As submitted to http://acanac.org/blogs/geek/

Remember the good ole days of Unreal Tournament 2004 when you could simply click on a link like ut2004://ServerNameORIpAddress:port and your game would instantly fire up and take you right to the current match on that server?  I do.  I miss those days.  It was relatively easy to create web pages that would show you a collection of servers, what map was currently on, how many players there were, who they were, and so on.  UT2004 was very extensible in that way.  What made those pages (and gadgets) popular was the fact that you could create hyperlinks to the servers and users could connect with one click.

All of that changed in UT3.  Epic and Midway seemed to be on a quest to release a half built video game and leaving out the protocol handler was just the tip of the iceberg.  The game had a rocky launch and has been through a flurry of patches already.  There are no real answers out there as to why they chose to leave this feature out.  I would suspect that they simply didn't have the time to implement it, as they appeared to be grossly over-budget on the core components of the game.

Where Epic/Midway have failed, a new hero was born.  A fellow that calls himself Radon took it upon himself to come to the rescue of the community.  He has developed a ut3:// protocol handler that gamers can install on their systems to bring back this glorious option.  You can get the tool by visiting his post on the Epic forums.

Download the UT3:// Protocol handler here

Installation is pretty easy...

• Copy the UT3ProtocolFix.exe into your "./Unreal Tournament 3/Binaries/" directory  (UT3.exe is located there too)
• Run the Application once and click on "CREATE REGISTRY FIX"   (***Note: You have to do this, AFTER the app is moved into the UT3 Directory)
• For Vista users:  If you have UAC active, you need to run the program with administration rights.  To do that just right-click on the UT3ProtocolFix.exe and choose "run as administrator"
• Close the Tool

That's it.  Pretty simple stuff.  Check it out!