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The subject of this article appeared in Unreal Tournament.

"The Unreal Tournament Preservation Group is a group of programmers and server admins from the UT community who got together and approached Epic about the possibility of maintaining the Unreal Tournament code base. Their goal of maintaining the game and fixing obvious problems, while keeping all the major game-play systems 100% intact, were right along with Epic's goals, Epic granted UTPG access to the source which allows them to undertake this project. Their focus is general maintenance with some time spent dealing with security issues in the Unreal Tournament engine."


The UTPG (Unreal Tournament Preservation Group) was a collective of community members who were involved in the later stages of Unreal Tournament's lifecycle.

Bio[]

UTPG comprised programmers and server administrators from the UT community who continued Epic's work on Unreal Tournament patches after the release of its final official patch (version 436).[1]

UTPG was disheartened by the numerous exploits and bugs players faced on Patch 436, including the infamous DDOS exploit and the creeping ping bug in Windows 2000 Server. UTPG approached Epic, requesting the source code of Patch 436 to develop unofficial patches. Epic agreed, with the condition that the patches would be entirely optional, and that players must install Patch 436 before applying the UTPG patches. UTPG accepted, and Epic Games provided them with the source code and the fixes made for Patch 436 to incorporate into the new UTPG patch.

Several other fixes and exploits were addressed, such as the UCC buffer overflow exploit and the backslashes and mutators in the status query replies bug. They also implemented a new team information query into the protocol, simplifying the identification of team information in the Unreal Engine. Once UTPG compiled the fixes, they sent a copy to Epic for verification. Epic was impressed and gave them a copy of the Unreal Installer. UTPG then recreated the setup with the Unreal Installer and labeled it Patch 440. This marked the beginning of the UTPG patches. Many UT players found this patch excellent and demanded more bug fixes.

UTPG continued to identify and patch exploits and fixes for the UT community. Two months later, the new patch was completed and numbered Patch 451. This patch fixed a total of 36 bugs and exploits, but it did not come without consequences. The modification of UnrealEd made it unusable, displaying an error message upon loading. Another bug caused the client and server to crash if invalid classes were loaded.

Approximately 10 months later, Patch 451b was released to fix the invalid classes bug and partially address the UnrealEd crash. The UnrealEd was still not fully functional, as the camera was still broken among other issues, making it impossible to create or edit levels. The only way to resolve this issue was to downgrade to Patch 436 or Patch 440 or simply make a backup of the UT folder before upgrading. About a year later, UTPG combined Patch 451 with Patch 451b for a more straightforward installation process.

UTPG has been inactive since October 2004. They had plans to release Patch 451b for Mac OS and Mac OS X, but there has been no discussion since their last post in October 2004.

Their final post stated:

"Yes, we are still alive and working. Who would have thought getting an MD5 patch across 3 OS's would be easy...

That being said, work continues. The MD5 code for Win has been tested and seems to work great. The latest Linux build is on the way very soon.

The most important piece for all you Mac users out there is a preview release of the brand new Mac OSX client.

Unfortunately, I can't give a timeline as there could be any number of events that could push us back (and don't want to upset you with a false date).

Keep your eyes pealed for new news."
UTPG.org


It is believed that the UTPG group shut down the program sometime in 2006, but their website remained operational and fully functional until around the 2010s, before being definitively shut down.

Works[]

Trivia[]

  • Their website was hacked at one time, and it took almost a year for one of the UTPG members to fix it.
  • In order to be able to use the UTPG patches, one must patch to version 436 first.
  • Versions 451 and 451b are known to cause problems with UnrealEd, so players should install them only if they don't plan on creating content.
  • An interesting feature in the changelog was that patch 436 labeled as patch 435 in some areas, yet some parts of the readme still said "Compatible with servers running Patch 436 or higher". It is uncertain if this is a typo or if Epic told UTPG to label Patch 436 that way.
  • They were also originally involved in the creation of a v468 patch for Unreal Tournament until the group was shut down. This is why OldUnreal's initial patch version was v469. This was the changelog:
Version 468 is completely network compatible with all previous public releases of UT (down to 432).

* HTTP redirection supports the HTTP 301 and 302 responses<br />* Made Engine.MinNetVersion and Engine.ErrorMsg available through UScript
* MD5 protection for Unreal packages
* Added new functions to Object: CalcMD5(string), PackageMD5(package name, optional init string, optional bool bRefresh), PackageGUIDMD5(package guid, optional init string, optional bool bRefresh), MD5TableLookup(string Filename, int Generation, optional string init)
* New config option to [Engine.GameEngine] : MD5Ignore
  Use that to set files/extensions to be excluded from the MD5 checks on the server, the last part of the filename is relevant.
  So: MD5Ignore=.utx will ignore all files matching `*.utx`, MD5Ignore=x.utx will ignore all files matching `*x.utx`
* New config option to [Engine.GameEngine] : MD5Require
  This works the same as the MD5Ignore, use this to unignore files. For example: "MD5Ignore=.utx" and "MD5Require=playerskins.utx" has the result that all .utx files are ingored, except playerskins.utx
* New console commands: `getmd5 <package>` to display the md5 of a package, `md5ignore` to list all ignore masks and `md5require` to list all require masks
* MD5Ignore, MD5Require masks are editable from within the WebAdmin
* Fixed Direct3D crash on invalid skin
* Fixed saving of .tmp files in the root dir
* Fixed UnrealEd, sorry about that
* Fixed error/warning reporting sometimes causing a shut-down
* Added new console command: `verifymd5 <package>` force a package verification between the client and server
* Added support for WinXP SP2 firewall

External links and references[]

See also[]

Creators
Companies
People
Cliff BleszinskiJuan Pancho 'XceptOne' EekelsElliot 'Myscha' CannonSidney 'Clawfist' RauchbergerCedric 'Inoxx' FiorentinoShane CaudleJim BrownNick DonaldsonAlexander BrandonMichiel van den BosAlan 'Talisman' WillardDave EwingMatthias WorchJeremy WarDavid KelvinRich 'Akuma' EastwoodWarren MarshallJames SchmalzSteven PolgeScott McGregorPhil ColeBastiaan FrankTim SweeneyMark ReinKevin RieplStarsky PartridgeDan GardopéePeter HajbaAndrew SegaWill NevinsRom Di PriscoJesper KydErik de NeveJack PorterEric 'Ebolt' BoltjesMick 'VerMoorD' BeardJean 'El Chicoverde' RochefortDavid 'DavidM' MünnichChris 'Plutonic' BlundellJeremy 'Faceless' GravesEd Duke-CoxNathan 'TomWithTheWeather' OvermanDavid SpalinskiTynan SylvesterRogelio OlguinTeddie TapawanPeter RespondekSjoerd 'Hourences' De JongSascha DikiciyanPaul MeeganArtur BialasJames Parkman
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