3. Game Engines

3.1 TyrQuake

TyrQuake is a fairly complete project including OpenGL, Software Quake and QuakeWorld clients, and other tools including the popular TyrLite. Tyrann's focus is on a fully featured but minimalist engine for Windows and Linux. A new feature is command line completion. Pressing the tab key at the console will automatically complete the current command or mapname - similar to the Linux shell, Bash.

Currently at version 0.54, TyrQuake now compiles out of the box on all systems I've tested :-)
Typing make will build all the clients, but to compile only the single player client, after unpacking the source code, type:

make prepare
make tyr-glquake

make tyr-glquake V=1

A patched TyrQuake binary is available here.

http://disenchant.net/engine.html

3.2 Darkplaces

Darkplaces is an amazing Quake engine with a great range of visual enhancements and options for colour, effects and sound. It uses the same Doom3 lighting features as Tenebrae and thus requires a more powerful computer than GLQuake and QuakeForge.

It also supports many otherwise incompatible mods including Nehahra and Nexuiz, and has improved support for the official mission packs.

Havoc's file archive can be a little confusing. The large "darkplacesengine" tarballs include precompiled binaries and the game's source code in a second tarball. To compile your own program uncompress the second tarball , type make to see a list of possible targets (programs), and select one. For example - to build the OpenGL engine with ALSA sound type make cl-release, or to build with OSS sound, make cl-release DP_SOUND_API=OSS.

Much thanks to Lord Havoc for this great project.

http://www.icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces

3.3 QuDos Quake Ports

"Here you'll find QuDos' `linuxified` src+bin tarballs for popular quake ports, including that of bjp for Nehahra."

This is great news for gamers. For the first time these engines - including DemonQuake, JoeQuake, NehQuake, Qrack and Tremor - have been ported to Linux. NehQuake runs Nehahra much faster than Darkplaces, and JoeQuake has impressive eye candy.

The tarballs include source code, binaries and in most cases the data files necessary for the engine. To install these data files, find the simply named folders (such as "joequake" or "qrack") inside the tarballs and move them to your quake directory. If they are not present you will have to download them from the game's homepage.

For some of the engines, an additional sound library (which is included) has to be installed. To do this:

    su
    cd /usr/lib
    mv {some directory}/libfmod-3.74.1.so .
    ln -s libfmod-3.74.1.so libfmod.so
    ldconfig

http://qudos.quakedev.com/linux/quake1

3.4 MFCN's GLQuake

A great place for Linux noobs to go is Jörgen's no frills site. Here you'll find some relevant documentation and trouble shooting tips, and a basic version of OpenGL Quake for Linux. Fairly pain free by Linux standards, it supports most Quake mods, but gamma (brightness) support is broken.

http://mfcn.ilo.de/glxquake

3.5 Tenebrae

A Quake engine using lighting techniques similar to those in Doom III. Tenebrae requires a very fast computer and may not be compatible with all hardware (the documentation is a little unclear, and ATI cards may not work). This game only ran at 10 to 50 fps on my Celeron 2400 / FX5600. Interestingly, Tenebrae has an "easter egg". To see this, in the quit game dialog press "d". Also check out the "bumptest" and "zoo" maps.

The Tenebrae installer will install the shareware Quake levels, and all fancy Tenebrae models and textures, but is a 100 meg download. (Make sure to run the game in 32 bpp mode - see below). Tenebrae binaries may be available here.

Compilation of the source code may not be straight forward. Firstly:

cd linux ; ln -s Makefile.i386linux Makefile ; make

- extern int gethostname (char *, int);
+ extern int gethostname (char *, size_t);

After compilation, copy the binary "debugi386.glibc/bin/tenebrae.run" and the Tenebrae data files to your Quake folder. Finally, the game only runs in 32 bpp colours (X11 colour depth 24), so restart X in this mode if you have to, and execute the game with: tenebrae.run -basedir $PWD. Alternatively you can start a new X session with the command:

startx $PWD/tenebrae.run -basedir $PWD -- :1 -depth 24

http://tenebrae.sourceforge.net/

3.6 QuakeForge

QF is a comprehensive Linux Quake project. It has elegant graphical enhancements, numerous single player and QuakeWorld clients and Quake C tools. Amongst it's features are: an overhauled menuing system, a new "heads up display", and in-game help.

Possibly because of it's size, QuakeForge hasn't been updated in years and it's documentation was never quite finished. The usual "configure && make && make install" will build the whole project, but it does not appear to support a minimal single player build option. QuakeForge's default directory is "/usr/local/share/games/quakeforge", so ensure to link to your "id1" directory from here. (For example ln -s /usr/local/games/quake/id1 /usr/local/share/games/quakeforge/id1).

For information about building QuakeForge on the BSD Unices, see the FreeBSD section.

Kudos to the QuakeForge team for a huge project which has provided much inspiration for other open source games.

http://www.quakeforge.net
http://sourceforge.net/projects/quake/
QuakeForge subversion repository

3.7 NPRQuake

Another Quake engine which has been ported to Linux but, as far as I know, hasn't been touched in a few years is NPRQuake. Notably, it has the ability to load different renderers on the fly (!) which is pretty cool. The linux port includes support for the cartoon renderer ainpr, and works really well for me.

The SDL version has rewritten mouse and video code and may work on otherwise troublesome systems. But the sound APIs have not been ported to SDL, so it is not a fully portable engine.

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Gallery/NPRQuake/

3.8 Twilight Project

The Twilight Project "is a set of rather minimalist NQ and QW engines that focus on insane rendering speed, it is however a bit unstable at the moment."

This game is ~quick~, with a plain looking, but useful menu system, so users with a slow computer should definitely give this a go. It also has some unique graphical effects and an unusual user interface.

To compile version 0.2.2 of this project, you'll need the python scripting language installed, and perhaps to make this change to src/nq/pr_edict.c , line 1108:

-               if (progs->ofs_strings + pr_stringssize >= com_filesize)
+               if (progs->ofs_strings + pr_stringssize >= (uint)com_filesize)

If you're having trouble with compilation, version 0.2.01 uses the traditional "configure && make && make install" method, so you may want to try it.

Game saves are an issue with this engine. There are no game save or load menus, and this can only be done using the "F6" and "F9" keys to quicksave and load. Additionally, this feature often won't work if you started with the "map MAPNAME" command, so make sure you begin games in a normal fashion, through the "Start Game" menu.

http://icculus.org/twilight

3.9 SDL Quake

This basic version of Quake is not of major interest to Linux users. It's main feature is that it uses the SDL programming API for sound, video and mouse handling, and should run on all SDL supported operating systems without major changes.

SDL Quake does have a bug relating to music: running the game with an audio CD in the cdrom will limit the game's speed. To avoid this simply remove the CD from the drive, or use the -nocdaudio option.

The game runs at a fixed resolution - the width and height can't be changed. To play in fullscreen mode, use the -fullscreen option.

http://www.libsdl.org/projects/quake

3.10 wmQuake

WindowMaker is a window manager for X11, and this tiny version of Quake fits in an 64x64 pixel dockable applet!
You can test it out if you don't have WindowMaker, but the game will crash if it gets keyboard focus.

For the curious, this game can be benchmarked with timedemo demo1 after removing the "usleep" commands from sys_linux.c.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/wmquake/

3.11 Software Quake

For a more in-depth treatment of Software Quake, see the previous version of this how-to.

The original WinQuake source also came with two pixelated versions of the game:

• X Quake (quake.x11)
• Svga Quake (squake)

but compiling them is no longer straight forward. It involves copying Makefile.linux to Makefile, editing this file to remove the extra targets , replacing /usr/X11/lib with /usr/X11R6/lib and typing make build_release.

There are easier options though. TyrQuake and QuakeForge have software clients, and there is also an old SDL Quake written by SDL's author, Sam Lantinga, which should work on all modern platforms.