Easy Access To Unreal Tournament's Weekly Builds

As has been previously documented, the prospect of a new Unreal Tournament game fills me with joy. It's a sort of violent, twitch-shooting, wall-dodging, gib-splattering joy but I take what I can get. Development continues apace, though naturally not nearly as fast as I'd like, with weekly livestreamed updates. There's new builds of the game every Friday and still radical changes being made to even the most basic systems of movement, shooting and aiming. These builds are now officially available to all (as opposed to the community hosted jerry-rigging I last reported on) though still "non-representative pre-alpha" to use Epic's phraseology.

All that's required to get in and play is an account on the official forums. Once you're tooled up, this thread will be accessible and contain the most recent version. At time of writing that's the 10/16 build which fixed some extreme mouse issues and altered underwater movement. To find people to play with, forums user RushPL has made a custom launcher which will check you're on the correct build and find servers. (Addendum: I've been informed by UT community hero 'raxxy' that the in-game server browser does work and the custom launcher is unnecessary. It does mean those servers are running custom maps, however. Thanks to him for letting me know.)

If you've got an Unreal Engine 4 license you can also host your own servers, via the link in that same thread. Last time I checked there were no UK-based ones, so it'd be nice to get some RPS Motherland inhabitors in on that action. UE4 license owners can now also access an auto-updating version of the game through the UE4 launcher, which is also now a prototype of the eventual standalone launcher for the full game.

What I'm finding most interesting about following UT is how well the community has taken to their task of helping build the game from the ground up. The Flak Cannon model pictured above is community sourced and is now going into development as the official one. The weapon design forum is chock full of threads and polls about how certain guns should work, as well as early prototyping within the engine itself. A personal favourite is the webbed Bio-Rifle by threadlock, adding a significant new ability to UT's long-standing dud.

Here's Epic's latest livestream, going over their most recent developments and plans for another community event: