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======================================================================== Unreal Tournament 2003 DEMO "README" notes. ======================================================================== Developed by : Digital Extremes & Epic Games Distributed by : Atari ======================================================================== Please note that due to the pre-release nature of the product the demo can't be supported by Infogrames technical support. ======================================================================== 0 Special information about the UT2003 Demo 0.1 Reporting bugs and suggestions 0.2 Features of the demo compared to the full version 1 System Requirements 1.1 Minimum System Requirements 1.2 Recommended System Requirements 2 Performance 2.1 Resolution 2.2 CPU speed 2.3 Memory 2.4 Considering upgrading? 2.5 Getting better performance 3 Troubleshooting 3.1 Crashes 3.2 Sound issues 3.3 Network play issues 3.4 Control issues 3.5 D3D issues 3.6 NVIDIA 40.41 drivers 3.7 GeForce 4 MX/Go issues 3.8 Radeon 7x00 issues 3.9 TNT2/ Kyro II/ Voodoo 3 issues 3.10 OpenGL issues 3.11 DirectX 8.1b 3.12 Game is starting up windowed 4 Controls 4.1 Keyboard 4.2 Mouse 4.3 Speech menu 5 Dedicated Network Servers 5.1 Explanation 5.2 Launching 5.3 Multiple server per machine 5.4 General performance guidelines 5.5 More information 6 Benchmarking 6.1 Overview 6.2 Possible issues 6.3 Further information 7 Online Stats Tracking - UT2003stats 7.1 Overview 7.2 Turning on *your* Stats Tracking 8 Useful Web Links 9 Copyright Notice ======================================================================== 0 Special Information about the UT2003 Demo ======================================================================== This is the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo version. As of this release, we're a few weeks away from shipping the final game. Therefore, some features aren't finalized, and some gameplay tweaks remain. We welcome bug reports and gameplay suggestions for the demo. Please send all feedback to: ut2003bugs@epicgames.com The team can't reply to messages individually, be we do take the feedback into consideration. The full game differs in the following ways compared to this demo: * Textures in the full game are, on average, 2X higher resolution than in the demo. The textures in the demo were reduced because of download size limitations. * The full game includes over 30 maps, compared to the 4 in the demo. * The full game includes over 50 characters, versus 4 in the demo. * The demo only supports "instant action" mode, Internet and LAN play. The full version also contains the single-player ladder, enabling you to play through the game while managing a team roster. * The demo doesn't include the Unreal editor and content-creation tools which ship with the final game, enabling you to build new levels, modify existing ones, and create game mods. * The full version includes 6 mutators offering new variations on gameplay, versus 2 in the demo. ======================================================================== 1 System Requirements ======================================================================== 1.1 Minimum System Requirements ------------------------------- Operating System: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP (Linux in separate download) Processor: Pentium III or AMD Athlon 733 MHz processor Memory: 128 MByte RAM Hard Disk Space: 300 MByte free Video: 16 MB TNT2-class or other DirectX version 6 compliant video card* Sound: Windows compatible sound card. NVIDIA nForce or other motherboards/soundcards containing the Dolby Digital Interactive Content Encoder required for Dolby Digital audio.* DirectX: DirectX version 8.1 or higher for cards with a hardware transform & lighting unit. DirectX version 8.1b for cards without a hardware transform & lighting unit (e.g. TNT2, Radeon 7000) Modem: 33.6K baud (for modem/Internet play) Internet (TCP/IP) and LAN (TCP/IP) play supported. 1.2 Recommended System Requirements ----------------------------------- Operating System: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP (Linux in separate download) Processor: Pentium III or AMD Athlon 733 MHz processor Memory: 256 MByte RAM Hard Disk Space: 500 MByte free (300 MByte for game, 200 MByte swap) Video: NVIDIA GeForce2 or ATI Radeon (32-128 MB VRAM recommended)* Sound: Sound Blaster Audigy series sound card* DirectX: DirectX version 8.1 or higher for cards with a hardware transform & lighting unit. DirectX version 8.1b for cards without a hardware transform & lighting unit (e.g. TNT2, Radeon 7000) Modem: 56K baud (for modem/Internet play) Internet (TCP/IP) and LAN (TCP/IP) play supported. * Indicates device should be compatible with DirectX, version 8.1 or higher. ======================================================================== 2 Performance ======================================================================== 2.1 Resolution -------------- The resolution in which you run the game will have the greatest impact on performance if you are not in the lucky position of running the latest top of the line graphics cards. Running at 640x480 in 16 bit mode or even 512x384 in 16 bit mode should provide decent performance even on older hardware. 2.2 CPU Speed ------------- The game is also very sensitive to CPU speed, memory bandwidth, and cache performance. Thus, it runs far better on leading-edge processors like those of AMD and Intel. See section 1.2 for a guideline on recommended specs. 2.3 Memory ---------- Unreal Tournament 2003's performance is highly dependent on the amount of RAM you have in your machine, and the amount of memory that is available. Machines with less memory will access their hard disk more frequently to load data, which causes sporadic pauses in gameplay. Thus, if you have a 128 MByte (or less) machine, you should make sure that you don't have other unnecessary programs loaded in memory when playing Unreal Tournament 2003. How the game will perform under different RAM conditions: * 64 MByte or less: lots of swapping * 128 MByte: minimal swapping with default settings * 256 MByte: might swap in rare cases with highest texture detail * 512 MByte or more: shouldn't swap 2.4 Considering upgrading? -------------------------- For people considering upgrading their machines, here are some tips based on our experience running Unreal Tournament 2003 on a variety of machines: 1 The biggest performance gain in Unreal Tournament 2003 comes from having a state of the art graphics chip. 2 The next upgrade that tends to improve Unreal Tournament 2003 performance is upgrading your CPU. 3 Finally, lots of RAM helps. With memory prices continually falling, it's now reasonably affordable to upgrade to 256 MByte of system memory. 2.5 Getting better performance ------------------------------ By default Unreal Tournament 2003 picks hardware specific default values the first time you run the game which should result in decent performance but there is always room left to tweak. Resolution and texture detail levels have the greatest impact on performance, if you have a fast CPU. So you might want to tweak the settings to achieve the visual quality / performance tradeoff you desire. If you have a fast graphics card, but a rather slow CPU you might want to lower the World detail setting in the detail settings menu. Last but not least, if you have both a fast CPU and a fast graphics card you shouldn't have to read this :). ======================================================================== 3 Troubleshooting ======================================================================== 3.1 Crashes ------------ If Unreal Tournament 2003 stops with a "Ran out of virtual memory" message, you need to free up more hard disk space on your primary drive (C:) in order to play. Unreal Tournament 2003's large levels and rich textures take up a lot of virtual memory. We recommend having 500 MByte of free hard disk space for running the demo. On cards without hardware accelerated transform & lighting the game will crash reporting a problem in "DrawIndexedPrimitive" with DirectX 8.1. The problem has been addressed by Microsoft for DirectX 8.1b. Please upgrade your version of DirectX - see section 3.10 for instructions how to do this. 3.2 Sound issues ---------------- If using a 3D sound accelerator such as the Sound Blaster Audigy series sound card, you can go into "Options/Audio" to enable EAX 3.0 by selecting the "Hardware 3D Sound + EAX" options. You need to upgrade to the latest version of Sound Blaster Audigy drivers in order to get acceptable 3D sound performance. Using Unreal Tournament 2003 in conjunction with earlier versions of the drivers MAY cause severe performance problems (major slowdowns in the order of 30-50% while playing sound) in which case you should change the option back to the default "Software 3D Audio". If your computer is hooked up to a 5.1 speaker system, you should go into "Options" and turn on "Hardware 3D Audio" to take advantage of 360-degree sound panning, which rocks. 3.3 Network play issues ----------------------- The minimum speed connection for acceptable Internet play performance is a 33.3K modem connection to your Internet Service Provider. Known network play issues: * When a new player enters a network game, clients may experience a 1/4-second pause while the mesh, skin, and other data is loaded for that player. This is by design. * Unreal Tournament 2003's Internet play performance is highly dependent on the bandwidth of your connection, the latency (ping time), and the packet loss. The game is designed to be playable up to 300 msec ping times, 5% packet loss, and 33.3K connection speeds. Performance degrades heavily under worse latency, packet loss, and bandwidth connections. 3.4 Control issues ------------------ Some PC keyboards can't recognize certain combinations of 3 or more simultaneously pressed keys. 3.5 Direct3D ----------------- Please ensure that you are running the latest drivers for your graphics card as Unreal Tournament 2003 stresses the hardware and drivers to a greater extent than most available games and we rely on a number of bug fixes hardware vendors incorporated into their latest drivers. To obtain the latest drivers please visit the website of your graphics card manufacturer. 3.6 NVIDIA 40.41 drivers ------------------------ The NVIDIA 40.41 drivers are known to have visual flaws and performance problems (hitching) with the Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo which are not present in the 30.82 drivers. The issue has been addressed by NVIDIA and future drivers released by NVIDIA will contain the appropriate fixes. If you are currently running the 40.41 drivers please either downgrade to 30.82 or install newer drivers when available. 3.7 GeForce 4 MX/Go issues -------------------------- With GF4 MX/Go cards you might experience graphic corruption in 32 bit mode. The problem has been addressed by NVIDIA and upcoming drivers will contain the fix. A workaround for now is to play the game in 16 bit mode. 3.8 Radeon 7x00 issues ---------------------- Radeon 7x00 cards exhibit a couple of visual flaws like the hanging banners in BR-Anubis which will be addressed by us for the full version of the game. We recommend using the 7.76 drivers (Catalyst 2.3) drivers as they incorporate fixes for running the Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo. 3.9 TNT2 / Kyro II / Voodoo 3 issues ------------------------------------- Due to the lack of certain key functionality like texture compression and cubemap support TNT2, Kyro II, Voodoo 3, G400, ... cards won't be able to run the game at the full visual quality. As uncompressed textures are much larger than the compressed ones we have to drastically scale down both size and color depth of the textures in order to fit them into video memory. This means you will notice banding artifacts - especially in the menus. The lack of cubemap support means that reflections won't look correct though during gameplay you'll most likely be hard pressed to spot the difference. 3.10 OpenGL issues ------------------ The OpenGL renderer is not officially supported on Windows but might be a good choice on certain hardware / driver combinations as it might trigger fewer bugs in drivers. Unless you are experiencing serious visual flaws there is no reason to change to the OpenGL renderer though. Unlike Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2003 was designed around D3D and offers the best performance and visual quality with the D3D renderer. Also please keep in mind that the OpenGL renderer is still work in progress and has higher system requirements than the D3D renderer. E.g. it relies on the presence of texture compression which rules out e.g. TNT2 cards. The OpenGL renderer is known to not work correctly with pre-7.76 ATI drivers. 3.11 Obtaining DirectX 8.1b --------------------------- DirectX 8.1b contains bug fixes in the DirectX runtime that are required for the game to run on cards without hardware transform & lighting. E.g. TNT2, Kyro I/II, Voodoo 3, Radeon 7000, ... DirectX 8.1b will be included on the retail CD. If you are running Windows 98/ME/2000 you can download DirectX 8.1b using the below link. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/downloads/drx81.asp For Windows XP you have to install QFE 321178 to upgrade your version of DirectX to 8.1b http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q321178 Please note that Windows XP Service Pack 1 contains this fix. http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsXP/pro/downloads/servicepacks/sp1/default.asp 3.12 Game is starting up windowed --------------------------------- If the game fails to obtain keyboard focus when launching it will start up windowed. In this case you can click on the window and press ALT-ENTER to switch to fullscreen mode. ======================================================================== 4 Controls ======================================================================== 4.1 Keyboard ------------ You can bind new keys to controls by clicking on the "Controls" tab of the Preferences menu inside of Unreal Tournament 2003. There are many controls to bind. 4.2 Mouse --------- Although you can rely solely on your keyboard to move around in and interact in Unreal Tournament 2003's 3D universe, using both the keyboard and mouse simultaneously gives you much more fluid and responsive control. When you use the mouse to control your rotational movement and aiming you gain a degree of precision and speed that players using keyboard-only controls can't touch. The keyboard is best used for simple lateral and forward/backward movement, and for jumping. To master the default controls in Unreal Tournament 2003, keep your left hand on the keyboard, using the arrow keys for movement, the 0-9 keys for weapon selection, and the space bar for jumping. Your right hand operates the mouse, controlling rotation, aiming, and firing. Of course, you can customize these controls to suit your preferences via the Options Menu. 4.3 Speech Menu --------------- Press the 'V' key to open the speech menu. You can now select various commands and taunts. Under the Orders submenu you can select a job to assign to a teammate. If your bot is a teammate they will automatically carry out your orders. The available orders are: Defend the Base. The ordered bot will immediately make his way to your base and protect it from enemy attack. Cover Me. The bot will find you and follow you attacking enemies that you encounter. Assault the Base. Orders the bot to go offensive. In CTF this order is replaced with "Capture the Enemy Flag." Hold this Position. The bot will find your current location and try to protect it from enemy attack. Freelance. Releases the bot from previous orders. A freelancing bot will make their own battlefield decisions. If you give an order to "All" then every bot on your team will attempt to complete the order. If you look at a bot the speech menu will have the option to "Order This Bot." ======================================================================== 5 Dedicated Network Servers ======================================================================== 5.1 Explanation --------------- For optimal network play performance, you can launch a dedicated copy of the Unreal Tournament 2003 server on a computer. This improves performance compared to using a non-dedicated server but, of course, since it ties up the PC. Anybody may freely run dedicated servers on the Internet; you don't need to get permission or fill out any paperwork. 5.2 Launching ------------- You can launch a dedicated server by going through the regular Unreal Tournament 2003 menu, select "Host Multiplayer Game | Game & Map, setting the appropriate options under the 'Server' tab, being sure to check 'Dedicated Server'. This is what you'll want to do for quick LAN games where you have an extra machine sitting around that can act as a dedicated server. Alternatively, you can launch a dedicated server from the command line by running UnrealTournament2003.exe directly (which usually resides in the c:\UnrealTournament2003\System directory, or the System subdirectory of whatever other directory you installed the game in). For example, to launch the level "DM-Antalus", run: ucc server DM-Antalus.ut2 5.3 Multiple Servers Per Machine -------------------------------- Each copy of the dedicated server can serve one and only one level at a time. However, you can run multiple level servers on one machine. To do this, you must give each server a unique TCP/IP port number. The default port number is 7777. To specify a port, use the following type of command line: ucc server DM-Antalus.ut2 port=7778 5.4 General performance guidelines ---------------------------------- We find that an 600 MHz CPU can usually handle about 16 players with decent performance. The performance varies with level complexity and other machine speed factors, so your mileage may differ. Performance degrades as the number of players grows huge. If you're running multiple servers simultaneously, Windows XP/NT/2k outperforms Windows 9x due to its superior multitasking and TCP/IP processing capabilities. For best performance, we recommend having 128 MByte of memory per running server. For example, for running 2 simultaneous servers your machine should at least be equipped with 256 MByte of memory. The Unreal Tournament 2003 server uses up at least 33.38 bits per second of outgoing bandwidth per player (on Internet), so if you run the server on a machine connected by a 28.8K modem, you'll only be able to support one client with decent performance. Dedicated servers that support many players generally require the outgoing bandwidth of a T1 line or better. 5.5 More Information -------------------- Visit the Unreal Technology Page for extensive information about running Unreal Tournament 2003 servers. Some topics addressed there include: * Remote server administration * Linux version of the server (separate download including special README for Linux) * Serving custom levels and game types * Administering public servers that appear in the server list ======================================================================== 6 Benchmarking ======================================================================== 6.1 Overview ------------ The Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo comes with a large variety of benchmarking functionality. The easiest way to utilize it is by starting Benchmark.exe in the System directory of your Unreal Tournament 2003 installation directory. This will bring up a dialog box asking you to pick a resolution and when you press okay, it will run 4 consecutive tests (two level flybys and two botmatches). It is important to not touch the mouse before the final dialog with the results pops up. The result dialog displays the average framerate of the two flybys and the two botmatches. 6.2 Possible issues ------------------- The benchmark will always try to run at the highest detail settings so results will not be directly comparable with cards on which the game can't render at the highest detail level (e.g. TNT2 and Kyro I/II cards). For the botmatches the Benchmark.exe is running a game with just bots, with the player in spectator mode. In case the engine can't run at the highest detail settings the outcome of the botmatch might differ leading to a different botmatch and therefore numbers not comparable to other results. This could also happen when comparing different kinds of CPUs. So either watch the botmatches carefully when benchmarking to ensure that they are the same every time or compare the number in brackets in benchmark.log. If the number is the same, the exact same sequence was rendered. 6.3 Further information ----------------------- In the Benchmark directory you will find a couple of batch files which can be used to run individual tests and to create a big batch file for automating the whole process of running at multiple resolutions. The game will log a lot of information and stats while in benchmark mode and the results can be found in the subdirectories of the Benchmark folder. Of the most interest is the CSV folder, which contains the myriad of stats the engine collects on a per frame basis in the form of a "comma separated variables" file which e.g. can be opened in Microsoft Excel. ======================================================================== 7 Online Stats Tracking - UT2003stats ======================================================================== 7.1 Overview ------------ Unreal Tournament 2003 has built in support for the freely available service UT2003stats. UT2003stats lets you track and display your scoring and ranking and provides gameplay statistical analysis for your Internet games. For a detailed breakdown of your stats visit UT2003stats at: http://ut2003stats.epicgames.com 7.2 Turning on *your* Stats Tracking ------------------------------------ Go to the in-game Settings > Network > UT2003 Global Stats menu. Turn on UT2003stats tracking by clicking the "Track Stats" button, and choose a unique Stats Username and Stats Password combination. This will assign a unique PlayerID handle to you. Note: Your online UT2003stats are *only* as safe as you are with your password. ======================================================================== 8 Useful Web Links ======================================================================== Visit for the latest updates, patches, and community events: http://www.unrealtournament2003.com Information about other Digital Extremes games: http://www.digitalextremes.com Information about other Epic games: http://www.epicgames.com Latest news from the Epic development team. Great resources for programmers, mod authors, and enthusiasts: http://unreal.epicgames.com Find out more about Atari Products: http://www.atari.com ======================================================================== 9 Copyright Notice ======================================================================== Ogg Vorbis Copyright ⌐ 2001, Xiphophorus MathEngine and Karma and the MathEngine and Karma logos are registered trade marks or trade marks of MathEngine PLC, used under license. Unreal« Tournament 2003 ⌐2002 Epic Games, Inc. Raleigh, N.C. USA. Unreal and the Unreal logo are registered trademarks of Epic Games, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners. Unreal Tournament 2003 was created by Digital Extremes and Epic Games, Inc.. Manufactured and marketed by Infogrames, Inc., New York, New York, a subsidiary of Infogrames Entertainment, S.A., under license from Epic Games, Inc.