Universal Unreal

Matthew said:

Universal Unreal is a very large project for Unreal Tournament (UT99) that I've been working on since the beginning of September. I will start by emphasizing that this mod is not yet complete or public, but will be hopefully within a month or less.

This mod will allow players to interact with each other (and even chat) with each other between connected servers or a web-based installation in real-time. This mod, however, is much more than simply a UT chat server. This mod also allows players to maintain a 'buddy' list and receive instant alerts when a buddy joins a participating server, which is great for unplanned matches with friends. Additionally, users can enable a HUD overlay which displays the top 8 most active servers in the universe, including player counts and the map that is being played... with all data in nearly real-time. There are at least 10 other big features for players that I will not cover yet, but they are very useful as well.

Universal Unreal is powered by a PHP and MySQL website backend which is accessed frequently by participating servers. There is not one central installation - think of Universal Unreal like UTStats; each community of servers needs only one installations. For example, the UT StrangeLove community will run just one universe server, which will cater to about 12 servers and a couple thousand players. The mod is a Nexgen plugin, and as such requires an active installation of Nexgen. Can Universal Unreal be released in a version that does not require Nexgen? No, sorry, the functions of Universal Unreal depend on many aspects of Nexgen to be able to operate.

For admins, Universal Unreal acts as a massive player information system. All player joins, ASC/Nexgen IDs, IP addresses, hostnames, player nicks, administrative actions (kick, ban, mute, etc) and server history are logged to the universe server and recorded for 6 months. I will also attempt to intercept UTDC, EUT, and Pure actions too. All of this data can be accessed from in-game and on the website as well, meaning that you can make decisions from in-game instead of having to close UT, fish through logs, and find the information you need before performing a ban or other action.

Screenshots will be posted to this thread in a few days. A public release could be as far as a month away; but I have announced this now so that you may ask questions about the system and consider installing Nexgen so that you can be ready for when the mod is finally released.

Doesn't sound appealing? The overview above is a very very small snapshot into the features of Universal Unreal. Once a final release is near, more details will be published.

Nexgen Download / Nexgen Information Thread: http://www.unrealadmin.org/forums/sh...ad.php?t=26835

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