UT2004 *NOT* Online!

Yet.

It seems I forgot more than I ever knew about putting up at UT2k4 server.

One of the problems is that you need to have the game installed in order to test the server.

That was a trial. I looked everywhere. It took about a half hour but I finally found all 6 CDs in the original package hiding behind a book that was leaning next to my stereo amplifier.

After firing up CD #1 it said "Enter the activation code on the cover of your manaul".

Manual? Uh-oh.

I found the CDs in the box, but no manual. Crap.

Luckily I had it installed on my old Windows XP box (which is using most of the RAM for the Proxy Project) as well, so I dug into the Windows Registry and, to my surprise, found it! I scribbled it onto CD #1's envelope for future reference.

After about 45 minutes of setup it says, "Insert Play CD" so I get the CD out of the box and there, underneath the Play CD, is the FUCKING ACTIVATION CODE!!!

"Manual" my ass.

In goes the Play CD and setup chokes on it. It try everything to get it to read the CD (including the toothpaste trick) and nothing works, so an hour after I started this mess it says "setup failed".

But I click on the shortcut and eveything's fine. It runs better than it ever did on the old XP box (probably due to the PCI Express video card and the AMD64 CPU).

I had moved the files over to the BOT House server and then noticed that there's also an AMD64 binary, so I moved it again to my Dual Core AMD64 Mythbuntu system (I haven't said much, if anything, about the MythTV project that had me tearing my hair out earlier this year, but this is the most powerful box I own).

What followed was about an hour and a half of fiddling around with the INI settings, but I finally got it running off-Net. VERY smooth performance.

I need to check into a lot of things before it goes online. There have been a ton of patches and I'm not sure which ones I've installed. There's the issue of downloads. I have none of this stuff in the utmods folder on www.mrhinkydink.com so I'm hoping to find a public download server. That was the problem with running it before. All the downloads were sent locally, which caused serious LAG on the other servers.

If I can't find a public download server I'll burn a DVD with the data and sneak it online over the 40mBps connection we have at work. While no one's looking.

heh.

Of course, I'm the only who ever looks. I'll have to make sure I'm looking the other way.