Santaduck Tools for Mac UT2004 Updated

I’ve just updated the Santaduck Toolpak, which if you don’t already know is a set of utilities for the OS X version of Unreal Tournament 2004. Specifically I updated three of the tools: The installer app DropInstaller now correctly installs .upl and .ucl files. I haven’t had the time to exhaustively test this, say with the Community Bonus Pack manual zip, so no guarantees atm. I was suddenly inspired and just tried to do it as I was falling asleep at 3am. Also, the retail and demo benchmarkers now enable full rendering of shadows, and allows for the enabling or disabling of audio as well as graphics rendering. (Demo benchmarker hasn’t been tested– the 3am syndrome again– that, and I no longer had the Demo installed so I didn’t bother downloading it at that time of nigh). The disabling of graphics rendering provides and indication of the CPU-limited processes, and we’ve long since known that UT2004 is a very CPU-limited app, so this is a fun option– look for it in some of our future reports. The use of shadows during benchmarking brings the results closer inline with Windows-based UT2004 benchmarkers (such as UMark), as full shadows have been enabled in the recent v3369.2 patch to the game, despite the UI option for shadows having a bug– in other words you can get shadows in UT2004 by tweaking the INIs (ut2004.ini and user.ini), but checking the box for full shadows in the settings menu of the game might be broken.

It’s cool, run the Antalus botmatch benchmark (in “Max” detail), and you can see the shadows under the trees moving, and you can see each individual branch and leaf! And of course the shadows under the players are no longer ovals.

The other tool applications remain unchanged from the previous release, and include tools for UMod extraction, UZ2 compression and decompression for online servers, and a cache cleaner– this utility set is the only one of its kind available for the Mac version of UT2004. The Santaduck Toolpak has previously been recognized with an honorable mention in the Atari/Epic Make Something Unreal contest, and benchmarks using these tools were cited by Apple in introducing the Rev. A iMac G5.

Download it here at Macupdate

Yes, btw the download works, even though 99% of our download system at Macologist is still down. We are working on a solution that looks good, but it will take time, and all of us are volunteers and we just went through moving the entire forum at the beginning of the year so this is the next big step.

Tactical Ops: Crossfire: Well the news is that there’s no news. I’m still trying to get Petter to get us any information from the team– I know they are testing away, but have no idea how close they are for release. This will be a big release party I’m sure, since this is probably the only UT2004 mod that will have an absolutely huge waiting audience, if the mod gameplay turns out to be recognizable to fans of TO:AoT.

This entry was posted on February 19, 2006 at 2:19 am and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.