New adventure of UT99 saga

After the success of RedeeMOD, my other project (a mod launcher for games), I decided I want to make an easier way of running dedicated Unreal Tournament ’99 servers.

The plan

My plan was to create a Docker container, mostly for portability. Since the server itself was already implemented by Epic Games back in 1999, all I have to do it to package it for Docker.

Thankfully, Epic back in the day supported Linux and included official binaries, which are still maintained by a volunteering group called OldUnreal. This meant I didn’t have to think about integrating Wine/Proton into the container!

And while a docker container for UT99 was previously made by someone, lack of updates disappointed me. I decided to make my own because of a couple reasons:

The technologies used

Having experience in UT99 modding, I decided to use Python since I could use RedeeMOD as a source for code templates.

Having coded a modding tool for this game was also trivial while asking AI - my own repos were heavily used as context.

In the near future I’m also planning to bake-in RedeeMOD for mod support for servers, providing great use of something I had already made!

Current stage

Today I have built a strong foundation for the server - it builds, validates and applies environment variables (through .ini patching) and runs the server with provided config. Within its run pipeline also has a place for near-future addition of modding.

Web panel works, LAN discovery too!

It has no CI/CD pipelines yet, but that’s one of the main things I’ll be taking a look at in the next day or so.