Unreal Tournament 3 Retail on Steam

Retail copies of Unreal Tournament III can now be activated on Steam, a popular online content-delivery service by Half-Life makers Valve, that now houses an impressive range of games (Fallout 3, Bioshock, The Orange Box to give a few).

This attracted my attention, as I have a copy of UT3 Special Edition (that I got from England about $80 less than retail in Australia). Why am I interested in this, you ask? Well, it means that one more game I own is integrated into the steam service (i.e. all my games are in the one place) and also, if my game discs are damaged and/or my PC screws up, I can just download the entire game through Steam again - the ultimate backup strategy. Also, this is apparently in preparation for a new update that will incorporate Steamworks, the framework that Left4Dead and TF2 use for achievements and integration into the Steam Community.

I pulled up Steam and entered my CD Key. I activated fine, but I was concerned that I would have to download the entire game again, and also possibly lose my settings/saves. It turns out you can't install UT3 into Steam from the CD, at least not directly. Not contempt with waiting 3-4 days to download 8GB, I decided to try to copy my UT3 Installation into Steam.

Steam stores all 3rd party games (i.e. not source/GoldSrc) in the Steam\SteamApps\common folder (for some reason Left4Dead was also installed this way). First I started to download UT3 from Steam. I stopped the download as soon as it started: I just needed the folder hierachy to be set up. Once that was done, I copied all 8GB of data from my retail copy. This took about 5 minutes, and when done I resumed the steam installation. The download percentage immediately started to skip ahead, perhaps downloading little bits here and there, and finally slowed down about 80%. I checked the steam UT3 folder to see that it was downloading the Visual C++ and DirectX 9 redistributables. I left it overnight to finish.

The next day I came to see UT3 sitting at '100% - Ready'. I fired it up, but it said that 'This game is currently unavailable.' A quick Google search revealed that I needed to remove Read-Only rights from the UT3 folder. Once done, I launched again, then hit an update, which for some reason would only go while I was waiting to launch the game. Nonetheless, I patiently waited. Once done, I had to install AGEIA PhysX, DirectX, Visual C++ Redistributable, and OpenAl sound system. UT3 Started up, and thankfully all my settings and saves transferred through. Looking forward too that update, Epic!