Thursday, September 20, 2007

Running the QW:ET Demo on Fedora 7

Now one really cool thing that I gotta share has pretty much occupied my whole day today, and with damn good reason too.
The Quake Wars: Enemy Territory demo was released recently to much excitement and draining of bandwidth across file repository sites around the globe, I too downloaded the file and eagerly waited for the download to finish.

Now I only use Linux on my computers. I choose to not allow a certain very well known, bloated, overpriced, featureless trojan-horse of an operating system anywhere near them as I prefer my PCs to be fast, secure, stable and also include a lot of cool, leading edge stuff to play with.
There are many other reasons why I use open source software, I'm sure they'll ooze out in future posts but not today.

Therefore I had my fingers crossed hoping that this demo would work on my Fedora desktop.
I first tried Cedega as I pay for the thing (God knows why!) it didn't even install!
I installed Wine from the Fedora repositories, QW:ET installed OK and I sorted out a few other bits and bobs but the demo Didn't run :(
QW:ET came back with something along the lines of a 'Display must support 32bpp colours' message. Damn! X only supports 24bit. I walked away defeated.

Today I stumbled across an brill little how-to on the QW:ET forum which was a little collection of links & tips gathered by stoic_ails over at the forum. The original how-to can be found over at http://community.enemyterritory.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9115.
Therefore I do not take credit for this info, all I have done is correct & expand the odd bit here & there and stick it all in nice bloggy format for all to hail mightily so here goes.

Preparation
Firstly I got rid of my Yum installed Wine (0.9.42) installation as this did not have the patches required to get round the 32bit display message.

UPDATE
Wine 0.9.46 is now in many distro's repositories which works OK with the QW:ET demo without patching.

Therefore if you have Wine 0.9.46 or later from your package manager you don't have to compile Wine yourself anymore and you can skip steps 1-9c and kick off from step 10a.


I logged in as root, entered the root password and removed wine using yum;
su -
yum remove wine

If you are using a different distribution, maybe one of those crazy Debian based affairs, you may want to remove Wine as follows;
sudo apt-get remove wine

Then I was ready to go...
Do everything by the book and you'll be rocking the QW:ET with the rest of us. Until the native Linux version of the full game is released around the end of October.

I already had the Nvidia binary Linux drivers installed on my system and I assume that your system also has 3D acceleration enabled, the process of installing proprietory graphics drivers is not covered here.
If you're expecting to run QW:ET without any 3D acceleration then you are proper silly.


Oh yeah of course, download the QW:ET demo as well. I got it from Filefront.com as the downloads are fast with no queues and no registration required. Download link below.
Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars PC Demo

The How-To
1. Get the latest wine source; in this case 0.9.44: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/w...0.9.44.tar.bz2

2a. In your home directory, make a directory called wine
mkdir ~/wine

2b. Copy the archive to the new directory ~/wine :
cp wine-0.9.44.tar.bz2 ~/wine/

3. Change to that directory:
cd ~/wine/

3. Unpack the archive:
tar xvfj wine-0.9.44.tar.bz2

4a. Open http://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cg...39&action=view and copy it (ctrl+a & ctrl+c) into a file called patch1.

4b. Open http://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cg...49&action=view and copy it (ctrl+a & ctrl+c) into a file called patch2.

4c. Change directory to where you've saved the patch1 & patch2 files too, maybe your desktop for example.
cd ~/Desktop

5a. Copy patch1 to the wine source directory:
cp patch1 ~/wine/wine-0.9.44/

5b. Copy patch2 to the wine source directory:
cp patch2 ~/wine/wine-0.9.44/

6. Change to the wine source directory:
cd ~/wine/wine-0.9.44/

6a. Patch the wine source:
patch -p1 < patch1

6b. Patch the wine source:
patch -p1 < patch2

7a. Run configure:
./configure

7b. If configure complains about missing packages, stop here and install the missing packages...
For those using Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint/etc. it'd go something like:
sudo apt-get install flex bison fontforge

For those very sensible lot running Fedora/Red Hat type distros:
su -
yum install
fontforge
exit

...and run ./configure again.


7c. Go ahead when configure finished successfully.

8a. Run the following command:
make depend && make

8b. Wait and hope that there's no errors.

8c. Go ahead when make finished successfully.

9a. Change to user root:

su

9b. Run:
make install

9c. When the install has finished, exit from root:
exit

10a. Run:
regedit

10b. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/

10c. Add the key X11 Driver

10d. Add the string ScreenDepth with the value 32 (Screenshot)

11. Download http://tacticalsites.com/~lorian/fil...stem32.tar.bz2

12. Copy the archive to your wine system32 directory:

cp system32.tar.bz2 ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/

13. Change to that directory:
cd ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/

14a. Unpack the archive:
tar xfvj system32.tar.bz2

15a. Run:
winecfg

15b. Set the windows version to Windows XP (Screenshot)

15c. Go to libraries and set wtsapi32 to Native (Windows) (Screenshot)


16a. Install the ET:QW Demo:
wine ETQuakeWarsDemoSetup.exe

16b. There might be some complaints, just click 'ok' :P

17. Download http://tacticalsites.com/~lorian/fil...st_x86.exe.bz2

18. Unpack it:
bunzip2 vcredist_x86.exe.bz2

19. Run:
wine vcredist_x86.exe

20. Check that msvcr80.dll, Microsoft.VC80.CRT.manifest and Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls.manifest are neither in the system32, nor in the game directory. If they are, delete them.

21. Change to your ET:QW Demo installation, e.g.:

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/id\ Software/Enemy\ Territory\ -\ QUAKE\ Wars\ Demo/
(notice any spaces in directory names have to be preceded with a backslash)

22. You can start ET:QW Demo like this:
nice -n19 wineserver && wine etqw.exe
(This way, wineserver won't use too much CPU time)
Or you can be all gung-ho like me and have a launcher icon that runs:
env WINEPREFIX="/home/vin/.wine" wine "C:\Program Files\id Software\Enemy Territory - QUAKE Wars Demo\etqw.exe"

23. Before joining a game, the mouse can behave weird in the menu. But after joining it's just fine, like the whole game.

24. You can now clean up and get rid of the ~/wine directory if you want:
rm -rf ~/wine



The Results
The guy who originally wrote this how-to also pointed out that he found that QW:ET running under Wine on Linux was actually performing better for him that under Windows XP & Windows Vista on a similar spec PC. I don't really find this surprising as I have seen similar comparisons with other games which had similar outcomes, especially against Vista as it's a dog.

When I got round to toying with the graphics settings I found that just sticking the detail on 'High' prevented the level from loading, so I chose the 'Custom' settings and set most of rendering details to "High", the Anti-Aliasing could not be enabled. I'd put that down possibly to the version of the DirectX API under Wine.

Anyway that's not really a problem as it looked fantastic at 1280x1024 resolution and I was seeing frame-rates between 30-40+ FPS on my system during online gameplay with 31 other players together with all the high-end weather, plants, 'soft particle' effects and all that fancy stuff which simply looks fantastic.
Punkbuster doesn't work so I just filtered out the punkbuster servers out of the server list, no biggy.


My system?
Fedora 7
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz
1GB DDR2 PC8500+ RAM (1066Mhz)
Nvidia GeForce 7600GS PCIe 16x
Nvidia HD 7.1 sound


Kill ya later...