Unreal Tournament 2004 Guide

Unreal Tournament 2004 is the sixth installment of the Unreal series. Strictly a multi-player game, but includes vehicular warfare and state-of-the-art graphical engine with advanced lighting, high quality textures and ragdoll physics. Many games were created with Unreal Engine 2.5 such as America's Army.

Follow my step-by-step guide on installing, configuring and optimizing Unreal Tournament 2004 in Linux with PlayOnLinux.

Note: This guide applies to the Anthology & Retail versions of Unreal Tournament 2004. Other versions may require additional steps.

Tips & Specs:

To learn more about PlayOnLinux and Wine configuration, see the online manual: PlayOnLinux Explained

Mint 17 64-bit
PlayOnLinux: 4.2.5
Wine: 1.6.2

Wine Installation

Click Tools
Select "Manage Wine Versions"

Look for the Wine Version: 1.6.2
Note: Try using stable Wine 1.8 and 1.8-staging

Select it
Click the arrow pointing to the right

Click Next

Downloading Wine

Extracting

Downloading Gecko

Installed

Wine 1.6.2 is installed and you can close this window

PlayOnLinux Setup

Click Install

Click "Install a non-listed program"

Click Next

Select "Install a program in a newvirtual drive"
Click Next

Name your virtual drive: unreal2004
Click Next

Check all three options:

• Use another version of wine
• Configure Wine
• Install some libraries

Click Next

Select Wine 1.6.2
Click Next

Select "32 bits windows installation"
Click Next

Wine Configuration

Applications Tab
Windows version: windows 7
Click Apply

Graphics Tab
Check "Automatically capture the mouse in full-screen windows"
Check "emulate a virtual desktop"
Desktop size: 1024x768

Click OK

Installing Packages (Components, Libraries, DLL's)

Check the following:

• POL_Install_corefonts
• POL_Install_dotnet40
• POL_Install_dxfullsetup
• POL_Install_tahoma
• POL_Install_vcrun2010

Click Next

Note: All packages automatically download and install

Installing Unreal Tournament 2004

Click "Select another file"
Click Next

Click Browse

Navigate to the Unreal CD ROM
Select Setup.exe
Click Open

Note: I'm using the Unreal Anthology to install Unreal Tournament 2004. The original game may have a different executable

Click Next

Click Next

Check "I accept the terms..."
Click Next

Enter the game KEY
Click Next

Click Next

Check "Unreal Tournament 2004"
Click Next

Note: This applies to the Anthology only

Click Install

Click Finish

PlayOnLlinux Shortcut

Select "UT2004.exe"
Click Next

Name your shortcut: Unreal Tournament 2004
Click Next

Click Next again

PlayOnLinux Configure

Back to PlayOnLinux
Select Unreal Tournament 2004
Click Configure

General Tab
Wine version: 1.6.2

Note: Click the + to download other versions of wine. Click the down-arrow to select other versions of Wine.

Display Tab
Video memory size: Enter the amount of memory your video card/chip uses

Close Configure

Launching Unreal Tournament 2004

Back to PlayOnLinux
Select Unreal Tournament 2004
Click Run

Note: Click Debug to see errors and bugs

Optimization

Click Settings

Click Display
Adjust Resolution

Adjust Options:

• Texture Detail
• Character Detail
• World detail
• Physics Detail
• Dynamic Mesh LOD
• Decal Stay
• Character Shadows
• Decals
• Detail Textures
• Coronas
• Trilinear Filtering
• Projectors
• Foliage
• Weather Effects
• Fog Distance

Rule of Thumb:
High settings = More detail, lower frame rate
Low settings = Less detail, higher frame rate

Conclusion:
Unreal Tournament 2004 ran really well in PlayOnLinux. There were a few settings I had to lower in order to play smoothly on my GeForce 550 Ti at 1680x1050 resolution, but otherwise, it played GREAT!
In the future I may create a guide for the native Linux version as well. For now, the installation was smooth and setup was easy.

Gameplay Video:

Screenshots:

 

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.

 

Sadly I was too busy playing Battlefield 1942 those days. Never quite "got into" Unreal Tournament until Unreal Tournament 3. Today I still play 3 in my LAN Parties and a bunch of Mods. Hence my PlayOnLinux guide for UT3 and Mods

 

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.

 

Yeah, that is pretty strange...
Did you select the packages mentioned in this guide specifically?
I've never seen anything more than 300 MB download in the past.
Most of the time its pretty transparent because I already have the packages downloaded for most game requirements.
When I used to download IE8 packages it would automatically download the Windows XP Service Pack 2 (WindowsXP-KB936929-SP3-x86-ENU.exe) and it was a pretty large download 331.8 MB
I have also noticed if you download dotnet40 it might require:

• dotnet20 (73MB)
• dotnet30 (82MB)
• dotnet 35 (206MB)
• dotnet 35 sp1 (242MB)

That could be your 700+ megabytes right there, but I already have all of that downloaded ahead of time, so I only experience installing them.

That is awesome UT2004 is running without any packages at all. I may have had some problems running it and threw in dotnet40 and vcrun2010

 

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.

 

I thought you got it working without any packages?

Yes, I have a feeling those packages had to download for Ubuntu 14 since you didn't have any previous games installed. Still not sure why it came out to 700 MB?

I could mess around with that UT2004 Linux binary. Sometimes they can be frustrating because the libraries are so old and are not fully supported anymore. PlayOnLinux handled everything really well.

 

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.

 

Interesting Mod...
So you get the same performance from PlayOnLinux as you do Native?
Which is easier to install?

 

Which is easier to install?

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.

 

It sounds confusing... not to mention if one of those produces an error, I wouldn't know how to fix it.

Does the installer automatically use the DVD to install the game?

 

Does the installer automatically use the DVD to install the game?

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.

 

Sad but true.
I totally agree. This is the same reason why I used PlayOnLinux for Unreal.