Linux & Mac UT2004 Demos

Jacek Fedorynski writes "A Linux version of the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo is now available. There's also a Mac version."

Nice!

[DarkBlackFox]

Props to Epic for continuing to support Linux! I'll be sure to support this with my money, and show the world linux ports are economically viable.

Re:Linux games

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wrong. This one has vehicles. That's right, vehicles. And some new game modes. But.. Vehicles!! This isn't just the same as ut2003.

DracoSoftware review

[Dracolytch]

Assault is back, in-game voice chat is supported. Find a mirror/torrent, and start sucking down some bytes.

~D

Bittorrent here!

[Anonymous Coward]

Courtesy of GameTab [gametab.com].

Re:Linux games

[BagOBones]

See if you can run the demo. There is a sofware render option in the game settings.

Bit Torrent

[hcetSJ]

Bit Torrent link: http://www.filerush.com/torrents/ut2004-mac-demo-3 120.dmg.bz2.torrent [filerush.com]

Re:Bittorrent here!

[Neophytus]

one with 125 seeds here [myby.co.uk]

Re:Bittorrent here!

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows version. Why oh why oh why won't people label these things? :)

Mac users, go to the FasterMac mirror

[caveat]

It's holding over 4.4Mbits (550kB/s) and still going strong, all the other mirrors are running about 10kB/s. [shameless plug]Of course, if you have any ISP besides OptOnline, you're SOL ;D[/shameless plug]

What's in the download

[Dracolytch]

So, here's an idea of what's in the download that you may find interesting:

6 maps
The new Onslought game type
Assault is back!!
Voice chat
Turrets
New levels
Sniper rifle is back
Voice recognition (bot commands)

I've heard reports of, but haven't seen yet for UT2K4:
Vehicles
New weapons (spider mines)
Anti-Vehicle rockets
Nade launcher
Play from laptop!!!

~D

And great Mac performance

[benwaggoner]

Yeah, UT2004 is the first thing I've been able to run on my new box where it really felt like all the potential performance was on the screen.

I've got a Dual G5 2.0 with the BTO Radeon 9800 card, attached to the 23" Cinema HD display. Running Halo on it was fun, but I had to stick to 800x600 or so to get semi-decent performance, and even then fps would drop down to like 1-2 if I died near an explosion or something. UT2004 runs at the native 1920x1200 of the display wickedly fast (never noticed the frame rate getting low enough to notice), and looks great.

It's striking to be able to play a game on a Mac with absolutely no performance issues! Been a long time since that happened for me!

Re:does it work with video != nVidia?

[dinivin]

Uhhhh... Both the closed-source ATI driver (for R200+R300 cards) and the open source R200 driver (maybe the R100 driver, but I haven't tried it) have worked with UT2k3 for a while now.

Dinivin

Re:Doesn't mount

[jmcneill]

Poor taste responding to my own post, but...

I just managed to get this working. I rebooted my mac, ran Disk Utility, did a 'verify' then 'repair' on the image, then mounted the image through Disk Utility. Worked like a charm.

Hopefully this will help others who are experiencing the corrupted .dmg problems on Panther.

Re:does it work with video != nVidia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just an affirmation to the parent post: check the change log for the patches, they fixed the issue (patented "S3TC" compressed textures being required) a long time ago.

Re:Mirrors anyone?

[ender-]

Copies of both windows and linux Demo Clients:

Click here for client goodness... [spack.nu]

Ender -

Re:What's in the download

[Erwos]

I agree - the Onslaught map that they included is absolutely kick-ass. Requires a bit of strategy, but not so much that bots are useless as team-mates. If only they'd jump on the back of the truck and man the damn gun!

It's funny - some of the initial reviews I read complained that the vehicles were done badly. I couldn't agree less - the ground vehicles need a little tweaking, but those air units bring me right back to the days of Tribes 2.

The vehicles also don't destroy balance, which is a good thing. A guy on the ground can take out air units and light vehicles pretty easily, and airborne units can destroy tanks extremely quickly. But, then again, five guys coming down on you with buggies is going to result in you dead, which makes sense.

The AI is good at blowing up air units if:
1. You stay still or move slowly.
2. You fly predictably.
If you move like a fox and jink, they generally don't get you.

Interestingly, I also found the Assault map to be fantastic. You've got optional switches and "special events" (airstrike). There's also the cool cutscene at the beginning showing you exactly how to do the map.

Is the Ion Painter (oribital strike) weapon in the demo at all?

-Erwos

Re:Wait, wait...

[47Ronin]

You fail to realize that this Mac demo was out the same day as the Windows demo. Just like how Starcraft, Diablo, Warcraft, Warcraft2, Warcraft3 was released for Mac and PC on the same day (and disc). The only news here is that the Linux demo is now out.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004 is expected to have a Linux-native installer on one of the CDs. Unlike Unreal Tournament 2003, it'll probably be advertised on the box (it wasn't for 2003 because they weren't sure if they be able to ship it). Hopefully, since they've worked out the bugs in 2003, 2004 and its installer will be a lot less buggy (if you patch 2003 up-to-date it's alright, of course).

Software renderer

[waaka!]

I would imagine that the software renderer is probably a PC-only option. UT2K4 uses Pixomatic [radgametools.com] for its software renderer, which from what I can gather from the website, is heavily optimized for speed, but is only for PCs. (I suppose the fact that it was written by Mike Abrash, who worked on the original Quake software renderer with John Carmack and has written a fair share of optimization books, is more than enough assurance for me.) Anyways, there doesn't seem to be a Mac version of that, but Macs tend not to be saddled with crappy onboard graphics chips, anyway.

Re:gentoo ebuild

[DeathPenguin]

You'll still need to download the tarball and put it in /usr/portage/distfiles.

Re:This is not right

[smkndrkn]

Darn I wish I had done a quick search before posting...here is the link to it...
href=http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/afte r.html [unm.edu]

Re:It's probably there

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Just tried it and it worked, although it was much laggier(on my geforce2mx400 64mb pci..)

I was a little weary of messing with the config(or console for that matter) as I've always been more of a quaker.

Try A3D support instead

[tjwhaynes]

If you want hardware 3D audio, then your best bet is to buy one of those old Aureal soundcards with A3D support. Recently the developers finished reverse engineering the the 3D audio hardware and got it cranking. Work on integrating this 3D hardware to work in Open AL is underway - it'll be sweet if they can get it working well. The Aureal cards now have full blown ALSA drivers complete with working hardware equalizers and mad props to them for getting it working. EAX is, as far as I can tell, still in need of heavy reverse engineering as Creative don't seem to wish to release the specs.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Re:other *nix games ?

[sloanster]

There are not as many games released for linux as there are for the more common ms windows platform, but the situation is getting much better. id software has been pretty good over the years, pretty much any id game (doom, quake, quake2, quake 3...) has a linux version, whether official or unofficial, and games based on the carmack 3D engine often have native linux versions as well, e.g. return to castle wolfenstein, MOHAA, BF1942, enemy territory...

Some of the more informative linux game sites:

http://icculus.org/
http://www.tuxgames.com/
h ttp://www.linuxgames.com/
http://www.linuxgamepub lishing.com/

Re:Linux games

[Listen Up]

It has as much to do with your processor as it has to do with the video card. I have a laptop with an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ and a Mobility Radeon 7000 IGP. I can play UT2004 in Direct 3D mode (DirectX 9.0) at 800x600 with full graphics turned on and every option I can find without a single frame rate drop or slowdown. About 5 seconds into the game and my CPU fan kicks into high speed mode, so it is definitely using a ton of processor power. It would be nice to play it at 1400x1050 resolution though (my everyday laptop resolution setting).

Mac users - disconnect iSight

[gsfprez]

this is what causes UT 2004 demo to crap out at the spash screen.