UTAN 3MAC System Announced
 

UTAN would like to announce the upcoming release of the 3MAC software for 3rd-Party Modifications to Unreal Tournament 2004.

3MAC (3rd-Party Modification Access Control) is a simple addition to your modification that allows the development team to maintain a 'white list' and a 'black list' of UT2004 GUIDs.

The 'white list' maintains a list of GUIDs that are allowed to play your modification. This is used during development releases to ensure that unauthorised people cannot use any leaked copies of your modification.

The 'black list' is another list of GUIDs that are not allowed to play your modification. This is used when you publicly release your modification and is used by the development team to disallow access to servers hosting your modification to unauthorized people.

Is this sort of thing a large enough issue that this is necessary? It's easy enough to hide a development server from browsers and password it.

Its not that people want to hide servers, its to allow activities such as secure closed beta testing.

How will it authorize legitimate developer/testers who are not using it on the internet or in "instant action" mode? Or worse yet, if utan.unrealadmin.org is inaccessable for some reason..

Well, it's an online system, I doubt it covers "instant action", although as it's written into the mod it could I guess. I would also assume it works the same way as UTAN, if it can't see utan.unrealadmin.org it just uses the current guid lists it downloaded last time it could see the server. Of course Limited will probably say how wrong I am now I've typed all this. :)

Configurable option inside the code ;) Can be programmed to stop all access offline/online if you are not whitelisted.When its in ultra secure mode if it can't contact our server, it wont allow anyone to play as the lists get downloaded every map change.;)

Sounds good. Does the server's GUID also have to be whitelisted as well?

At present with 3MAC you could run a server with no problems, however attempting to join it and not being on the whitelist would still not allow play. However you do have an interesting idea...