ebd wrote:A very vocal minority harbors a lot of ire for this patch but they don't seem to have any specific reasons for it..
Tl;dr: use 227 at your own risk, stick with 226b if you want something that will work 100% of the time. For UT99, OldSkool can present rather frustrating issues, see below my 227 rant.
[spoiler]I feel I should clarify a few "specific reasons" that I have problems with the 227 patch.
It mostly has to do with the fact, well coming from my honest and non biased point of view: 227 bloated Unreal with alot of superfluous features that should of been kept separate of the primary engine and UnrealI\UnrealShare packages (i.e. should of been a MOD, not FEATURES), 227 is also compiled with newer Visual Studio compilers often producing binaries that execute very oddly on various machines due to retarded compiler optimization bugs and also 227 broke compatibility with Windows 4.x versions for no real good reason...
(No I don't believe there was ever a point to using the "Latest and greatest" Visual Studio when 2005 would of been sufficient especially for such a old game that people like me continue to play happily on Windows 98SE machines)
Another "FUN feature" of newer Visual Studio compilers is that Microshaft adds yet another stupid "Visual Studio C++ Runtime" library that your program is arbitrarily forced to use and unless you wade through the hell of configuring it to statically compile your binary with it, you either have to include the library with your distribution or point the end user to Microsoft's website for installing the redistributables... What exactly was wrong with just plain old mscvrt.dll?
227 is also bogged down with ridiculous "security features", such as constantly calculating SHA-1024 hashes of every single file on your machine and silently kicking you for executing commands too quickly or too many at once. (You know it would of been better and nicer if on the server side you simply just dropped the incoming packets rather than boot the client, like how one can configure Nepthyst to do in such a situation like that) You also cannot use EditActor online anymore which makes debugging replication problems very difficult as well.
It also makes it difficult to debug runaway scripts as 227 will simply cause the script to terminate rather than generate a Critical. (I'm not sure if there was ever a bool to toggle the default behavior back on as I am banned from OldUnreal for obvious reasons)
In all honesty I would of wished that 227 focused purely on fixing bugs and compatibility issues rather than INTRODUCE compatibility issues. (from the result of people clinging to these new "features" saying it's paramount to their mod\mappack)
It's ultimately up to OP if they want to use 227 or not, but honestly if you happen to be rocking voodoo class accelerators, just stay with 225f. Otherwise go with 226b and use either the old OldUnreal multimedia patch OpenGL's (not the newer one as it somehow inherited the weird performance issue bug 227 itself has) or kentie's d3d10drv.
If you use 225f I can provide a UBrowser.u replacement that has a windowed console with various bug fixes so that you avoid crashes that the dropdown console has. (It is a conformed UBrowser.u, so you wont get mismatches online, of course you will potentially get autobanned from nanny state servers thinking it's a "cheat")
I still and with great pride design my mods and maps with 224v. I don't care about the "new and exciting features" of the 227 unoffical patch. I never welcomed such features and given the amount of problems and inhospitality I was given towards my grievances with the patch's issues on my machine, I've refused to touch that patch even with a ten foot pole.
And that ends my rant for today.[/spoiler]
I should also mention, Unreal Tournament Co-op or rather just online play in general with OldSkool and some other mods, has had this ongoing bug where the ENTIRE player's inventory chain will just break entirely. In a co-op setting this is incredibly undesirable as it makes using your inventory virtually impossible and depending where the chain broke you will not beable to use your Translator anymore. The breaking happens very randomly as well. OldSkool is a very poorly programmed framework for Unreal Tournament single player and I often recall running into problems just having Operation Na Pali, Xidia:Gold and Skytown Reduxx all in the same install. (Crashes and what not)
There seems to be VERY few mappacks on file here at UnrealSP that require UPak, so obviously you would need either 226b (Unreal Gold) or the UPak from the standalone retail version of RTNP in order to play such maps. Keep in mind that the UnrealGold and standalone UPak's are ENTIRELY different packages but while they are conformed to one another to avoid online mismatches the standalone version contains EXTRA data that the UnrealGold version does NOT have. But to my knowledge there is not anything that touches said data as Unreal Gold's UPak was the most prevalent one.