OldUnreal just posted this announcement on their Discord:
"Welcome Back, Unreal Tournament 2004!
Hi everyone! Some of you were probably wondering why we've been so quiet in the past couple of months. Today, we can finally reveal (part of) the answer: we've been working on a new side project! With Epic's blessing and with the help of some new team members, we are bringing Unreal Tournament 2004 (UT2004) back.
This means that we are going to publish an installer that downloads the original disc image for UT2004, installs the game, and applies patches to it. We are also going to start publishing patches that modernize the game, make it compatible with Windows Vista or later, Linux x86-64 and aarch64 (Raspberry Pi and similar), and Mac OS 10.9 or later, fix bugs, and implement quality-of-life changes.
Yes, you read that right. UT2004 will soon be available to download once again. Free of charge. This is a community-run effort but we’re excited to make the game easier to access and play again. We have been working on this for quite some time now and have made enough progress to start inviting the first batch of testers.
Highlights so far include:
We now natively support modern Linux and macOS systems with 64-bit Intel and ARM/Apple CPUs
You can now play the game or run a server on a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, albeit at a lower frame rate than on a PC!
The Linux and macOS distributions of the patch now include a fully functional UCC with an UnrealScript compiler (UCC make) and texture compression support
The Linux and macOS distributions now use SDL3 instead of SDL1
... continue reading