Since Unreal Tournament 2004 has been pulled from the shelves and from online markets, it is safe to assume that this is abandonware. Epic has given positive encouragement towards communities that are continuing the game so they don’t have to.
Those who paid for the game also have a legal right to be able to use the product they paid for, and if your discs are too scratched or you lost the download link, here are the ways you can get the files.
All versions install a generic key that's banned everywhere.
To play online you will have to supply the key you got when you purchased the game. If you're curious how to change your key, see changing your cd-key in our navigation menu.
Manual Install (Archive.org Edition)
If you don’t mind playing around with a couple files to get it going, this is a zip file that you need to decompress and run the game. Has the current version, plus extra fixes, and works with new master server out of the box.
There is a chance the Archive.org zip gets updated. Our mirror may have an older version. That being said, MuffinCDN should be faster in most cases.
Install the UT2004 Community Edition
If you’re not technical, this is a UT2004 install rebuilt using a freely made install creator (but it’s not signed so AV may get scared). It has V3369 with all exploit fixes, widescreen support, and openspy support so the game will work online out of the box.
MD5: D32889F2A82EC42D8538CA947102996D
SHA1: 7A6B8D72A30C89D7132E4B153AB55856F08BC7B9
Designed for Windows only.
Notes for Internet Archive Version:
This archive contains the complete game patched with Editor’s Choice Edition, v3369, OpenSpy’s master server, and a registry file that you can use to add your CD key to run the game. It is fully patched and online-ready, and has other convenience changes described below. The idea behind this archive is to make it as easy as possible for new or returning players to get into the game without having to muck around with patches/config files. Everything is already done for you, including some servers added to favorites which are frequently populated. You can of course remove them after.
Installation instructions: Move the UT2004 folder to C:/UT2004, run UT2004.reg, finally run UT2004.exe/ut2004-win64.exe in the System folder.
The registry file contains a generic CD key, however you can edit the file to use your own CD key. The 64-bit binary (ut2004-win64.exe) performs better (~150% FPS) but has a few issues (broken FPS cap on modern Windows, broken multipass texture rendering, alt-tab memory leak, no audio pitch without OpenALSoft).
Convenience changes:
- CBP1/2, UCMP1/2/3/4 bonus packs added
- UT2004.exe, UCC.exe, UnrealEd.exe modified to be Large Address Aware (access more than 1GB of RAM, up to 3GB)
- Replaced default master server with OpenSpy (Epic’s master server was shut down)
- Pressing “H” will set NetSpeed to 1000000; you should press this every online map switch to unlock the bandwidth and FPS cap
- Changed the game to start up windowed by default as newer displays may not have 800×600 resolutions which will result in the game hanging on launch (you can change this in Settings→Display→Full Screen, or by typing
setres 1920x1080in the console) - Set
ReduceMouseLag=False(disabled is actually lower latency), disabled mouse smoothing - Set
MaxClientRate=1000000to allow your client to receive more than 15000 bytes/sec from servers - Set
UseDefaultDriver=Falseto take advantage of CaptainSnarf’s OpenALUT2004Fix which fixes voice chat with 3D audio, and also fixes audio pitch in ut2004-win64.exe (courtesy of OpenAL Soft). You can revert this in Settings→Audio→System Driver to go back to standard audio. Please visit https://github.com/main-exe/UT2004-OpenAL to see how to setup OpenALSoft properly - Set
MaxClientFrameRate=144; press “H” to set NetSpeed to 1000000 to unlock online FPS from 90 to 144 - Patch v3369.1-alpha-8 from https://github.com/aldehir/ut2004-patches (original files included in /System/Unpatched) – these patches fix the FPS cap among other things, see the note below*
- Added GNU/Linux binaries (ut2004-bin, ut2004-bin-linux-amd64, libopenal.so [with working voice chat], libSDL-1.2.so.0, libstdc++.so.5) – you must create a
cdkeyfile in the System folder with your CD key to run the game - Added d3d8to9 v1.12.0 (d3d8→d3d9 wrapper for UT2004.exe/UnrealEd.exe)
- Added
IgnoreSP2=1to fix the uncommon firewall error
*A note on the FPS cap: UT2004 uses 1000/x caps by default (…, 125, 142, 166, 200, 250, 333, …). After Windows 7, Microsoft broke the sleep(1) function in the kernel which also broke the FPS cap, resulting in constant “seesawing” between caps, which is why you may want to use UT2004.exe instead of ut2004-win64.exe if you want an accurate frame cap on newer Windows. UT2004.exe is the patched version from aldehir which fixes the FPS cap and has higher precision timing, letting you set it to whatever you want.
To change the FPS cap, simply paste into the console (`) while not connected to a server:
set engine.levelinfo maxclientframerate 240. To see what FPS your game is running at, type stat fps in the console. You can also type getcurrenttickrate to get the exact frame rate at that moment. The 64-bit binary will only cap FPS while connected to a server, as the offline cap is exclusive to aldehir’s patch which adds that functionality.Beware that UnrealEd and the GUI dedicated server is broken in aldehir’s patch; please restore the files from /System/Unpatched if you intend to use UnrealEd/GUI dedicated server. For the extremely slow selection issue in UnrealEd on modern OSes, there is a patch available here: https://github.com/metallicafan212/UE2SelectionFixes.
Bonus:
- Added a simple benchmark map consisting of 512 Scorpions which can be accessed by typing
open benchmarkin the console. This benchmark represents a CPU bottlenecked scenario where the main thread is fully saturated. This can be used to compare different renderers and binaries this game provides (opengl/d3d8/d3d9, 32/64-bit and *nix/win binaries) as well as other changes outside of the game.