Unreal Tournament

One of my hobbies is writing mods (or, more precisely, mutators, which are like mini-mods) for the games Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2004. Over the course of several years I've written quite a few bits and pieces, most of which don't work, but a few are kind of funny to play with.

To install these, just unzip the files and copy their contents to your game's System folder. For UT, that's UnrealTournament/System, and for UT2K4 that's UT2004/System. Then in game, look in your mutators list for the new mutators.

Unreal Tournament 2004

Petrifying Gaze and Vyl Bird's Petrifier Rifle mutator

This is my most complete mutator to date, since I made sure it works in multiplayer as well as single player (which meant struggling with replication, as all experienced UT modders know too well). It was originally made for a friend who has a cockatrice character, but since nobody else has that model, I've added an All Players version which lets anyone use it.

It gives characters a petrifying gaze attack, which can be activated by pressing the / (slash) key. Sorry, you can't remap it... it was hard enough just getting the key to register at all! Any character (or monster, if you're playing Invasion) hit by the invisible petrifying beam will instantly turn into a stone statue, which kills them. Yes, this is incredibly unbalanced in Deathmatch. It's more intended for Invasion.

To make it slightly less unbalanced, there is a penalty for using the gaze too much in a short space of time; first it exhausts you and makes you move slower, and eventually will damage your health. It is possible to die from exhaustion!

The petrifying code is mostly not mine; it was written by my friend Vyl Bird to petrify players, and adapted by me for monsters. That's why the Petrifier Rifle is also included; it contains the code for making statues, so you need to install both of them.

Unreal Tournament

Unreal Tournament is where I began modding, and I have to say it was easier in those days. Firstly, the UT engine wasn't as complex as UT2K4's engine, and secondly, at that time I wasn't regularly LANgaming, and had no need to make sure that my code would work over a network. Because of this, be aware that not only are these mutators incredibly amateur, most of them won't work properly in multiplayer, although many are such small modifications that they might. In single player they should all work as intended.

The Hawthorn pack

• Deathmatch - All Levels - lets you play deathmatch on any map, not just the Deathmatch maps. Note that AS-HiSpeed, the one with the train, crashes if you play this mode, but it's the only one I've found that does.
• Last Man Standing - All Levels - lets you play LMS on any map. AS-Hispeed also crashes with this one.

• Bio Arena - UT came with various 'Arena' mutators, which simply restricts players to one weapon for a match. However, it didn't do this for all the weapons, so I added them myself. This one is for the Bio Rifle, if you really want to play with that gun.
• Bouncing gun - a silly weapon. The primary fire shoots out fast bullets which ricochet all over the place. The secondary fire is armour-piercing bullets - and these go through EVERYTHING, from players to walls of any thickness. Watch out for friendly fire, because these bullets travel through walls like butter!
• Combine Relics - this is essentially a hack for the Relics mutator which comes with some versions of UT. You'll need that to play. What it does is removes the restriction that you can only hold one relic at a time. Yes, that's right: you can now pick up all the powers and have them all at the same time. For that reason I also call it the 'Sylar' mutator. Do note that a player with all the Relics at once (including the ones I made, below) is near-indestructible, and it will take something like an entire team of players armed with rocket launchers, all firing simultaneously, to bring them down. This mutator, I believe, does work in multiplayer.
• DarkMatch - UT came with a gametype that wasn't used - DarkMatches. In these, I'm guessing the level was supposed to be dark, and it gives each player a flashlight to use. The problem with this is that it requires specially-made dark levels. Having previously made a mutator to turn the lights off on a level, I could see it would be easy to make this a mutator to implement darkmatches on existing level. And I did. However, most disappointingly, it does NOT work in multiplayer.
• Halfling - makes all players half size!
• Huge - makes all players twice the size!
• Hyperredeemer On - replaces the Redeemer with the Hyperredeemer. You know how the Redeemer's Shockwave fades out after a short time? Imagine if it didn't.
• Longbow Arena - gives everyone a Longbow Rifle. No, it's not really a longbow, I just named it after the bow because it sounded cool.
• Longbow Machine Gun - replaces the minigun with my Longbow version, which has a sniper scope and visible bullets. It's actually not as powerful as you might expect.
• Longbow Rifle - replaces the sniper rifle with my Longbow version. Instead of hitting instantly as UT's sniper rifle does, this one fires a visible, but very fast bullet, so you can actually see bullets zipping toward you if you're being sniped. It also means that snipers have to lead their targets a little, which is kind of fun if you get the hang of it.
• Low damage - weapons do much less damage than normal. This one is fun in enclosed levels, since you have to really blow the crap out of your opponents before they die. You should probably turn off health pickups before playing this mutator.
• Microgravity - like No Gravity, except you come down eventually.
• Minigun Arena - this is actually not my mutator - it comes with the game, but is never listed under mutators. I added it to the list.
• Monsters - randomly spawns monsters of increasing difficulty into the level at regular intervals. It's a little like Invasion in UT2K4. Note that the game scores most monster kills, so if you actually want to play this, you'll need to turn off scoring.
• No gravity - turns off gravity entirely. This is not really playable, although you can move by propelling yourself off walls with explosions.
• Realism - tries to make the game a little more 'realistic' by allowing headshots from all weapons to do four times damage, and body shots to do two times damage. Leg shots take normal damage - I was going to make this slow the player, but didn't get around to it.
• Redeemer Arena - Yes, really.
• Relic: Jumping - one of five new relics I added to the game; this one gives its holder the ability to jump super high. Note that it doesn't work properly if you collect jump-boots before you collect it, since they reset jumping ability when they run out.
• Relic: Stealth - gives its holder permanent invisibility.
• Resist: Energy - the Resists are also Relics. This was a special subclass I made for Relics to make it easier to add resistances to any kind of damage. This one is Energy Resistance, one of three resistances I added to the game. It reduces the damage you take from the Shock Rifle and the Pulse Rifle.
• Resist: Explosion - gives its holder Explosion Resistance. This reduces the damage you take from the Flak Cannon's shells, the Rocket Launcher, and the Ripper's exploding discs. No, it won't save you from the Redeemer!
• Resist: Shot - gives its holder Shot Resistance. This reduces the damage you take from the Enforcer, the Minigun, the Flak Cannon's flak, and the Sniper Rifle.
• Superhuman - gives the players super-speed, jumping, and resistance to damage. Not as fun as I thought it would be. You might want to play with health turned off if using this.
• Ripper Arena - gives everyone a Ripper.

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