READ THIS: Commonly Asked Questions and Solutions

[joeGraf]

Epic people ONLY please.

[joeGraf]

Suported OSes:

WinXP SP2 (32bit)
Vista

[joeGraf]

How can I enter my email address on a UK keyboard?

We are sorry for the inconvenience. You can type it in another application and paste it in.

[DanielW]

Before you post a question, be sure to read the release notes and search the forum for similar issues, since it may have already been resolved.

DRIVERS

You must be on a supported driver! We can't emphasize this enough. From the release notes:

http://www.nvidia.com/
NVIDIA ForceWare 163.71

ATI—http://www.amd.com/
ATI Catalyst driver 7.9 (with the exception of 9x00 cards, which should use 7.8)

SUPPORTED SYSTEMS

The Unreal Tournament 3 Demo requires a personal computer with the following minimum system requirements:

· Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista
· 2.0+ GHZ Single Core Processor
· 512 Mbytes of System RAM
· NVIDIA 6200+ or ATI Radeon 9600+ Video Card
· 8 GB of Free Hard Drive Space

REPORTING A BUG

We need certain information to reproduce problems. Please include this information in your original post, at a minimum:

-Game log - located at My Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3 Demo\UTGame\Logs\Launch.log
-Description of the problem, as detailled as possible
-Video card and driver version
-OS
-CPU and system memory
-If you had a spontaneous reboot, please also include the newest file in C:\WINDOWS\Minidump

[joeGraf]

What network port does the game use?

The game uses port 7777 and you can change that via the command line by adding -PORT=<number>

[Daniel Vogel]

Some people may be seeing hitches while playing the UT3 demo on NVIDIA GPUs in the Geforce 6 and 7 series. This can happen when a new object is rendered for the first time, e.g. when picking up a new weapon, first firing it and so on. We added an option to significantly lessen the impact of said hitches and will enable it by default for the game if it proves to be an overall win.

To enable the option in the demo:

1) Exit the game and open the Windows Explorer.
2) Open the "My Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3 Demo\UTGame\Config" folder.
3) Open the UTEngine.ini file from that folder in a text editor (for example, notepad).
4) Find the [Engine.ISVHacks] section.
5) Under [Engine.ISVHacks] heading, find the line that says UseMinimalNVIDIADriverShaderOptimization=False.
6) Change that line to UseMinimalNVIDIADriverShaderOptimization=True, and save the file.

After that you should see substantially less hitching in the Unreal Tournament 3 demo.

We also recommend upgrading to the latest NVIDIA drivers (163.71 as of the time of this post), as they're always tuning them to make new games like Unreal Tournament 3 run better.

[joeGraf]

Where should I post my problems and/or questions?

Our testers and engineers are reading the sticky threads, so please post there

[joeGraf]

Where are my user files written too?

Logs, INI files, and other user data are all written to:

"My Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3 Demo"

[joeGraf]

Does the demo include linux dedicated server support?

No it does not. However, you can launch a dedicated server using the menus or via the command line. The command line below configures a DM game on ShangriLa with no score limit and a time limit of 5 minutes:

UT3Demo Server DM-ShangriLa?NumPublicConnections=24?GameMode=0?GoalS core=0?TimeLimit=5?ServerDescription="Welcome"?gam e=UTGame.UTDeathMatch? -log=DedicatedServer.log -Login=<yourlogin> -Password=<yourpassword>

[Daniel Vogel]

DXDIAG information

DXDIAG is a diagnostic tool that comes as part of DirectX and helps gather all relevant information about your system and installed drivers. It's usually very helpful to have this information handy and we often ask for it in order to help you out further.

To gather the information, open the "run" menu and enter "dxdiag". After it finishes starting up there should be a "save all information" button you can use to convert the information into text format you can then cut & paste into posts.

[Daniel Vogel]

WinXP 64 installer workaround

1) Click on Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools -> Local Security Policy
2) Right click on Software Restriction Policies and select New Software Restriction Policies from the popup menu.
3) Left click on Software Restriction Policies, right click on Enforcement, and select Properties from the popup menu.
4) Under Apply software restriction policies to the following users: click All users except local administrators. Click the Apply and OK buttons - you should now be able to install the UT3 Demo

We are currently investigating why it doesn't run afterwards. Sorry for the inconvenience... we certainly would've liked this to be much smoother :-/

[Daniel Vogel]

Benchmarking

Unlike the full game, the demo does not contain demo recording functionality. But not all hope is lost for benchmarking as most maps in Unreal Tournament 3 have a flyby that can be used to benchmark GPU performance of static geometry. This means there are no weapon FX and AI overhead, but at least it's something

Below is the commandline that we use for this purpose

MAPNAME?causeevent=FlyThrough?quickstart=1?nocusto mchars=1?numplay=0 -seconds=300 -unattended -novsync -fixedseed -CaptureFPSChartInfo=1 -nomoviestartup

You may want to remove the "-CaptureFPSChartInfo=1" if you want to use an external capture application. By default data is written to the Stats folder in your My Documents folder.

Additionally, you will want to modify UTEngine.ini and set bSmoothFrameRate in

[Engine.GameEngine]
bSmoothFrameRate=TRUE

from TRUE to FALSE to disable frame-rate smoothing/ limiting.

Another form of benchmarking is to run botmatches as a spectator, though the variance between runs is fairly high, so this is mostly good for broader comparisons and trending. Having said that, it does fully test your system the way that playing against bots would and also stresses the GPU via weapon effects, player models and such.

The commandline that we use for this purpose is

MAPNAME?numplay=12?timelimit=5?automatedperftestin g=1 -unattended -novsync -fixedseed -CaptureFPSChartInfo=1 -nomoviestartup

The results of the benchmarking will be put in the following server in the form of a HTML page per level, with newer runs at the top.

My Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3 Demo\UTGame\Stats

[Daniel Vogel]

Workaround for UT3Demo not starting up on WinXP 64 and Windows Server 2003

We created a fix for the game not starting up on Windows XP 64 and Windows Server 2003 systems. This patch has not undergone the same amount of QA as the released demo so I strongly encourage to ONLY replace the UT3Demo.exe with the one from the patch if you are experiencing the "Modified executable code is not allowed" issue at startup.

http://www.epicgames.com/download/UT3Demo-XP64-2K3.zip

UT3Demo.exe md5sum: 9ac494f243bdd6d71c2d612d8d98fba3

[Daniel Vogel]

For anyone who is getting this crash:

"Detected negative delta time - on AMD systems please install http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_13118,00.html\par"

Be sure to restart your computer after installing and before running the demo.

[DanielW]

For anyone with an Nvidia card getting a crash in kernel32.dll (this does not affect blue/black screen errors), try this workaround:

First, make sure you are on 163.71 Nvidia drivers.

If you are an administrator, Open: Program Files\Unreal Tournament 3 Demo\UTGame\Config\UTEngine.ini
Otherwise open: My Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3 Demo\UTGame\Config\UTEngine.ini

Change the line
bInitializeShadersOnDemand=False
to
bInitializeShadersOnDemand=True

*RESTART BEFORE TRYING TO RUN THE DEMO AGAIN*