DeWitt Clinton

I moved the original page into the new unto.net blog because, amazingly, it still gets a ton of hits, even if I haven’t played a computer game in years.

Updated (07-12-2003 09:18)

This document hasn’t been updated or available about three years, but the page still gets hit a number of times a day. I don’t have unreal installed any longer, nor do I own the latest version. Feel free to read through the information here, but it is unlikely to contain the information you are looking for.

Prologue:

Like more than a few people, I’ve had some difficulties getting Unreal Tournament to run on Linux. I’ve now managed, however, to actually install and play the game, so I thought I’d share my experience.

I’m running RedHat 6.0 on a i686 with a 3dfx Voodoo 3 card, btw.

Updated (07-15-2000 13:37)

I just purchased a Elsa Gladiac (with the Nvidia GeForce2 GTS chipset) and finally managed to get UT to work. Great framerates, too. Around 60+ fps at 1280×1024. For some reason, I had to reinstall all the patches (making sure that the CD was mounted!) before it worked. I didn’t need to use the OpenUT code, but I think that some of it was merged into the 413A patch anyway.

My current setup is now:

• Dell Precision 410 (Intel Pentium III 500) with 256MB RAM
• Elsa Gladiac GeForce 2 GTS
• RedHat Linux, a mixture of 6.2, rawhide, and helixcode
• Linux 2.2.16
• glibc 2.1.91

A

• XFree86 4.0.1
• NVIDIA_GLX 0.9-4
• NVIDIA_kernel 0.9-4

Updated (11-28-1999 16:50)

I’ve received a fair bit of feedback from people, including Brandon from Epic, and I’ll try to keep this page current. I noticed on PlanetUnreal that his .plan says that there will be a new installer out soon that will take care of most these issues.

Updated (11-29-1999 15:28)

There is new version of the UT Linux client/server and installer. This fixes nearly all of the issues below. Major credit to Brandon, who worked through the holiday weekend to get this out the door. He also changed some runtime debugging code, and it now runs even faster. I bet our Linux performance is better than under Win9x. I don’t dual boot, so I can’t check it though.

Act 1, getting the binaries:

Try:

• http://unreal.epicgames.com/files/LinuxUT400.tar.gz (Epic Games, USA) or
• http://www.fileplanet.com/index.asp?file=32058 (GameSpy, USA)

Updated (11-29-1999 15:33)

The new UT Linux code is available here:

• http://unreal.epicgames.com/files/UT-Linux-400A.tar.gz (Epic Games, USA)

Updated (12-26-1999 12:27)

I know this old news, but the 402A patch is available here:

• ftp://ftp.bluesnews.com/ut/UT-Patch402A-Linux.tar.gz and
• ftp://ftp.3dgamers.com/pub/3daction/00archives/unrealtourn/releases/ut-patch402a-linux.tar.gz

Updated (02-21-2000 16:32)

Better late than never, right? The 402B patch is available here:

• http://download.sourceforge.net/OpenUT/UT-Patch402B-Linux.tar.gz

Updated (04-21-2000 16:44)

Version 413A is out (and has been for a little while, my bad!). Get it here:

• ftp://ftp.bluesnews.com/ut/UT-Patch413a-Linux.tar.gz or here:
• ftp://ftp.3dgamers.com/pub/3daction/00archives/unrealtourn/releases/ut-patch413a-linux.tar.gz

Updated (08-27-2000 11:39)

Version 425 of UnrealTournament has been released. I believe this was a joint effort between the great people working on OpenUT and Loki.

You can pick up the version 425 here:

• http://www.3ddownloads.com/showfile.php3?file_id=95412
• ftp://boudicca.tux.org/misc/lokigames/patches/ut/

Updated (09-02-2000 16:17)

Version 428 was recently released.

You can get the full version here:

• http://www.3ddownloads.com/showfile.php3?file_id=97884

And the patch from here:

• http://www.3ddownloads.com/showfile.php3?file_id=97885

Updated (09-10-2000 20:10)

Version 428a (bugfixes for 428) is out. You’ll want the 428 full release (see the link above) and the 428a patch (see below).

• http://www.3ddownloads.com/showfile.php3?file_id=101466

Updated (11-07-2000 15:11)

Version 436 is out from Loki, in both full and patch version. You can find those files here:

• http://www.3ddownloads.com/showfile.php3?file_id=105724(full)
• http://www.3ddownloads.com/showfile.php3?file_id=105726(patch)
• http://ftp.gameaholic.com/mirrors/ftp.lokigames.com/patches/ut/ut-install-436.run
• http://ftp.gameaholic.com/mirrors/ftp.lokigames.com/patches/ut/ut-patch-436.run

Updated (11-29-1999 15:33)

In order to install the patch you will need to get xdelta, which is available from here:

• ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/powertools/6.1/i386/xdelta-1.1.1-3.i386.rpm (i386 RPM)
• ftp://ftp.xcf.berkeley.edu/pub/xdelta/xdelta-1.1.1.tar.gz (source)

Updated (02-26-2000 14:15)

The UT Bonus Pack was just released. Pick up the linux port here:

• ftp://ftp.unrealism.com/demo/UT-BonusPack.tar.gz

Act 2, required libraries:

I needed to install:

• ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/rawhide/1.0/i386/RedHat/RPMS/libxml-1.7.3-1.i386.rpm (libxml) and
• ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/rawhide/1.0/i386/RedHat/RPMS/libglade-0.7-1.i386.rpm (libglade)

Note that the installer (setup.sh) wouldn’t work at all until I installed the libraries. In fact, it died with an error message about glibc-2.1 and an x86 being required, which I knew I had.

Updated (11-28-1999 16:57)

Note, these libraries are required to install UnrealTournament *using the installer*. Nils Hoven mentioned that you can install the game by hand. His suggestions are pretty good, but I’ll hold off on posting them here until after we get the new installer tonight from Epic.

Updated (11-29-1999 15:33)

The installation code now work fine, so there is no real need to do it by hand. Brandon has included a number of new checks, and fixed the “glibc-2.1 and x86 required” bug (they still are, but there was an erroneous error message in the first installer).

Act 3, getting the cdrom to work:

I had some difficulties getting the install script to read files off the disk. There were a couple of issues here. First, the installer looks for directories like: $CDPATH$/Help, $CDPATH$/System and so on. Well, after I mounted the disk, the filenames were all listed in 8.3 lowercase format. The installer couldn’t find any of the files, and I ended up with a thoroughly corrupt installation. I managed to get around the the lowercase/uppercase issue by mounting the cd with “check=r” specified in the /etc/fstab. But that didn’t solve the 8.3 problem. I thought the Rock Ridge extensions dealt with that, but I guess I am mistaken.

I ended up mounting the disk on a Windows box and ftp’ing the entire contents over to my machine. I actually had to symlink the directory to /mnt/cdrom to get the installer to run. Weird, eh? You could probably NFS export the cdrom drive on the Windows box, use SMB, or be clever with VMWare, but I went for the quick and dirty approach because I had the disk space.

I’d love to hear any suggestions about how to do it right!

Updated (11-28-1999 17:00)

After a few emails exchanged with Brandon, one from Jim Knepley, one from Adam Gibson, and one from Mohammed Zia, we realized that I had recompiled my kernel without the Microsoft Joliet extensions or vfat support. I enabled both and built a new kernel and I can now read from the CD fine. Thanks guys!

Act 4, the installation itself:

Ignore what the README says. Run the installer as root. Otherwise, it will not be able to overwrite some of the files that are copied off the CD. After the install (I did it into my home directory) just chown it all back to the user you will run the game as. I tried a dozen different times running the installer as a user, even trying one guy’s suggestion of repeatedly chmod’ing the files during the process. Nothing worked. Note, if there is an error about not being able to overwrite a file, you probably need to try again. I even extracted the archives that come with the installer, but I couldn’t find the right files to modify by hand, and I gave up. So, run it as root. But don’t blame me if it does something evil.

Updated (11-28-1999 17:07)

Apparently, this will be fixed with the new installer.

Updated (11-29-1999 15:36)

It was fixed! Go ahead and install it as the user. Most people don’t have user-writable /usr/local/games directories, so you should install it in your /home/[user] directory instead. Actually, this is a good idea because the configuration files are shared anyway, I believe.

Act 5, running the game:

Try it. It popped up the splash screen for me, waited a few seconds, sputtered, and then froze X. I remembered reading someone post about how he couldn’t get it to run under Enlightenment, so I switched over to twm for a little bit (which was easy with the little Gnome toolbox. Gnome rocks.) and ran the game.

Updated (11-29-1999 15:36)

I still can’t run it under E, but it works perfectly under twm or icewm, so it’s not a major issue. BTW, I’m running DR16.3 of Enlightenment. I’ve heard that other people have had luck. Maybe it’s just me.

Act 6, making the mouse work:

Well, it’s still jerky and unresponsive, but after setting the GUI mouse speed higher, and adjusting it to about 9 or 10 for the in-game sensitivity, it is playable. If anyone knows how to make the mouse work a little better, I’d love to know.

Updated (11-28-1999 17:09)

According to Brandon’s plan, DGA support is forthcoming.

Updated (11-28-1999 18:07)

Someone named Rob wrote and pointed out that linuxgames.com is a great resource for Unreal Tournament news about Linux (or any linux game, obviously). Good suggestion. While I was checking that page out I noticed this little tidbit from Sven Riedel:

Hi,

I had the same problem with the jumpy mouse and got rid of them by installing the most recent 3dfx X server from http://www.3dfxgamers.com/view.asp?IOID=31 and added the following lines to my XF86Config, in the Pointer Section:

    SampleRate 100
    Resolution 300
    

Finally in your UT User.ini, look for the MouseX and MouseY lines, and change the speed there to 20.0 (default is 6.0 IIRC). So you should have the lines

    MouseX=Axis aMouseX Speed=20.0
    MouseY=Axis aMouseY Speed=20.0
    

there. Additionally, I changed the MouseSensitivity and MouseSmoothThreshold lines to the following:

    MouseSensitivity=5.000000
    MouseSmoothThreshold=0.100000
    

Now everything is working ok.

Updated (11-29-1999 15:40)

With the DGA support and the changes to the XF86Config, the mouse is now working well. I’m using a Microsoft Intellimouse 1.1A, in case anyone cares. It seems that the sensitivity has been bumped up a bit by default, so you may want to turn it down.

Updated (11-30-1999 09:05)

Brandon’s latest .plan says the following about mouse support:

This version also has other improvements. DGA mouse is now the default. If you are using XFree86 3.3.3, you’ll need to disable it by editing the UnrealTournament.ini (or Default.ini if its your first run) and changing DGAMouseEnabled to false. DGA mouse improves mouse performance quite a bit.

Updated (11-30-1999 11:11)

Theo Janssen from Germany wrote in with this tip:

Hi,

(…thought, that could be of interest for the community)

after having spent 3 days to solve the problem with the jerky mouse in Linux UT (not the retail version here, just the demo V3.48) i found out, that everything works fine after giving the “X-Server” process a lesser priority. If you are working with KDE, start the “ktop” program, look for the “X” process, right-click on it and renice the process to -10. If you do not have KDE installed you’ll have to use the “nice” command in a Shell. After that changes, everything worked well for me (you even have a better FPS rate then).

Note: You probably have to be “root” to renice the X-Server

Epilogue:

It’s working. I love it. I suck at it, but I love it. I’ll see you out there. Please mail me with any advice that I can share on this page.