For anyone who owns Unreal Tournament on steam

Well, for one, Steam breaks UnrealEd. And I think it prevents manual patching, although I'm not sure. And it slows down loading time to the speed of a snail. Personally I don't like Steam and will never use it.

Steam doesn't affect loading times for me, and it runs the latest version of UT3 with the bonus pack included. I don't have the other games in there to know.

No idea if the 'join friend' function works since none of my steamfriends play UT :<

Steam forces you to install the game into C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\UnrealTournament. The path is 62 characters long. UnrealEd only works with 80 characters in the path, and can not open any packages if the length of the package name and the path combined are more than 80 characters. Now textures are installed into their own Textures folder - +9 characters, the extension of the package itself costs 4 characters, so you get 75 characters in total. Thus Steam's UnrealEd can not open packages that are more than 5 letters long, and I don't know a single package that long (and it's the same reason why by default the game is installed into C:\UnrealTournament and not C:\Program Files\UnrealTournament). The same thing affects Unreal as well. And since there is a space in the path, you can not import anything to UnrealEd if you place it in your game's path.
Needless to say if you have Impulse's version of Unreal and UT, no such thing happens.

GreatEmerald said:

Steam forces you to install the game into C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\UnrealTournament.

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To be fair you can actually put the Steam installation wherever you like, which will shorten the path considerably (for example just install in C:\Steam).

GreatEmerald said:

The path is 62 characters long. UnrealEd only works with 80 characters in the path, and can not open any packages if the length of the package name and the path combined are more than 80 characters. Now textures are installed into their own Textures folder - +9 characters, the extension of the package itself costs 4 characters, so you get 75 characters in total. Thus Steam's UnrealEd can not open packages that are more than 5 letters long, and I don't know a single package that long (and it's the same reason why by default the game is installed into C:\UnrealTournament and not C:\Program Files\UnrealTournament). The same thing affects Unreal as well. And since there is a space in the path, you can not import anything to UnrealEd if you place it in your game's path.
Needless to say if you have Impulse's version of Unreal and UT, no such thing happens.

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This is all true, but can be easily overcome by just using subst or for that matter under windows NT just create a junction point. In fact in NT6 and later the tool for creating junctions is included with the OS and is called mklink, so it's a 2 second job to map say C:\UnrealTournament to c:\Program Files\Value\SteamApps\Dear\God\How\Deep\Is\This\Path

Last time I checked Steam didn't ask where to install it. In fact, I was using a partition setup where C: was only for the system, and D: was for all programs, and not only did Steam not ask where to install it, but also disregarded all the environment variables and registry edits I did to point the default installation folder to the D: partition and installed it straight into C:.
About junction points - never heard of them, although they sound like symlinks from Linux. Does UnrealEd even acknowledge them? Also, from what I know, symlink support is in Vista/7 out of the box.

GreatEmerald said:

Last time I checked Steam didn't ask where to install it.

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When was that? I've had no problems installing it to different directories.

GreatEmerald said:

Last time I checked Steam didn't ask where to install it. In fact, I was using a partition setup where C: was only for the system, and D: was for all programs, and not only did Steam not ask where to install it, but also disregarded all the environment variables and registry edits I did to point the default installation folder to the D: partition and installed it straight into C:.

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I've never come across this, and also, moving the Steam directory has no noticeable side-effects that I've ever observed. eg. Just drag it to a new location and run Steam.exe, last time I needed to move it to a new partition I did that and it just updated the registry for me automatically. Wouldn't recommend all the same this but I never observed any anomalies having done so.

GreatEmerald said:

About junction points - never heard of them, although they sound like symlinks from Linux.

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NTFS has supported this for as long as I can remember and they're kind of like symlinks but not as "hard" as a unix hard symlink and not as "soft" as as a soft symlink. Microsoft refers to them as "reparse points" or "junction points" although until NT6 the tool to create them by hand was not shipped with windows. Mounting a volume into a folder rather than to a new root letter uses this functionality however and has been available in MMC since NT5.

I admit this is more a sysadmin thing (or for that matter anyone who regularly uses Linux or Unix) but since the mklink now ships with the OS it makes it far more accessible to ordinary users. People seem more au fait with reparse points also since NT6 uses them in user profile directories as standard (for example "My Documents" actually reparses to "Documents" and this is listed as [JUNCTION] when you look at a directory listing).

GreatEmerald said:

Does UnrealEd even acknowledge them?

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Of course, think of it like a hard link. Unless an application explicitly chooses to differentiate between directories and junctions it has no way of telling the difference.

GreatEmerald said:

Also, from what I know, symlink support is in Vista/7 out of the box.

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I think I already covered this, although I guess most people think of Vista and 7, I was trying to cover both by using the term NT6.

Oh, Windows NT 6.0, I was thinking about 4 for some reason Yea, then that's right.

BTW mods that run on renamed .exes (like Infiltration) don't work in the Steam version. It crashes with an error soon after you start the .exe.

UnrealEd works fine. Not sure about other TC mods, but The Ball worked fine for me.

GreatEmerald said:

UnrealEd works fine. Not sure about other TC mods, but The Ball worked fine for me.

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I tried Unreal Fortress but it crashed. Dunno about the others. Unreal Fortress works fine on my regular copy tho.

Just wondering, would it be possible to install the 436 patch over the Steam copy of UT? I'm thinking of repatching UT3 and other games to work with older versions of Wine (Problems with Steam client except with Crosssover Office).