Developed by: Epic Games & Digital Extremes
Distributed by: GT Interactive
To start Unreal Tournament:
Please see the manual accompanying the retail version of the game for instructions on obtaining technical support. Or visit the Unreal Tournament Home Page.
Check out the Known Issues page for update troubleshooting information.
If Unreal Tournament locks up or crashes when you run it, then a list of "Safe Mode" options will appear the next time you run it. To access the "Safe Mode" options directly, start Unreal Tournament via the "Safe Mode" icon available in the Start menu (Start/Programs/Unreal Tournament/Safe Mode). This mode is similar to Windows 95's Safe Mode. It runs with sound, DirectDraw, and 3D hardware support disabled. This way, you can modify your options that may be causing problems, then run the game again.
If Unreal Tournament 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's large levels and rich textures take up a lot of virtual memory. We recommend having 150 megabytes of free hard disk space for running the game, and 300 megabytes or more of free hard disk space for the editor.
Some video cards ship with drivers which do not support Unreal Tournament properly. If you experience any of the following problems, your Direct3D driver may need updating:
If you have any of these problems, please visit our Get A Fixed Direct3D Driver Page on the web.
The sound playback rate defaults to 22 kHz, which is optimal for Pentium machines with MMX. If you have an older, non-MMX machine, you can get better performance (though lower sound quality) by setting the playback rate to 11 kHz in the "Advanced Options" menu.
If using an Aureal A3D 3D sound accelerator board such as the Diamond Monster Sound 3D, you need to go into "Advanced Options/Audio" and turn on "Use3dHardware" to enable 3D sound card support. You need to upgrade to the latest version of Aureal's A3D drivers in order to get acceptable 3D sound performance. Using Unreal Tournament in conjunction with earlier versions of the drivers causes severe performance problems (major slowdowns on the order of 30-50% while playing sound).
If your computer is hooked up to a Dolby SurroundSound receiver, you should go into "Advanced Options" and turn on the "UseSurround" to take advantage of 360-degree Dolby sound panning, which rocks.
Known sound issues:
The minimum speed connection for acceptable Internet play performance is a 28.8K modem connection to your Internet Service Provider.
Known network play issues:
Some PC keyboards can't recognize certain combinations of 3 or more simultaneously pressed keys.
Unreal Tournament'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 32 megabyte (or less) machine, you should make sure that you don't have other unnecessary programs loaded in memory when playing Unreal Tournament.
How the game will perform under different RAM conditions:
The game is also very sensitive to CPU speed, memory bandwidth, and cache performance. Thus, it runs far better on leading-edge processors such as Pentium II's than it does on older ones such as non-MMX Pentiums.
How Unreal Tournament will perform on different classes of machines:
For people considering upgrading their machines, here are some tips based on our experience running Unreal Tournament on a variety of machines:
Minimum system requirement:
Typical system:
Awesome system:
The first thing to do is to increase your minimum desired framerate. UT will try to meet your framerate requirements by subtely dropping detail levels during complex scenes and fire fights. The default MinDesiredFrameRate is dependent on the speed of your computer. If you have hardware acceleration and a 300MHz or better CPU the MinDesiredFrameRate defaults to 30, otherwise it is 20. The higher the framerate, the more aggressive Unreal Tournament will be in eliminating excess special effects and detailing. To change the value open Advanced Options and click on Display. There will be an edit tab for the MinDesiredFrameRate variable. The change will take place immidiately.
If increasing MinDesiredFrameRate doesn't help, try decreasing your texture detail levels in the Preferences window. You can also try lowering your screen resolution.
You can bind new keys to controls by clicking on the "Controls" tab of the Preferences menu inside of Unreal Tournament. There are a lot of controls to bind, so here is a list of defaults.
| Key | Function |
| TAB | Opens a mini system console line. |
| Shift | Hold shift while moving to walk slowly. |
| Ctrl, Space | Ctrl or Space causes your player to jump. |
| Alt | Alt will fire your weapon's primary attack. |
| Pause | Pause will freeze the game. |
| Escape | The Escape key will open the menus. |
| Arrow Keys | The arrow keys will move you forward and back or strafe left and right. |
| Number Keys [0..9] | The number keys cycle through your weapons in order. |
| H, J, K, L | These keys will cause your character to animate in a taunt. |
| F1 | Displays the scoreboard. |
| F2 | Displays the message of the day. |
| F3 | In an Assault game, F3 lists the current objectives. |
| F5 | Allows you to cycle through your teammates viewpoints. |
| F6, F7 | QuickSave and QuickLoad respectively. |
| F9 | Take a screenshot. (Appears in your UnrealTournament\System directory.) |
| F11 | Adjust screen gamma. |
| T | Send a chat message to the public channel. |
| R | Send a chat message to your team only channel. |
| ~ | Open the system command console. |
| F | Drop to the ground and pretend you are dead. (Feign death.) |
| V | Press and hold V to access the speech menu. Use this menu to give orders and taunt enemies. |
Although you can rely solely on your keyboard to move around in and interact in Unreal Tournament'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 easy lateral and forward/backward movement, and for jumping.
To master the default controls in Unreal Tournament, 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.
Press and hold the V key to open the speech menu. While you hold V your mouse will become activated and you can 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:
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."
For optimal network play performance, you can launch a dedicated copy of the Unreal Tournament server on a computer. This improves performance compared to using a non-dedicated server but, of course, it ties up a PC.
Anybody may freely run dedicated servers on the Internet; you don't need to get permission or fill out any paperwork.
You can launch a dedicated server by going through the regular Unreal Tournament "Start Game" menu, setting the appropriate options, then choosing "Launch Dedicated Servers". 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 UnrealTournament.exe directly (which usually resides in the c:\UnrealTournament\System directory, or the System subdirectory of whatever other directory you installed the game in). For example, to launch the level "DM-Zeto.unr", run:
UnrealTournament.exe DM-Zeto.unr -server
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 kind of command line:
UnrealTournament.exe DM-Zeto.unr port=7778 -server
We find that a 400 MHz Pentium II 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. Note that there is no absolute maximum player limit in the game; performance simply degrades as the number of players grows huge.
If you're running multiple levels simultaneously, Windows NT outperforms Windows 95 because of its superior multitasking and TCP/IP processing capabilities.
For best performance, we recommend having 64 megabytes of memory per running level. For example, for running 4 simultaneous levels, 256 megabytes is ideal.
The Unreal Tournament server uses up at least 28.8Kbits 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.
Visit the Unreal Technology Page for way more information about running Unreal Tournament servers. Some topics addressed there include: