After reading an entry of escapenguin’s, I was reminded that there was a Doom3 installer for Linux.
I remember when the installer was released, a few of my Swede friends were all excited. But I never bothered installing it because I already had it running in Windows and I didn’t want to deal with it (installing non-native games in Linux can be a serious pain). So I never bothered until yesterday morning when I thought I’d “give it a shot.”
Turns out it is really easy.
In Gentoo:
emerge games-fps/doom3
Which installs a file similar to: ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/doom3/linux/doom3-linux-1.1.1286.x86.run
In Gentoo it installs the game into /opt/doom3/ (in other distros the .run file installs it to /usr/local/games/doom3/ so you’d need to edit these directions accordingly).
Once that is installed, you need to copy over a few files from the cds:
From CD 1: cp /mnt/cdrom/Setup/Data/base/pak002.pk4 /opt/doom3/base/
From CD 2: cp /mnt/cdrom/Setup/Data/base/pak000.pk4 /opt/doom3/base/
From CD 2: cp /mnt/cdrom/Setup/Data/base/pak001.pk4 /opt/doom3/base/
From CD 3: cp /mnt/cdrom/Setup/Data/base/pak003.pk4 /opt/doom3/base/
From CD 3: cp /mnt/cdrom/Setup/Data/base/pak004.pk4 /opt/doom3/base/
Done!
I logged in as my normal user and started the game with: doom3
Sys_Error: Unable to initialize OpenGL
OH NO!
So I hit the Gentoo Forums, all I needed to do was run my xsession in 24bit rather than 16, a simple change in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
Now it works! Yay! From start to finish I only spent about 45 minutes on this (including the time it takes for my old cdrom to transfer the files from cd to harddrive, which took at least 20 minutes).
It runs at least as well as it does in Windows, I haven’t run into any of the jitteriness I saw in Windows, and later I’m going to try turning the graphics up higher to see how it handles it.
Well damn, now I need a new project.