UT 2003 Client For Linux?

Thomas A. Anderson writes "Although not officially supported, there is a very interesting post here from Mark Rein (VP of Marketing for Epic Games) that says UT 2003 client *already* runs on linux, and that it *might* be released close after the windows client. Let's all support Epic on this... Background: Back in April, on an IRC chat, Mark Rein stated that a linux server will happen, but the chance of linux and mac clients were a qualified "likely". He stated something similar in a chat in August. All the chat logs are interesting reads..."

Re:why wait?

[ybmug]

From the IRC log:

ScHlAuChi OpenGL in UT was much faster on some cards, and what about Linux Gamers?

MarkRein[Epic] That was UT, this is UT2003. UT was designed around software rendering and Glide. We have designed this particular game (and hence the latest versions of the engine) around Direct3D and they work really, really well together. This time around we would have to work really hard to get OpenGL to be as fast as D3D. We are doing OpenGL (needed for Linux client and Mac down the road if we do it) but it is not a priority and probably won't be ready and debugged well enough in time for retail release.

Don't forget about the full game size!

[AFCArchvile]

Remember, UT2K3 is slated to take up over 3GB of hard drive space. Hopefully they're not going to require a CD present in the drive since they're implementing a cd key system (IIRC), but that's still a huge chunk for an MP-only game.

Don't waste your money unnecessarily; I plan on sticking with the demo unless I find a really good reason to buy it.

Re:Cutting Edge

[octover]

IIRC, back when Quake 3 came out I could only get it to run on my computer in Linux. Because I wanted to best FPS I could get, I started X and had it only run Quake. Today my computer is a lot faster and such, but I would probably still run the UT client the same way. The point I'm trying to make is that a game or a couple of games doesn't make the desktop. The word type applications and such, those are the things that the desktop is made of. Unfortunally after playing with Jaguar (Mac OS X.2) I agree with the Apple kids. Linux can't touch Jaguar when it comes to being my workstation. I got the cool/stable *nix under the hood, but my window manager and all my apps run the same way.

I'm more interested in seeing the Mac version personally.

Re:Now all we need...

[Tepic++]

ATI does not release *nix drivers for their products.

ATI does release accelerated 3D XFree86 DRI drivers for some of their products. Specifically for the Radeon 8500 and FireGL product lines.

URLS:
Radeon 8500 Driver [ati.com]
Linux Driver Policy (mentions their own drivers in a table half way down the page) [ati.com]

My theory:

If the...

• ...Radeon 8500 driver is just a rebranded FireGL driver.
• ...future FireGL cards are based on similar chipsets to their high end consumer level cards.

ATI might regularly release drivers for their high end consumer cards from now on since it would be seem to be little work for them.

The drivers would probably be optimised for correctness instead of speed.

Re:Question about linux gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried RTCW on my linux box, it actually ran more smothly than on windows. :)