Unreal Tournament 3 Tweak Guide
[Page 4] Patches & Mods
Official Patches
Another major patch has been released for UT3, bringing it up to Version 2.1. The patch has a range of changes in all areas, from gameplay to UI and bug fixes. It also includes all the changes from the previous patches.
Note: If you experience any strange glitches or issues after installing the latest patch, delete 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 tweak them again from scratch.
I will update this section accordingly with details of any future patches so check back often.
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 now Epic has released the first free UT3 Bonus Pack, containing 3 new maps including the classic Morbias and Facing Worlds.
A new free official Titan Pack has also been released, containing a range of new maps, game modes, vehicles and weapons.
It's also 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.
Update: The PhysX Mod Pack is now part of the first Nvidia GeForce Power Pack, and all GeForce 8, 9 and 200 series (and newer) owners can now access the enhanced effects on these custom levels with improved performance courtesy of GPU-based PhysX. Full details of how to enable and configure GPU-based PhysX are on this page of the Nvidia Forceware Tweak Guide.
The next section begins our detailed look at UT3's in-game settings.