Excelent game , played over and over

Oh childhood memories!
Such a great game! I am already playing the pre-alpha of the new Unreal Tournament. I can highly recommend it because it is heavily community driven and although it is in pre-alpha state, it runs pretty stable and smooth! And you have the feel of UT99 and UT04. Even now it is better than UT3. But I am only testing it on Windows atm.

As someone who got addicted to UT99(GOTY) I can't wait for the new F2P UT to come out.

http://www.unrealtournament.com/
If you can't wait, go and play it!

It's out already? that was fast...

It is not out. It is in pre-alpha. But it is already playable. I have seen games which were fully released but unstable as hell. UT is in alpha but more stable than some AAA games which get released.

I have a couple of observations.

I tried to install UT2004 (DVD edition) following this excellent guide but, once selected the extra pakages suggested, I found out that POL kept downloading very large libraries, particularly one called “windows XP Ksomething” (316 megabytes).

I stopped the process, checked the UT2004 virtual drive and found out its dimension was already more than 700 megabytes without completing the latest download and without a single game file in it.

I had never seen anything like that in dozens of POL installations.

I tried again using POL wine version 1.5.25 without adding any package at all.

Everything went perfectly well, I had only to check the mouse warp override option because I couldn’t look down (the up, left and right movements were perfect) and manually edit the UT2004.ini file to display my native resolution of 1600x900.

As I said, the game works flawlessly with every setting maxed out, no difference at all from my native installation.

Hi Booman,
it occurred to me after reading your reply that the reason for the large downloads was that UT2004 was the first game I was installing on my Ubuntu 14.04 MATE partition (a 1 Tb hard disk) while all my other POL, native and Steam for Linux games are on the other (almost full) hard disk, running Ubuntu Unity/Gnome Shell.

So basically, if I understand the process correctly, on this OS PlayOnLinux needs libraries that on the other partition were installed with other games.

In your guide you say that maybe you will try installìng UT2004 natively: will you use the installer which can be found on the DVD or will you use this one?

I ask because I tried both unsuccessfully; the only way I was able to get this game running was to copy the ut2004 folder from a previous installation, getting the libstdc++5 library, copying on the System folder the libSDLsomething package and launching the game from terminal using padsp ./ut2004-bin because otherwise there was no sound.

Yes, I installed it on POL without adding anything, but it was already working natively on my system.

So right now I have BOTH the Linux and Windows versions on my PC!

I understand that this is a little wasteful and given that I agree with you that PlayOnLinux is probably the best option I will almost certainly nuke the native version when I need that extra space.

Furthermore, there is a a great mod called Ballistic Weapons which works better with Windows anyway.

No doubt right now the Windows version with PlayOnLinux is much easier to install than the native one for the simple reason that with the latter you have to:

1) find and install the libstdc++5 library
2) install the libsdl1.2 library and symlink it to the UT system folder with
ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libSDL-1.2.so.0 /path/to/your/folder/UT2004/System/libSDL-1.2.so.0
3) if there is no sound, launch the game from terminal with the .padsp command.

I think that those instructions may be fairly simple to us but are certainly confusing for a new Linux user.

Edit: I forgot a question: yes, the performance is the same.

Yes, it does.

Having said that, however, in my opinion you shouldn't bother with a UT2004 native installation guide.
Even if it worked, it would be certainly more complicated than the POL one and more intimidating for less experienced Linux users who might stumble upon it after a Google search.

Furthermore, as I already stated there is no difference at all in performance so I don't think there is a need for it.