Unreal Tournament 2004 - 20 Years Old

[Zema Bus]

LGR did a look back at Unreal Tournament 2004 (as well as UT 2003) now that the game is 20 years old. UT 2003 is one UT release I never saw, and now I see I didn't miss much. I still like to go back and play UT 2004 once in a while.

[Grogan]

I haven't copied that over, I'll bet it still works

(audio might not work on Arch, I've never tried it there. My Bollux is a pure Alsa system, and that's where I'd play this game anyway)

I still have the original directory from 2004, with icculus' patches with 64 bit build. I've dropped in compatible 64 bit libraries from days of old (e.g. a 64 bit libstdc++.so.5 from a gcc 3.x build I did on an unofficial Slackware many years ago) and it's survived every system.

P.S. I had UT2003. By the time I got it working on Linux (needed that ST3C compression and mesa had to be recompiled with it, with a #define if you didn't use nvidia), UT2004 was out and didn't use that. They weren't dlopen'ing it in those days. Soon after that I switched to nvidia cards for a few years.

Most of the maps from UT2003 are in UT2004.

[Grogan]

Actually wrong, the audio does work in Arch. It must work just fine through alsa emulation. I transferred my ut2004 game directory (already self contained with libraries in its System directory) and /home/grogan/.ut2004 (which is of the utmost importance not so much because of any game data (the maps, mods, everything are in the game directory), but otherwise I'd have to go find the box from 20 years ago for the license key lol)

It just worked, without missing a beat. The last map I played was even highlighted lol

So this game can be played on both OSes any time I want.

[Zema Bus]

I'm going to spend some time in this game over the weekend. At some point I re-bought it on Steam.

[Grogan]

I had power outage all night and after about 6 hours, my Internet went out (They have some sort of switches in boxes around neighbourhoods that have backup batteries... seems to be getting weaker here. They will come and put portable generators on the street, but not in the middle of the night in 95 km/h winds etc.)

Nowadays I'm better prepared for that, with standalone games in Lutris etc.

After a while, I played this for several maps (Instagib of course). At first it felt too twitchy for me, but I got used to it. I wonder how many hundred FPS that was. It wasn't too bad (no sync issues) but that needs some sort of governor. There's no vsync or anything. There was a time when that ran so bad (on Nvidia) I had to underclock the card as low as I could to play it. It hasn't ever done that with Mesa.

Everything came back after 4:00... just on time to start falling asleep at the computer. I think I fell asleep listening to Jay, it was an interesting video. Wish I could remember any of it. I can probably find it in some sort of youtube history.

[Zema Bus]

That happens here too, during prolonged outages like the 24 hour+ outages I had to go through, the Internet connection goes out. Before solar the only way I'd know about it was via a text message on my phone from the ISP.

It's running well for me in the Steam version, all I had to do was turn up the vid settings plus full screen and set the resolution in the console "setres 1920x1080".

[Grogan]

You can just write that in, the engine takes any arbitrary values. Unlike Quake engine, you don't have to unlock it with another setting (can't remember but it's -1)

In UT2004.ini

Code: Select all

[WinDrv.WindowsClient]
WindowedViewportX=640
WindowedViewportY=480
FullscreenViewportX=1920
FullscreenViewportY=1080

(On Linux it's the same, but in the [SDLDrv.SDLClient] section.

[Zema Bus]

Thanks Grogan.