This is a release candidate for Unreal Tournament v469f. This version is stable and compatible with the most recent versions of ACE.
Notable changes since Unreal Tournament v469e include:
- Big performance gains across the board, and the heavier the scene, the bigger the difference. In a test scene full of meshes and terrain, 469f averaged 143 FPS at 1280x720 where 469e averaged 34 and dropped as low as 10, and 469f also loses less performance as you raise the resolution. We optimized dynamic light and mesh lighting rendering, and improved performance in Frucore, D3D11Drv, D3D12Drv, VulkanDrv, and OpenGLDrv. VulkanDrv in particular went from the slowest of our regular renderers to one of the fastest, so it is well worth a second chance - and it is the one hardware renderer we ship on every platform
- We made major improvements to the mouse input code. Mouse latency should now be lower than ever before. Raw mouse and keyboard input are now also supported on macOS, and Raw Input/DirectInput users can opt into the Windows XP mouse acceleration curve
- You can now type in your own alphabet. Text input is no longer restricted to Latin characters, so chat, the console, and every other editable field accept your language. Our fonts cover a large part of Unicode rather than all of it, but that is enough for most real languages
- The patch now includes 64-bit binaries for Windows! The 64-bit version includes all editor tools, all renderers except D3DDrv, and all audio drivers, including a brand new port of Galaxy
- SDL3 has landed. Our Linux and macOS clients now use SDL3 instead of SDL2, which improves support for high-dpi displays, multiple monitors, and high-end mice. You can also drag a borderless game window on those platforms now
- D3D11Drv now includes experimental VR support for OpenXR-compatible headsets, with real stereo rendering, adjustable weapon/crosshair/HUD depth, desktop mirroring, and 3D or 2D video recording
- New rendering and audio options: SSAA and Intel CMAA/CMAA2 anti-aliasing in OpenGLDrv, adaptive VSync and Catmull-Rom texture sampling in ICBIND, EAX on all platforms, and a "Legacy Volume Boost" option that restores the original game's way of amplifying CTF announcements and similar notification sounds, as it sounded with Galaxy
- SoftDrv, the software renderer, now runs on all of our platforms instead of just 32-bit Windows
- HOR+ is now the default FOV mode, you can type in the menu combo boxes to filter them (which makes picking a map far quicker), map and mod lists are no longer limited in length, and the game now warns you and lets you refuse when a mod such as NPLoader tries to install an external extension
- Downloading files directly from a game server (without an HTTP redirect) is now at least 2.5 times faster, provided both ends run 469f
- We added dozens of major quality-of-life features to Unreal Editor, including dark mode, the ability to open maps with missing dependencies (even maps built for different Unreal Engine 1 games), an animation browser, and mesh import/export for OBJ, SMD, MD5, MD2, GLB, and FBX. The editor is also much faster: rebuilding geometry takes about half the time it did, and building the paths of a 5000-node map now takes 6 seconds instead of 72
- Unreal Editor also gained four big new tools: a terrain editor, a decimate tool that reduces the triangle count of brushes while preserving their shape, a "Bake Light Into Mesh" tool that lights mesh actors like the BSP surfaces around them, and a mesh collision tool that gives a mesh precise, non-cylindrical collision
- Put together, baked lighting, mesh shadows, mesh collision and much faster mesh rendering let you use ordinary meshes the way later engines use static meshes: build your detail as meshes instead of BSP and stop fighting the BSP node limit. Maps built this way still play on clients as old as 436
- We significantly improved crash handling and crash reporting on all platforms, and fixed a long list of crashes, hangs, and bugs in the game, the editor, and UCC
Note: This patch disables older versions of ACE. Server admins should upgrade ACE to version 1.4b or later to check 469f clients.
Note for Linux users: all builds now live in the System folder — System64 and SystemARM64 are gone. If you have shortcuts, launchers, or scripts pointing into one of those folders, update them to point at System.
A full change log is available here. We look forward to your feedback.