Doom3 Natively in Yoper How-To


Doom3 is the latest in the Doom series of games from iD software. It follows the same basic storyline as the original Doom - but with awesome graphics! Watch out for things like the shimmering heat haze when passing flames etc to appreciate the graphics!
Because of this, you need a fairly powerful machine. iD recommend a minimum of a 1.5Ghz machine with 384mb ram and a graphics card of GeForce3 or above. However, with that spec of machine, the game is virtually unplayable. The best graphics card you can afford will make a vast difference to the game play - however, setting lower quality on various settings will help minimise choppiness in the game play.

Right, thats the preamble over with!

Installing Doom3

First you need the Doom3 linux binary - the current one is doom3-linux-1.1.1286.x86.run, available from id's ftp site -

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/doom3/linux/

You will find if you try to download the file using a broswer, that you need to right click the file and select Save Link As... or you will simply see a huge text file!
The binary has to be installed as root. So the easiest way is to open a Konsole (the black monitor icon in your taskbar) and then do the following -
Type in (without the quotes) -

"su"

and press enter. You will be asked for your root password - type that in, and you should see the root user command prompt.
Now you need to go to the place where you saved the doom3 binary.
So, using the Konsole still, type in (again, no quotes) -

"cd /home/yourusername/whereverthefileis"

and press enter. In my case, I put it into /home/mark/stuff, so I simply issue

"cd /home/mark/stuff"

and press enter.
You will now be in the right place to install the doom3 binary. Now, to install it, type in (again, no quotes) -

"sh doom3-linux-1.1.1286.x86.run"

press enter - and the install will begin. You can scroll through the readme if you like, then hit the return (enter) key. You now select I agree to accept the licence. You can read the readme if you want - but its only going to say pretty much what this is doing
So I would select no here with the arrow keys, then press enter to accept your choice. The next screen will ask where you want to install Doom3. The default is the best choice (/usr/local/games/doom3). Likewise the next screen - where to install symlinks - choose the default. Just accept all defaults - until the game installs. It installs quickly! Then at the final screen, you will be asked if you wish to start the game. Choose no here - you have not finished installing it yet!
That is the finish of the actual binary install. Now we need to copy some files from the Doom3 CDs. This is probably the worst part of the entire install! A lot of disk swapping and waiting.
OK, its not hard - but tedious!
So, you need to copy the following files from your Doom3 CDs to your newly created /usr/local/games/doom3/base directory. It will already contain a few files, but the ones below have to also be added -

 pak000.pk4
 pak001.pk4
 pak002.pk4
 pak003.pk4
 pak004.pk4
 
The files will need to be copied as root.Perhaps the easiset way is to copy the files into a folder in your home partition first, then use the File Manger Super User program to transfer the files from there. Lets create a new folder in /home called doom_files
For convenience, the files are on the following disks here -
 
 pak000.pk4 disk two about 340mb (/Setup/Data/base)
 pak001.pk4 disk two about 220mb (/Setup/Data/base)
 pak002.pk4 disk one about 400mb (/Setup/Data/base)
 pak003.pk4 disk three about 303mb (/Setup/Data/base)
 pak004.pk4 disk three about 230mb (/Setup/Data/base)
 
So, once you have collected the files from the CDs - and put them into your /home/doom_files folder, you can now transfer them as root to the /usr/local/games/doom3/base directory.
From the Start menu button, select System and then More Applications. Click the File Manager-Super User Mode icon. You will need to enter your root password into the window which appears. Once started, navigate to your home directory and find the folder where you put the files you have just copied from the CDs.
Click Edit, then Selection and click select all. Click edit again, and choose move files. A window will appear for you to choose the location to move the files to. Either navigate to, or enter /usr/local/games/doom3/base/ and click ok. The moving of the files will begin. There are over 1gb of files here - so it will take a while!
Once that is completed, Doom3 is ready to roll  You have moved the files from your home folder, so you can now delete that folder which we created to temporarily hold the files and close the SuperUser File Manager window.
 
Doom3 needs a 24 bit desktop, so check that you have yours set to 24bpp before attempting to start it - otherwise it will bomb out !
Another problem you may encounter is choppy, robotic sound. The way round this is to pass the following conmmand to Doom3 via your command line -
 
"/usr/local/games/doom3/doom3 +set s_driver oss" without the quotes of course! This makes Doom3 use the oss drivers rather than alsa and helps in some cases (my machine for instance!)
 
Finally, you will probably wish to create an entry in your main start menu for Doom3 - so you can launch the game by simply clicking the entry.
Go to the start button and right click it. Select Menu Editor. When this opens, you will see a list - similar to the normal Start menu entry list on the left pane of the editor. Find the entry called Games - which is where Doom3 should probably go. Right click the Games entry in the editor, and select New Item. Enter the name Doom3 in the dialog box which pops up and ok it.
The Doom3 entry will now appear in the Menu Editor pane under the heading of Games. It will probably be selected already, but if not, select it. In the right hand pane, you will see the editing pane for Doom3. In the Command part, put the path (and any parameters you need) to start Doom3. So, in the case of my own entry, as I need the sound fix as well, I put -
"/usr/local/games/doom3/doom3 +set s_driver oss" without the quotes. You may not need the sound parameters, so check first
The icon in the Doom3 editor will still be a plain one - looking like a text type document. We can easily change that - simply click the icon in the editor, then select other icons in the Icon menu. Click browse.. and navigate to the /usr/local/games/doom3 folder. In there is the ideal icon called doom3.png. Click that and accept it.
That will add the Doom3 icon to your Doom3 start menu entry.
Now all that remains is to play the game