Unifying Unreal and UT99 for network play?

[Hyper]

Is it possible to join Unreal Tournament (UT99) servers with Unreal?

I see that a mod exists by MasterKent called BotPack227 allowing players to play UT99 maps in Unreal, including OldSkool support for UT SP/coop maps that require this (Note the irony in this)

But my use case / wish is a bit different. While it made all the sense in the world for Epic to release UT99 as a standalone game, I have always deeply regretted this. Why? Because it split the community between two excellent games. I mostly sticked with the old Unreal as it had everything I needed. Robust single player, great deathmatch and lovely cooperative play.

But it is 2024 and I have to recognize that Unreal Deathmatch is dead. It has servers but hardly any players or clans. UT99 has the opposite problem. The UT99 community worked in the past on creating single player support via OldSkool and cooperative support. But the UT99 coop scene has the same problem as the Unreal Deathmatch scene: No players.

It would be wonderful if Unreal could just browse and connect to UT99 servers for deathmatch play or that UT99 would just connect to Unreal servers for coop play, unifying both games to the game Unreal should have been.

But when I install the BotPack227 mod to my Unreal game I can't connect to UT99 servers. I can load UT maps like CTF-Face just fine in 227j now, but no network play. Is there any way to achieve this?

Same for UT99. If I link my Unreal folders to UT99 I can open Unreal maps in UT99, but I can't connect to Unreal servers.

[Hyper]

*kick*

Unifying Unreal and UT99 online play by making them network compatible may be the solution for our shrinking communities.

[Leo T_C_K]

Actually I remember seeing some servers where it was possible via some mod of some kind, might have been a native mod even by Marco or someone. The thing is, tournamentplayer and UnrealIPlayer use different methods and TournamentPlayer is more clientside. But if you use tournamentplayer to connect to the UT servers there shouldn't be a problem. Also that botpack needs to be compatible with the UT stuff too. Most servers that use anti cheat stuff will try to kick those players too. So it has to be a special server in the first place I think.

You know what would be even more ridiculous though? Unifying Unreal UT and U2. In U2's case it would only be possible with those early test versions of the first Unreal Engine or 1.5 or what you wanna call it lol....

[Psychomorph]

Unifying Unreal and UT would be grand. Does it mean one could play Unreal maps which use 227 features in UT?

[Leo T_C_K]

Unifying Unreal and UT would be grand. Does it mean one could play Unreal maps which use 227 features in UT?

If UT doesn't have certain classes with the new patches and the map uses them it won't be possible, otherwise yes. I was against adding extra classes to UnrealI though in the first place, proposed they would add them in a separate package to maintain compat and all, but naw...then again the UT patches weren't part of the deal yet so they couldn't see the future consequences either.

But you know, the "exclusivity" and saying "this is a patch not a mod" made them keep it, (however that's also exactly why it shouldn't have been done because they turned the patch into more features than fixes at one point and features is a "feature" of a mod usually am I not right?)

[gopostal]

*kick*

Unifying Unreal and UT99 online play by making them network compatible may be the solution for our shrinking communities.

Hyper, I know this is a bit of an older post but what did you find? I'm kicking around the idea of restarting my Unreal Coop server just to play around some.