DEAD GAME REVIEW - Written interview with Timiimit

UnrealTournament - This article is part of a series.

Part 2: The Unkillable Unreal Tournament

Part 3: This Article

This interview is available via PDF format here. It was first released via Discord on the 31st of May 2023 and was added to Entropic Domain on the 11th of April 2025.

We still recommend you read via the PDF as its a nicer visual, but it has been added here for archival purposes (in case the Drive host goes down for some reason) and to make the website a more complete platform for DGR content.

Since when do you play Unreal games?

I honestly have no idea, perhaps I wasn’t even going to school yet. My dad booted up the game for me and i used to just mess with the bots i think. I always though that i played just UT04 but later learned that sometimes my dad started ut99 and sometime ut04, maybe ut03. I’m really not sure. My guess of my age back then would proabably be 6 or 7.

How did you get into game modding?

I think there are 4 possible answers based on your definition of game modding. I used to work on a server for MTA (multiplayer mod for GTA San Andreas) and thats the first time i wrote code to modify a game, but that didn’t really feel like modding. In 2017 or 2018 I got an idea to make a program which would be able to retrieve some in- game data from game called osu!. My intention was never to modify anything in the game, but it was probably the first time i got introduced to techniques used in mods. In 2019 i stared working on UT4UU and that was the first time i actually tried modding existing game features.

Are you an active modder for other games aswell or is Unreal Tournament the main game for your hobby?

No, i only work on UT4UU mod. I havent played many games in my life. i usually stick with games for years before moving on, so there’s not many games that interest me.

Why did you start work on UT4UU and what does it do?

“why” is an interesting question. i was just playing bt (BunnyTrack game mode) in UT4 with ProX221, just someone that used to play a bunch of bt back in 2019.

he came up with the idea of being able to trigger more than 2 taunts and wondered if something like that was possible. normally game only lets you bind 2 taunt keys. i actually took his idea seriously and first came up with a plan to make this a reality. with experience i aquired from locating and reading data from osu! i was confident i could do the same for ut4 but then just additionally overwrite existing memory data.

i became obsessed with his idea and worked on it for what i think was 1 week. i worked on it all the time, since i woke up until i went to bed. luckily it was summer break so i had free time. then after i finished that, i came up with the idea to animate clan name. i obsessed with that idea for another week and then gave the final program to people that i used to be in clan with at the time. i remember they told me they managed to confuse many people with that lol. i kept improving this program and then decided i’ll make this fully accessible to anyone and had to decide on how to name this. and “Unofficial update” or UU for short seemed fitting since the game was abandoned for so many years already. it was something fresh for players deprived from updates for 2 years.

UT4UU was originally just meant as a quality of life improvement. It offered faster game startup times. when you try to open The CUSTOM tab which is used to create a custom match it takes ages to open every time. UT4UU allowed this to be reduced only take long the first time you opened it then it opens almost instantly subsequently. These problems aren’t really noticed by new players because the length of time needed to wait extends by the number of custom content files (.pak files, usually just called paks) you try to load in the game. then i started adding more and more:

Faster pak downloading
ability to start the game without EpicGames Launcher
unlocking cosmetics that became unobtainable through the years
game normally shows only levels up to 50, i unlocked that to go as high as possible (around 930, due to xp being a 32-bit integer)
option to customize cursor color through console

then i focused more on the gameplay aspect and added some in-game improvements that pro players always wanted. some of these were previously possible but only with the use of mutators which were loaded on the server. UT4UU allows them to customize these and then applies them across the whole game no matter if there are mutators or not. some of these include:

added console command to move equipped weapon (hardcore players like to hide their weapon so they see everything. they could just move the weapon off-screen to essentially hide it)
force all character models to be set to default character (some characters have weird shading and are hard to see in some cases)
hide annoying effect in Blitz game mode which obstructs vision
hide enemy name when you are aiming at them
remove console chat message sound
prevent death messages from showing in console which is basically used to read chat history

it does a bunch of small things that add up and are useful to players. ut players always want minimalism. having beautiful maps was never that interesting. most ut players want performance and reliability, they want to do anything they can to get that tiny bit of advantage. all graphics settings down to low is a must :D

i was quite busy irl, so i didn’t make many updates. but i promised in 2021 to deliver a new update by the end of september 2022. i think it was 15th september or so and i still havent done anything. but i had an idea one month prior. up until now UU was purely a game hack. but we have source code of the game, so i was messing with the code and managed to compile it and that gave me a way to turn UU into a plugin which UE4 allows you to make. I was again obsessively working on it until the end of month, perhaps 1 week over.

I was rewriting all funcionality that the old hack had but because of access to source code, everything could be made 10x quicker. I even was now capable to deliver on new UI which seemed very far fetched before UU was a plugin.

UT4’s friend list got broken in i think 2021. in stock ut4 you were unable to see which friends are online and what they are playing. i fixed this by upgrading XMPP module which is used for that.

I was very happy with the plugin version i made. and all uu users were as far as i know happy with it too.

What went through your mind when you got the bad news that UT4 is going to die?

At first i was just confused, didnt know whether to believe the person that mentioned it to me or not. Within the first hour of the news dropping i think i got about 10 people asking me if there was a way for me to keep the game alive. First i was considering whether people would even switch to a “new way of logging in” and if its even worth to make something like new master server. I think soon after i was determined to find a way to extend game’s lifetime. UT4 is my second favourite game and ive been playing it since 2016. I really couldnt have it be taken away like this.

What are the challenges in reverse engineering master servers of a game? I bet capturing packets from the server and “guesstimating” what commands the server is expecting can become quite frustrating! (feel free to get as technical as you want)

It was luckily way easier than i expected. The game uses HTTPS to communicate with master server and there are established tools which allow to capture sent and recieved packets. I used Fiddler Classic for analysis of whole traffic between game client and master server as well as game server and master server.

Master server handles things like:

user authentication
listing game servers in the game
storing user settings
handling stats
allowing certain game servers (hubs) be trusted which means they have higher sort priority than other servers listed
handling QuickPlay (QP) matches
entitlements which are things that users normally unlocked through epic’s store
cosmetics that are unlocked once you reach certain level
stars achieved in single player challenges

And probably a couple more things i cant remember right now that make everything work. All gameplay related communication is handled directly through UDP or TCP connection but that happens directly between game server and game client so master server doesn’t have to do anything there.

The biggest challenge to me was figuring out how epic envisioned the whole system and trying to mimic it. It wasn’t like there was one thing more difficult to implement than others. As i said luckily the game uses HTTPS and all data is transfered via JSON so it was fairly easy to decypher what everything was supposed to do. Since we have source of the game, it was also relatively easy to figure out how things like entitlements and unlocked cosmetics (called profile items in the official code) need to be handled.

These two were not possible to be reversed just by spying on HTTPS traffic because only some players get sent secret IDs that are supposed to unlock them. But i was able to find these IDs in game’s source, so thats taken care of.

One other challenge is that UT4 is badly coded. game client needs to be modified to fully separate away from epic. While it is possible to use Engine.ini file to reconfigure domains that game connects to, a couple of domains that are giving me headache are the ones that are hardcoded. Luckily these are not really needed for the game to function, but its still something that troubles me.

What is the current state of the master server? (feel free to get as technical as you want)

I’m happy to say that almost everything is working, we are just working on final touches and nit-picking at minor details before opening it up to the public. Earlier today i’ve seen 9 people playing a game together and everyone that tries it, says its working great. I was already hoping to let everyone in today but found some things that could be improved.

Today i just figured out how QP matches work and was able to host one myself running master server locally in development mode and i was really happy with that i didnt think i would be able to find a way to get them to work because game has 4 modules which are proprietary and we dont have source code of. Those modules handle all network communication that i reversed by just capturing network traffic. And since we (as a community) were never able to start QP matches ourselves because they were hosted purely by epic i was unable to see traffic and/or configuration that needs to happen to make QP work. Luckily source code came to the rescue once again. All required information was in available source code and not in one of those proprietary modules as i anticipated.

A big part of new master server is the frontend/website that people interact with. @ghgKnives (on Discord) is the one that wrote it in its entirety and he did an amazing job. If it wasn’t for him the frontend would probably just be an unstyled html page capable of loggin you in and providing only bare minimal required info for master server to work. But now its an actual website that’s not alient to users and looks great.

From in-game functionality point of view, I think that the only thing that’s missing now is handling ratings. I need to implement ELO system or some similar algorithm to promote/derank players based on their performance. I already have all required information on how it works so that wont be a problem if its done post-shutdown. atm master server only sends default rating for all players. There is only missing logic for updating rating and storing it in db.

Another thing thats missing is someone hosting QP matches. These can be hosted by anyone who has a game server with high enough trust level. I already talked with a couple of people and i hope to get it up and running soon after shutdown.

Just yesterday i implemented basic permissions for accounts so that some people will be able to do some special actions in an admin panel. This way it will be easy to do tasks like issuing trust keys to all hub owners that previously had trusted hubs, making sure that stats arent weird in a way that someone might be doing something fishy, perhaps also suspending misbehaving players in the future and other admin related tasks.

One more thing that is bothering me which is missing is XMPP server. i dont know anyone who has any experience with using/configuring it but we have to get that done at some point. UT4 uses it for real-time communication between friends but for now we don’t have that. It is going to be slightly more difficuly to make that work post-shutdown but luckily we have source code for it, so we should be able to get it up and running.

How do you think could Epic make your life easier… besides not killing the game of course? Did you try contacting Epic for help?

I have not contacted them for help. I doubt they would be interested in helping. One thing that could make it easier for me is if they gave me access to whole source of all propiatery modules and source code of their server. Then instead of figuring how logic should work i would be able to see it directly and just rewrite it.

Do you receive help from the community for both UT4UU and the master server project, or are you more of a one man band?

I have always up until master server project worked on my every hobby project alone. I have never collaborated with anyone on anything. This is the first time im collaborating with others and making something opensource.

UT4UU is closed-source because having its source would allow people to make cheats way more easily and thats something i definitely don’t want to allow. However i am considering of cleaning up the code and separating it into 2 parts, one public and one private. That way people could still help with work on it but it wouldnt be possible to build it in entirety.

On master server side i’d say i wrote 95% of what is essential for the game to work and others worked on other aspects of the project. So far i also had help from @ghgKnives, @H4KS0R, @Saibaman, @dc!, @Counter Rebel. I thank them for all their contributions.

What is the best avenue for UT fans to help your efforts?

ofc yhe (the) best way is to join the new master server and use it :D

But more seriously for people without any coding experience the best way to help is to spread awareness of it existing and to donate. I got a bunch of donations in past month of working on this and I appreciate every single person who donated and helped with costs of running master server 24/7.

What would you say to someone that has never tried Unreal Tournament 4 before? Why should they play it?

I personally think that UT4 is the best edition of UT ever made. It has a lot to offer. It has all kinds of game modes all from classic deathmatch, team deathmatch and ctf to more modern modes like elimination and blitz. It has a ton of custom content. It has the best movement out of all UT games (imo). And if you are missing anything you can always use UTEditor and create your own game mode or map or mutator. Possiblities are endledd when it comes to UT4. If only we had a bigger community, there would be endless supply of custom constent and matches happening all the time.

Do you think that with UT4UU together with the Masterserver Unreal Tournament 4 might even become more flexible to work with as a community project than before?

Perhaps in a way. It will definitely give more freedom of what is and isnt possible. However the game is still the way it is, i don’t want to force people to start using UT4UU if they dont want to.

Some people still probably don’t trust it and they view it as a potential virus or something. Master server will still be usable without UT4UU. And if there’s half of people using it and half not using it, it would be impossible to add meaningful features which would not break the experience of others. This idea should definitely be explored more in the future, but i haven’t given it much thought yet.

Is the UT4 Editor able to be ran without the EGS store by the way?

Yes UT4 Editor is perfectly functional without EGS. To run it you simply run its executable with additional argument “UnrealTournament”.

Lastly: What is your favourite aspect of Unreal Tournament 4? Why stick with a game that was never even finished?

My favourite aspect of probably any game that i play nowadays is that the only thing you unlock when playing it is your skill. Trying to become better and to get to the top is something that gives me most enjoyment in games. I stick with all games that interest me for a very very long time, UT4 s actually the newest game i started playing (if you ignore online chess). It is not truly finished but it almost is, its finished just enough to be perfectly playable 99% of the time and thats enough for me its a shame Epic never announced it, doing so would definitely bring more people in. Sadly fortnite took that away.

Many many thanks for taking the time!

Thank you very much timiimit for taking your time to do this interview!

You can install Unreal Tournament 4 right now by downloading the game files and by either manually patching the game, or by running an installer provided by ut4ever.org which even includes UT4UU.

Download UT4 Gamefiles from ut4ever here
Download UT4 Installer from ut4ever right here
Download a mirror of the UT4 Installer via torrent (hosted by DEAD GAME REVIEW)