Continued from Part 12: In Tremendous Pain
It is rare for Linux to see support from both sides of an industry battle, but that is exactly where we were with the release of Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament. With both games aiming to package the full breadth of the online multiplayer shooter experience into a standalone title, the competition between the two was fierce. I myself have always favoured the solid craftsmanship of Quake III Arena, but the greater variety in Unreal Tournament has to be admired.
Some versions ship with a Linux installer already on the disc, but with the Game of the Year Edition you need to download the ut-install-436-goty.run setup script which grants all of the official patches. This proved a smooth process even when swapping between CD-ROMs, but the installer can be too opaque, not telling you outside of the terminal output that it is busy decompressing maps. This can take some time, making it easy to assume that the setup has stalled.
Unreal Tournament only came alive when I set the XFree86 server to 32 bit colour depth, not just improving the visuals and clearing up the numerous Z Buffer artifacts, but also helping to level out the game performance. From there I tweaked the UnrealTournament.ini file, setting "NoDynamicLighting" to "True" and "UseGammaExtension" to "1", with "Coronas" and "VolumetricLighting" set to "False". Like this the game was playable and still looked better than on first launch.
Even with those changes I never felt that it reached a comfortable level of performance, despite my hardware matching the requirements listed on the box. To catch up to what I achieved with Quake III Arena I had to escalate to the point of turning off all lighting entirely, leaving every map looking grey and uninteresting for just a marginal speed increase. With OpenGL on Linux at least, Unreal Tournament does scream for the power of a Radeon or a GeForce graphics card.
One of the benefits of Glide was its lower CPU overhead, so it is also possible a more powerful processor may have helped. Regardless, I am under no doubt that the game would still run smoother paired with a Voodoo card under Glide, as all of the contemporary coverage implies. In general my Rage 128 Pro has been great under Windows 98, but I have been feeling far more of a pull back towards the old 3dfx world order on Linux.
Unreal Tournament benefited from running at 32 bit colours with Direct3D as well, with Windows 98 giving a better showing than Linux did. In the City Intro timedemo Windows 98 managed an average of 40 FPS as opposed to just 30 FPS on Linux with a lot of churn when using my optimized settings. For the sake of argument I also tried the community made UTGLR 3.6 enhanced OpenGL renderer, but it proved heavier than the default SDL implementation on period hardware.
While I have played my fair share of deathmatches, I had never actually played through the single player campaign before. Someone spent a great deal of time writing the flavour text, leaving it a shame that it has next to no relevance to the actual gameplay. The bots in Quake III Arena show more individual personality through their dialogue and character designs than the bots in Unreal Tournament do, even with that one character blurb which is a dig at economists.
The few exceptions are the Skaarj Hybrids and those found in the Challenge ladder, who do exert more of a presence on the battlefield. I will admit to missing out by not trying Domination or Assault before, as it is here with team and objective based games that Unreal Tournament does excel over its competition. I also appreciate the tutorials made for each mode, although they neglect to inform you how to issue orders to your team until the final Assault tutorial.
I did encounter some bugs, such as sound effects interrupting one another and a few hardlocks. Like with Quake II these were sporadic but tend to cluster on certain maps, with the worst offender being "AS-Overlord". I came within 26 seconds of winning before the game crashed, and it kept freezing. My solution was the same as with the "Water Treatment Plant" level in the first Quake II mission pack, namely playing through the map in software rendering instead.
Even without a source code release, community support for Unreal Tournament has been stellar, with the OldUnreal project under the blessing of Epic Games being the current torchbearer. Thanks to them the game still runs great on modern Linux distributions, being easier to setup than even Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004 now are, the latter two seeing Linux ports thanks to Ryan Gordon. The community even managed to bring over what came before it.
Carrying on in Part 14: Return to Na Pali
http://www.ut-files.com/index.php?dir=Patches/&file=ut-install-436-GOTY.run
The UTGLR 3.6 renderer can be grabbed here:
http://www.ut-files.com/index.php?dir=Video_Renders/OpenGL/&file=utglr36_for_linux.zip
A review of the game by Matt Matthews for Linux Games is archived here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20001101213320/http://www.linuxgames.com/reviews/ut.html
A detailed retrospective of the game by LGR including on Linux can be viewed here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRF06DpQE0c
And my raw Unreal Tournament timedemo data can be found here:
http://icculus.org/~hamish/dianoga/ut99-timedemos.txt
If I ever find time to dig mine out, I would give it a try.
Quoting: slaapliedjeThe requirements on those should be fairly low, and it would be impressive to see how they run on a Pentium 2 or 3.Based on my own experiences trying to get certain Indie games working on my brother's older but still much newer laptops you might be surprised. Despite how they look they are not programmed anywhere near as efficiently as actual retro titles. It still might be worth a go though.
Quoting: thelimeydragonIs Sim City 3000 on the to-do list? :pIt definitely would be if I had the Linux version of it which I do not have at present sadly. I really should play a simulation or strategy title at some point just to break up all of the first person shooters, but they really did dominate the Linux gaming scene at the time and for a good while afterwards too.
It does strike me that Loki Software never ported any cRPGs over to Linux. We did get Neverwinter Nights from BioWare themselves in 2002 at the very least. Things have improved a great deal there.
Unreal Tournament with the Radeon 8500 absolutely flew. It was the r200 drivers specifically that did it. I recall 200+ fps on UT, max details at 1024x768 (the monitor resolution at the time of course), which beat the pants off the Windows version back then. The drivers had some issues elsewhere, so I guess whoever was writing it spent a lot of time playing UT. I was singularly impressed by that gaming experience, and it really showed back then just what GNU/Linux was capable of.
Actually I would have to say that was one of the original titles that hooked me into learning OpenGL. I wanted to know how they did it (display lists I suspect, for those familiar with OpenGL1.x).
I never got into QuakeIII, mostly because I never saw a copy on store shelves. Friends played it, but by that time I was hooked into UT. The team based matches, assault mode in particular, were always my favourite.

Quoting: HamishThere actually were quite a few strategy games, even though none of them were classic RTS titles (Theocracy might be the closest, would be great if you made a retrospective on that, even if it would be just complaining about how buggy it is). Case in point: SimCity was released for Linux around the same time as DOOM (both shareware). I have yet to find out which of the two was the first commercial game released for Linux.Quoting: thelimeydragonIs Sim City 3000 on the to-do list? :pIt definitely would be if I had the Linux version of it which I do not have at present sadly. I really should play a simulation or strategy title at some point just to break up all of the first person shooters, but they really did dominate the Linux gaming scene at the time and for a good while afterwards too.
It does strike me that Loki Software never ported any cRPGs over to Linux. We did get Neverwinter Nights from BioWare themselves in 2002 at the very least. Things have improved a great deal there.
Quoting: mirvUnreal Tournament with the Radeon 8500 absolutely flew. It was the r200 drivers specifically that did it. I recall 200+ fps on UT, max details at 1024x768 (the monitor resolution at the time of course), which beat the pants off the Windows version back then. The drivers had some issues elsewhere, so I guess whoever was writing it spent a lot of time playing UT. I was singularly impressed by that gaming experience, and it really showed back then just what GNU/Linux was capable of.Speak for yourself, plebeian. My first PC from 1998 had an Iiyama Vision Master 450 with 1600 x 1200 resolution. I don't recall what tool I used under Linux (I think it was developed by SuSE?) but with it, I was able to crank the nominal 75 Hz in that resolution up to 80 Hz. Also, later on, I got myself a used ATi FireGL 8800, back when professional cards were actually faster than consumer cards. 25 MHz higher clocked GPU and 15 MHz faster RAM than your measly Radeon 8500!
Edit: Right, it was SaX2 (SuSE advanced X configuration) and even had a graphical user interface.
Last edited by Lightkey on 22 February 2022 at 3:36 pm UTC
Quoting: LightkeySpeak for yourself, plebeian. My first PC from 1998 had an Iiyama Vision Master 450 with 1600 x 1200 resolution. I don't recall what tool I used under Linux (I think it was developed by SuSE?) but with it, I was able to crank the nominal 75 Hz in that resolution up to 80 Hz. Also, later on, I got myself a used ATi FireGL 8800, back when professional cards were actually faster than consumer cards. 25 MHz higher clocked GPU and 15 MHz faster RAM than your measly Radeon 8500!
I've used some Iiyama monitors before, and they were great. Can't even recall which it was, but it was a CRT and the colour calibration on the thing was about perfect.
I had at one point contemplated faking the id on my 8500 to say it was an ATi original card (I think mine was from Sapphire) just to try get the firegl drivers working. I was a bit new to things at the time - fortunately I stuck it out as I didn't want to risk damage to the card. Damned good workhorse card though.
The joys of playing around with X settings manually back then! Wait...was that before X.org? I think it was still XFree86 back then.
Quoting: LightkeyThere actually were quite a few strategy games, even though none of them were classic RTS titles (Theocracy might be the closest, would be great if you made a retrospective on that, even if it would be just complaining about how buggy it is).Theocracy is a fantastic suggestion that had slipped my mind until now. The game has to be ran at 16 bit colours and also has issues with newer glibc versions, so a perfect fit for Dianoga. It also seems to have been sold like Terminus with the Linux version included alongside the Windows release, so it should not be that hard to find.
At first it looked like the only place selling a dedicated Linux release was Amazon Germany, so I was considering sending you a private message about it, but I think I can get it in English instead.
Quoting: LightkeyCase in point: SimCity was released for Linux around the same time as DOOM (both shareware). I have yet to find out which of the two was the first commercial game released for Linux.My understanding is that SimCity was a UNIX port that just happened to work on Linux, rather than a dedicated port to Linux such as Dave Taylor did for Doom, Quake, and Abuse. An academic distinction though.
Quoting: mirvThe joys of playing around with X settings manually back then! Wait...was that before X.org? I think it was still XFree86 back then.As mentioned in the article, my install of Red Hat Linux 7.3 Valhalla is still using XFree86 at least. And powering just a 15" LCD monitor playing games at a paltry 640x480 to boot.

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