Unreal Tournament Master Servers Situation

I have some updates for all of you on this. It was correctly reported that gamespy was taking down it's master server, which was the last of the 3 servers that UT 99 uses. This was to effectively kill the game as people would no longer be able to find servers in-game.

First, I am not getting errors in the log (that I see, they may be later awhile after the server starts) after the master servers are loaded, and I have seen them before reporting "FAILED" when a master server fails, so who knows what is happening with gamespy. I suspect I am just missing the errors or they are not reporting for some reason.

The bad news of course was that gamespy went down. There were 3 master servers all the way through version 4.51 of the server. They were gamespy, epic games, and mplayer. Epic took their own master server down years ago and mplayer is gone as well. Again, none of them report being down in the server log which I find odd, but nonetheless they are gone.

Don't fret just yet, there is some good news and some great news. First, I added another server that should be active which is qtracker. Next there is a new tracker that just went up called 333networks. I have added this as well. The problem with these 2 is that they have to be manually added to both the servers and clients. So the more knowledgable people will be good to go but joe average gamer will never even hear about these.

This brings us to the great news. Epic decided to put their unreal tournament master server back up. This master server entry:

IpServer.UdpServerUplink MasterServerAddress=unreal.epicgames.com MasterServerPort=27900

Is already added to all clients and servers. So until Epic takes it down again we should all be O.K. I can't imagine that Epic would put it up and then take it down soon after. So I am guessing we have a few years at least.

To be sure about all of this, I request that someone install a new fresh copy of UT on their computer and then look in the server query and see if the DOU sniper server appears. If it does then we are all good. If not I will troubleshoot. I am 99% sure it will but I'd like a confirmation from someone else.

{DOU}Tommy

P.S. For those who are curious, these are the master servers in our server's .ini file:

IpServer.UdpServerUplink MasterServerAddress=unreal.epicgames.com MasterServerPort=27900

IpServer.UdpServerUplink MasterServerAddress=master0.gamespy.com MasterServerPort=27900

IpServer.UdpServerUplink MasterServerAddress=master.mplayer.com MasterServerPort=27900

IpServer.UdpServerUplink MasterServerAddress=master.333networks.com MasterServerPort=27900

IpServer.UdpServerUplink MasterServerAddress=master.qtracker.com MasterServerPort=27900

It doesn't hurt anything to leave them all in, so I am doing just that.

P.P.S. Of course there is still game tracker. It was never to be affected by any of this.