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.

Gaming on a budget laptop

A few months ago I purchased an Acer Travelmate 2424 laptop. The basic deal was an Intel Celeron M 1.6 GHz processor, 512MB RAM and Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 for about Rs. 32000.

Now laptops like this, and especially those equipped with intel integrated graphics are not great platforms to run all the latest games, and it wouldn't be fair to expect the hardware demanding games of 2006 to be playable on them. But at the same time the capabilities of the intel GMA 900 turned out a little better than I expected and certainly not as bad as people make it out to be.

Old games like Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament, No one lives forever and Max Payne run fine at maximum graphical settings, but this is no surprise. Games based on the quake or unreal engines, like Jedi Academy, Call of Duty, Medal of Honour, XIII, Deus Ex are fine as well, as are nearly all of the pre-2004 games.

Coming to slightly newer games, Max Payne 2, Need for speed underground 2, Age of empires III, Rome: Total War, SWAT 4 are a few which I can testify to be reliable on this system. Halo runs as well, with low-medium detail settings (I had some fun with the halo multiplayer demo).

Far cry was another modern game I tried on the system. As it represented quite a step ahead in graphics quality (and hardware requirements) I did not have much hope for it but it was playable at the lowest detail settings (and didn't look too bad). I will try Half-Life 2 as well to see if it has a more acceptable performance on lower end systems.

There were some games which would not run at all on the laptop because of the lack of hardware transform and lighting capabilities on the intel GMA 900. No one lives forever 2 is an example of this, but it ran quite well with software TnL emulation using a software called 3D Analyze (although the latest version of the software did not work with the game for some reason, and the game would crash if some graphical details were turned on).

So while budget laptops and intel graphics are not enough for people who wish to play very recent games, or use high graphical settings, but they are quite enough for casual gamers like me.