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 no interest in keeping this going, and they would prefer you to play their new titles.
That being said, you also have a right to the play the game that you paid for. If you have a key and you need to reinstall the game with patches required to play online, this is the place to be.
Manual Install via Internet Archive
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.
Install the UT2004 Community Edition
If you’re not technical, this is a UT2004 install rebuilt using a freely made install creator. 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
Notes for Internet Archive Version:
- 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 1920x1080
in the console) - Set
ReduceMouseLag=False
(disabled is actually lower latency), disabled mouse smoothing - Set
MaxClientRate=1000000
to allow your client to receive more than 15000 bytes/sec from servers - Set
UseDefaultDriver=False
to 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
cdkey
file 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=1
to fix the uncommon firewall error
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.- Added a simple benchmark map consisting of 512 Scorpions which can be accessed by typing
open benchmark
in 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.