So it feels like a long time since anything really drastic happened in the Unreal 2 XMP community, but good news is here, in the form of a replacement Master Server coded by ]HoC[Omen. The new MS made the news at BeyondUnreal and UT2007 World and is already breathing life into the wounded community. Efforts are underway to gain access to the domain "legendent.com" in order to provide seamless connectivity to the new server. In the meantime, we have put together a UI Mod which allows players to easily alter their configuration to query the new master server.

So far responses have been excellent, even to the point that new servers are sprouting up each week.

The project was made possible by two logs which have lain dormant on my hard drive for a number of months: Back when the master server still reared it's ugly head from time to time, I decided to use Ethereal to grab a Master Server to Client exchange, in the hope of reverse-engineering the protocol to build a replacement myself. However, my own lack of time - and not least patience - prevented me from ever getting further than a fairly unintelligent facsimilie.

It wasn't until (a number of months later) ]HoC[Omen collared me on IRC and asked if I had any info about the master server, that I remembered about the project and shared with him the logs I had made.

"Glee" is a pretty good word to describe how he reacted when he realised that the logs contained everything required to make a functioning master server, and within days (of solid work I might add) he had developed a functioning alpha, which he demonstrated to us with this video. It wasn't long before a number of servers (including my own) were uplinking to the new server and improvements were being made by Omen on a daily basis.

However, it became clear that making the new MS seamlessly accessible to all players, would require somehow gaining control of at least 1 of the DNS domain records for the old master servers. Since u2xmp.com has since been... lost, legendent.com was the focus of our attention. I made contact by e-mail with the owner of the domain, but he was unwilling to assist and suggested I forward my request to Atari...

Since trying to contact a living human being at Atari is comparable (and about as fruitful) as attacking a mental asylum with a mouldy banana, the DNS acquisition was put on indefinate hold. An alternative would be required, and had to be one which would be as uncomplicated as possible, to ease the transition for both new and existing players. I set to work on a WebUpdate feature which could be easily downloaded and run by anyone.

With a stable WebUpdate integrated into a UI Mod which was not only capable of automatically updating the master server configuration from a central location, but which also would allow players to update their configuration by hand much more easily, the new Master Server was ready for public consumption.

The rest, as they say, is history.