One of the great game industry battles of the turn of century was the standoff between Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament. With both multiplayer focused first person shooters released just weeks apart from one another, that the two games would wind up going head to head was inevitable. If pressed I am always going to have to say I favour the former, but the remarkable thing for us Linux users is that, for a time, both games lived harmoniously under the same publisher.
[…]While Quake III Arena was granted its place in eternity when its source code was released in 2005, community support for Unreal Tournament was able to breathe some new life into the game, even with the limitations of the closed binary.
Even a strong community can’t fix such problems.
“Even a strong community can’t fix such problems.”
Funny enough, an update to the article says they’ve fixed the problems.
Yeah, I was quite surprised reading the article. It’s been years since I played that game, but the first thing I noticed was he was installing an old build of the game. There have been newer builds with community fixes for years..
Linus has always been strict regarding user-space compatibility. All these old ports that Loki did can run fine through something like Snap/Flatpak with the right versions of libraries added and some OSS /dev/dsp interception library preloaded such as libaoss to redirect the audio to ALSA or maybe PulseAudio.
Unlike its great competitors in the Quake series, I’ve *never* been able to get unreal running natively in linux. It’s a poster child of the advantages of an open source and the destruction of value inherent to closed source software.
Id really handled that the best way – wait until the next engine rendered the old one redundant, then open source just the engine while retaining any license on the data files. It’s why old id games will run forever while other games of the same era gradually fade into obscurity. In fifty years, people will be running Doom on their neural traces all in their heads, while no one will remember UR(T) other than brief video clips on the history of gaming.
JLF65,
It’s still a shame though, I personally enjoyed UT more than Quake3. IMHO quake 1 was exceptional and the best in the series. Quake 2 didn’t feel like the same game. It was only later that I learned that quake2 was originally supposed to be a completely different game but they decided to reuse quake’s brand…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_II
Regardless, you’re absolutely right about the source code, to this day quake 2 gets a lot of attention by devs porting the game using new graphics technology over the years, the last one being RTX raytracing by an nvidia developer. Alas, the gritty stone texture style of the game doesn’t do RTX raytracing justice. A recent patch makes textures shinier and more metallic, but to be honest I wish racing games got the quake 2 treatment instead. Think about that, you could see your opponent’s reflection in your own car! Stylistically portal would also be a good candidate. But I digress…
It would be awesome if one of the big racing series open sourced their older engines. Imagine an open source Grand Turismo 1 or 2.
You would’ve been better off playing it under Linux emulation in FreeBSD. In those days, you would’ve gotten 3x the frame rate compared to Linux.
And, running it under FreeBSD with Linux emulation was officially supported by Loki games.
Without a doubt Quake III is an icon of network games … just like Counter Strike and the not-so-famous Duke Nuken, if you ask me, in particular Quake has no competition (For his time) … in streaming you can see interesting things on the subject
Q3 was also the de-facto benchmark game for YEARS. As such, everyone who could made sure it was optimised for their graphics card/OS/drivers
On a whim I tried ut, since I’ve had it installed and copied forward since forever. My setup is Slackware 14.2 x64 using NVidia’s X server (so not Mesa.) Video “just worked.”
What didn’t work? Audio. Seriously, at least for me personally, audio on Linux never recovered from pulseaudio. The way I made it work was by following instructions to edit the game .ini file to use a different audio stack, then copy the system’s padsp script which really just adds an LD_PRELOAD, and modified that to preload the correct (32-bit) shim rather than the default 64 bit shim. Now it works – but this is the kind of experience that non-Linux users mock Linux for. I mean, the fact that I need any kind of script to say “please make audio work” is itself odd, but having to say “please make 32 bit audio work” and watch a pile of warnings because ut is launched via a shell script, and that implies injecting a shared library into my 64 bit bash instances and failing, but succeeding when the game actually runs…eehh. Still, it did work in the end.