Bringing UT3 under Steam

[kAoS-Bambislayer]

If you buy the game online in steam, it installs in steam - like doh.

BUT what about if you already have the game purchased pre-steam and you want to install it under steam?

Your in luck, here's a link to Epic's forum covering just this aspect.

http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread. ... ight=steam

Note: This post used to be a sticky on their site but for some stupid unknown reason going against all sense and sound judgement, they have taken it off being a sticky - go figure.

If your searching Epic's site, it now resides under 'general chat'. The title of the post is 'Complete guide to activate retail UT3 on Steam without downloading 9GB' so you could search on any of the terms in the title and find it in future - unless Epic do something even more stupid and remove it altogether!

There's one BIG Gotcha with transferring your game under steam - your game will become steam locked - that is, you can never take it out of steam again! (that's if you transfer your keys to steam). To most people this isn't a big deal because of all the things that steam adds in terms of friends contacting etc and you can now buy the game for between $10 - $20 anyhow. Note: Apparently you don't have to transfer across your UT3 keys to steam if you don't want to. I did - under steam it means if your install disks ever become lost/corrupted etc you can simply reinstall the game off steam as you are a registered UT3 owner there - steam just makes life easy for this sort of stuff - the game backup option is p*ss easy too - a few clicks and your games backed up or a few clicks and you can restore the game on any machine with steam client installed - no need for the reinstall disks + patches etc if you just use the steam game backup files (you must do a backup first obviously!).

Effectively, the way you transfer the game under steam control is start a steam install of the game, cancel it after a few mins (check the guide). This will create all the file structure etc. Then drag and drop your UT3 game folder over the top. Then use steam again to continue the file updates etc. What steam does is then look at the differences and update the game and add steam stuff - it takes about 500 mb from memory of downloading - but this is in contrast to reinstalling 9 gb worth totally via steam.

You can then choose to delete your original UT3 game install if you wish.

I have found that the steam client doesn't interfere 'much' with the game. On some occasions however, the steam client causes a minimisation of the UT3 game mid play :-( This annoys the hell out of me because it take my system a good 30 seconds to reopen the game to full screen mode again, by the Grim has headshot me like 50 times - lol

Remember - read the guide! There's a fair amount of discussion in the thread about in's/out's but I for one am glad I transferred my UT3 under steam - the benefits outweigh the negative IMO.

[gämmö]

Yeah this works fine.

taks for the heads up man...