r3dux.org

I don’t do a lot of PC gaming these days, preferring more to just sling a disc in the 360 or PS3 to get my jollies without all the patch/driver hassle, but you’ve got to have a couple of linux games installed to vent the occasional blood-lust. With that in mind, I grabbed the latest version of ioquake3 earlier, and tried out a single player game, but no bots would join the match, and a look at the shell showed errors along the line of:

^1Error: file bots/default_c.c, line 2: file charsh” not found
^3Warning: couldn’t find skill 1 in bots/default_c.c
^1Error: file bots/default_c.c, line 2: file charsh” not found
^1Error: file bots/default_c.c, line 2: file charsh” not found
^1Error: file bots/default_c.c, line 2: file charsh” not found
^3Warning: couldn’t load any skill from bots/default_c.c
^1Error: file bots/kyonshi_c.c, line 2: file charsh” not found
^3Warning: couldn’t find skill 1 in bots/kyonshi_c.c

Apparently it’s only been an issue with the 64-bit version – but even the older version I had was showing the same problem (which I don’t quite get how) – anyways, I recompiled ioquake3 and it’s all fixed up – and thought that if anyone else was up against the same issue it might be useful to know how to fix it quickly and easily.

1.) Get the source

For this we need to have subversion installed to download the source trunk, if you do – great!, if not, run this first:

sudo apt-get install subversion

With subversion in place, from the command line create a folder with mkdir ioqcode or the like, go into it with cd ioqcode and then grab the source with:

svn co svn://svn.icculus.org/quake3/trunk ioquake3

2.) Build it

Go into the downloaded trunk code with cd ioquake3 and then build that bad-boy with this complex command:

make

Geez, linux is tech To be fair, you’ll need the sdl-dev packages installed (libsdl1.2-dev) and of course build-essential – I didn’t have to get any extra packages, it just built.

3.) Pick a place to stick it

Because I’m the only user of my laptop, I have a folder called Games in my home directory, so I just created ~/Games/ioquake3 and then copied all the files from the build/release-linux-x86_64 sub-folder (created when you successfully built ioquake using that complex make command – your folder won’t have _64 on the end if you built it on a 32-bit system) to ~/Games/ioquake3/, and then copied the pak0 to pak8.pk3 files from my original Windows install of Quake III into the baseq3 subfolder of the ioquake3 folder.

4.) Frag on!

Launch ioquake3.x86_64 and get your game on =D

I have absolutely no idea how they’ve got motion blur on the game (unless it’s applied post-game to the captured footage) – but it looks AWESOME! Want! If you know how they did it please feel free to smack me with the clue-stick in the comments! Cheers! =D

Update: It turns out they’re using the Excessive Plus mod in the video (which works fine with ioquake), still no clue about the motion blur though…

Another Update: Turns out this issue exists in the 64-bit version of OpenArena as well as ioquake3. I rebuilt openarena using the 0.81 version from the svn here – but still no dice with getting bots to spawn. Apparently the 32-bit version of OpenArena is unaffected.