Last year, a small team of developers in the Unreal Tournament community has been given the rare opportunity by Epic Games to be able to develop patches for the game.
This team is currently hard at work into trying to modernize and fix as many issues as possible in the very first game patch after 20 years, a patch which represents version 469 of Unreal Tournament 99.
This new patch is still currently under closed beta testing (which you may apply to in OldUnreal, the HQ of the developers working on UT99 and Unreal patches), and is being actively worked on, with a large number of issues already addressed and fixed in the new patch, namely issues that had led to massive performance drops, as well game crashes.
Some of these fixes have made it possible for this mod to finally be able to shine in its own max settings.
Up until now, every trailer put forward, every screenshot, every media, was with the mod in normal settings, the settings at which the quality and quantity of effects was moderate enough to keep the engine stable without crashing, although it was always possible from the start to raise to max settings, and to show off the extra effects, however I wanted to show what players would actually be able to play with, to match their expectations fairly.
At max settings, this mod employs a larger number of effects especially in nuclear explosions, making them look overall better and more massive than what they look at normal settings.
Once this new patch is out, you will be able to raise NW3 settings to the absolute max without crashing the game, and so here's a look of how the UltimaProtos nuclear explosion actually looks like at max settings in UT v469:
This fills me with joy