Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament – Game Of The Year (“GOTY”), UT’99, or just plain UT, call it what you will. Now an older game and eclipsed by the current attention garnered by the new Unreal Tournament 3, this version still has great gameplay and a strong following of devotees. I was asked by a fellow PCLinuxOS’er how to get this working, so here is a quick summary for anyone else interested or having trouble. I tried previously to run UT using Wine but after a while, something broke and I couldn’t run the game anymore. This method has proven to be solid.
1. Go to http://www.princessleia.com/UT.php and download the custom-made Debian installer file, ut-install-436-goty.run. Make sure the file properties has “Is Executable” checked.
2. Make sure your game CD 1 is in the CD drive (or DVD drive, as I have) before you run the script. Some installer instructions say you need to mount the CD-ROM media first, but I didn’t find this necessary. [EDIT: Depending on individual configurations, some users will not have their preferences set to automount removable media. Thus if the installer does ask you to mount the CD-ROM, simply open Konqueror, click on the Storage Media in the sidebar, and you'll see the CD in the main window. Right click on it and select 'Mount', then return to the installer and hit retry.]
3. Open a terminal in the directory where you saved the installer file. You need to be root to run it. Type “su root” and enter the password, then enter “./ut-install-436-goty.run” (or use the sudo method – “sudo ./ut-install-436-goty.run”). The installer will spin the files off the CD and unpack them to /usr/local/games/ut, and prompt for the second CD.
4. When you insert CD 2, wait for PCLinuxOS to auto-open either the Konqueror window with the disc contents or the ‘what do you want to do with this media’ dialog. Close it, then hit the installer’s ‘retry’ button when ready. [EDIT: When the installer is almost finished, it will appear to hang. If you look in the terminal window you will see that it is in fact unpacking the maps during this time and is still working. Don't interrupt it.]
5. When the installer is finished, do NOT hit the button to play the game as this will create a player file in the root directory which will not be available to you as regular user. Quit the installer.
6. (Optional) Create a desktop icon for the game: Right-click on the desktop, select to Create New –> Link to Application. Name it ‘Unreal Tournament GOTY’ or whatever you wish. Under the Application tab, simply put ‘ut‘ in the “Command:” text box. You can also grab an Unreal Tournament logo off the web and use it as the image for the icon if you want. Clicking this new applink will open a desktop terminal and execute the game launcher. Alternatively, if after installation, Unreal Tournament appears in your K menu, you can drag from there to your desktop to create a shortcut.
7. If for whatever reason you need to remove or uninstall UT99 from your system, simply navigate to the /usr/local/games/ut folder and delete it. You will also have to delete the .loki/ut folder in your home partition.
8. Tweak your /usr/local/games/ut/System/UnrealTournament.ini file in the [Core.System] section, change the value of “PurgeCacheDays=30” to a larger value. Essentially, this is the cache that stores maps pulled from the servers. You will have to re-download the maps you previously retrieved if they are wiped from this cache. Not a serious thing for most, but it does waste valuable time, especially for those with slower net connections.
There is no need run a patch after this since the installer script is already patched to bring UT to the latest 436 version.
At this time I am unclear as to how one can add extra maps and mods. Simply dragging them to /usr/local/games/ut/Maps, etc. doesn’t work, and doing so will break the install. I’ll post further on a solution when found.
Posted by thecleverlynamedpage 
