Monday, June 18, 2007

Unreal Tournament on Linux

I wanted to have some 3D gaming goodness available when I am under linux, and Unreal Tournament seemed a good choice, especially as I had the GOTY CD lying about. But as I had it installed under windows, I didn't want to waste precious disk space by duplicating content, so I wanted to share the data content with my UT installation on the windows parition. So this is a brief guide which should (hopefully) help someone else with the same quest, and serve as a reminder to me when I need to attempt it again. This was performed on Ubuntu Edgy running on my laptop with Intel GMA 900 graphics.

First you need to set up 3D hardware acceleration for your graphics card. Intel graphics users have it easy, you need not do anything. Although UT under windows supports software rendering, I could not find the option for that here.

There are several installers available under linux for UT, and I have no idea which one will work best for you. Try them all is my only advise. I used ut-install-436-goty.run available here.

Some other installers are available here and here.

Make the downloaded file executable, and launch it as root user (sudo ./filename with ubuntu).

The first two files I linked to allow installation of only the game engine, which is what I needed. Uncheck the "data files" option for that.

Now, we need to link the windows data files, I used this guide for that. Use these commands -

for i in Cache Logs Music Textures Help Maps Sounds Web;\
do ln -s /path/to/windows/ut"$i" /usr/local/games/ut/"$i";\
done

cd /path/to/windows/ut/System
for i in $(ls *.u *.int *.ini *.dll);\
do ln -s /path/to/windows/ut/System/"$i" /usr/local/games/ut/System/"$i";\
done

Then run "ut" to start the game. If you get a "dirname: missing operand" error, run this command

export UT_DATA_PATH=/usr/local/games/ut/System/

Replacing the path with the one appropriate for your system.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thx for the gr8 info.