Mark Rein, Epic Games' VP, has announced in the Infogrames Forums that UT2003 has gone gold and should be in production later today, shipping at the end of the month.

Click 'Read More' for the full details.

Just before 5AM Eastern Standard Time this morning we shipped the release version of Unreal Tournament 2003 to manufacturing. It should be in production later today and in stores before the end of the month. We want to thank everyone on the forum for all of the valuable feedback. In the week since we shipped the demo we worked pretty much non-stop to squash a lot of bugs and incorporate some of the great feedback we got from players all around the world.

Steve Polge is going to post a list of some of the gameplay changes we made since the demo in the demo feedback forum.

UT2003 is a 3 CD set. Of course you know it’s a huge game with a ton of content (over 35 levels), great characters, awesome gametypes, incredible AI, cool mutators, etc. But there’s also some great tools including the following:

1. Maya Personal Learning Edition from Alias|Wavefront - a special version of the professional-strength 3D content creation tool used by top game designers and major Hollywood studios along with a special plug-in created by our friends Secret Level Inc. that provides seamless integration between the game's engine and Maya.

2. The Karma Authoring Tool (KAT) that allows you to set up character joint constraints for use with MathEngine's Karma real-time physics system which is incorporated into UT2003.

3. UPaint - a 3D painting application that lets you paint directly on the games' characters in 3D and also provides face projection which allows you to paste your face over the game's characters.

4. The Unreal Editor 3.0 - the latest version of the main tool we used to build all of the UT2003 levels.

5. The UnrealScript Real Time Debugger lets mod authors trace through their code like never before. This is the kind of tool that professional developers rely on to ship the best possible code.

6. A fully working Karma-enhanced vehicle and a test level to drive it around it. This will give mod maker a head start on how to do cool vehicle-based mods with our technology.


Linux Support

The Linux installer is included on Disc 3 of the 3 CD set! We support both client and server for Linux. Unfortunately there's no mention of Linux on the box because we didn't know it would be done in time so please tell all your Linux gaming friends that UT2003 is ready for them!


Future enhancements:

We're going to be releasing a free server-only stand-alone version of the game for our friends who want to run servers without buying the full game. This should be ready about the same time the game shows up in stores or perhaps a little earlier.

We plan to ship UDE, the Unreal Development Environment, which is a full-featured UnrealScript editor and compiler interface that will make life easier for mod makers.

We're going to work with Discreet to provide a customized version of Gmax, a free scaled-down version of 3D Studio Max, with an importer/exporter for the UT2003. The editor already provides support for the full version of 3D Studio Max as it imports the ASE format directly.

We're already thinking of cool new features and content for a free bonus pack so stay tuned. Those of you who remember the original UT know that shipping the game is just the beginning of the Unreal experience.

Everyone at Digital Extremes and Epic Games hopes you enjoy the game.