal's patches add some new UnrealScript features which should not be used in mods that target compatibility with UT v451b or below. We are working on a document that lists the new features and that describes best practices for developers.
Native mod developers may want to use our updated UT SDK, which will be hosted in this repository.
[!IMPORTANT] Our Windows and macOS binaries are digitally signed, but malware/virus scanners may occasionally still flag them as potential malware because our signing certificate is still building up reputation. Additional information can be found here.
[!NOTE] We are all volunteers who work on Unreal and Unreal Tournament in our spare time. If you like our work, then please consider making a small donation here. Please make sure to mention Unreal Tournament in your donation note!
We are more than happy to accept other contributions too. Some of the things we could use help with are:
You can use our issue tracker to file bug reports. Reasonable feature requests for Unreal Editor can also be posted there. Please do not ask for new features in the game itself as these are out of the scope of our project.
[!IMPORTANT] Before filing a bug report, please use the GitHub search function to see if someone else has already reported the same issue. If you find an issue that looks similar to yours, then please submit a comment in the existing issue report. When filing a bug report, please include relevant details about your setup (i.e., your operating system and version, your UT version and build date, mods you are using) and describe how we can reproduce the problem.
The primary developers for OldUnreal's Unreal Tournament patches are: AnthraX, Higor, Buggie, Dots, and Smirftsch.
We also want to recognize the hard work of the many beta testers and contributors in our community:
Localization credits:
Finally, we want to express our sincerest gratitude to the following people: