Marathon: Resurrection Forum

channel #mar name change and why it's useful

Posted By: Grasshopper
Date: 2001.11.29.11.24

Hi Folks,

This is a two-part announcement, first to announce a name-change for the marathon irc channel I created three months ago, and the second to explain a bit on how this channel can help with joining/gathering M:R (and M|R) net games. If you're famliar with IRC and UT's built-in IRC client, you can skip number 2.

1. Channel #mar is now called #marathon This channel is located on UT's default server, which is irc.utgames.com. #mar will NO LONGER WORK.

2. For those unfamiliar with IRC (internet chat relay), and with UT's built IRC client, here's a bit of info. IRC simply means a real-time chat program, like popular instant messaging software. If you've never used it before, it's cool, and can be very useful when joining or gathering M:R/M|R net games.

To access #marathon from UT, here's what you do:

>Load up UT
>Click on Multiplayer menu
>Select Find Internet Games
>Click on the little tab that says "chat." Then click "connect"

NOTE: if you've never used this before, your default server should be irc.utgames.com, and your default channel should be #utgames. Go there first. For some reason, if you try to go to other channels THE FIRST TIME YOU USE UT's IRC program, you sometimes get a "channel not registered" error. That seems to go away after the first use.

Once you're connected to irc.utgames.com, type the following without quotes: "/join #marathon" A welcome message will appear on your screen, and you'll see a list of people (if any) on the right of your screen.

There are two reasons why IRC can be helpful in joining/gathering M:R/M|R games. The first one is that, say you're a player looking for a game, you can connect to the channel and sit around (called "idling") until other people show up, meanwhile playing a local (or net) game of Marathon or UT. If you see another player in the channel who is not responding to a greeting in the main channel, you may PM (private message) him or her by simply double-clicking on that player's name. A tab will appear, and any text you type in that new window will appear on his message console, even if that player is playing a UT/MR net game somewhere else.

To Gather a game of M:R/M|R, you'll need to use the "start multiplayer" menu option in UT. (Perhaps someone might want to post a step-by-step process here). Note that unless you have a cable/dsl connection or better, the game will probably be unplayable. The person with the fastest connection should always be the Gatherer. Once you've done that, go back to the channel, and tell the players you're ready. If you know your IP, then you can simply type it in this format: "unreal//nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn. All a player will have to do is then click on it, and UT will automatically connect. If you don't know your IP, a player can find out what it is by typing the following, without quotes but WITH the exclamation "!getip name" where name is the name of the gatherer. Then, all a player has to do is select "open location" from the "multiplayer" menu in UT, and type in the IP.

The second reason why IRC is helpful is that rather than launching UT everytime to see if people are around on Wolf's server, or any other M:R/M|R servers for that matter, you can use any mac/pc IRC clients (easily downloadable off the web), and idle in the channel until someone shows up. You can do this while doing other stuff on your computer. The standard mac IRC program is IRCLE, the standard PC program is MIRC, both of which (I believe) can be found at download.com. Neither of this programs are CPU/memory intensive, so you can have them running in the background (unlike UT).

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Grasshopper/MjolnirRecon

P.S. A little while ago, PFhoenix started a #marathon chat on enterthegame.com. Most of my comments apply to his channel as well, although some of the commands (like !getip) MIGHT be different.

Messages In This Thread

• channel #mar name change and why it's useful -- Grasshopper -- 2001.11.29.11.24
  • thanks! -- Djof@School -- 2001.11.29.15.24