Linux Guide

While Renegade X provides only release for Microsoft Windows, it is possible to get it running on GNU+Linux systems. This guide aims to be as simple as possible, but it is still recommended that you are familiar with basics of Linux and how it works.

Possible installation methods

This article describes two ways of getting Renegade X installed and running on your Linux system. First way is mostly automated while second one is more technical and requires more manual steps.

Installing with Lutris

Lutris is open gaming platform for Linux that servers as a sort of aggregator. It aims to provide easy way to install and manage games on Linux. This is achieved by having the community submit a so called "installer" (a list of tasks that Lutris should perform) to the online library. To install Lutris follow instructions here. Lutris installer for Renegade X requires some software to be installed on your system in order to work, so make sure to install it before running the installer.

WINE

WINE is a compatibility layer that allows software written for Windows to run on Linux. This is required for both installation process and for running Renegade X, so it must be installed in any case. Your distribution's repository should have it available, meaning that you should be able to easily install it on your system through your distribution's software center / package manager. If that is not the case, then follow this guide. There exists a community maintained tracker of what software runs in WINE and how well, named AppDB, where Renegade X is already one of existing entries. [1]

Mono

If you are using Debian, Ubuntu (or one of it's derivatives), Linux Mint or some other Debian-based distro, then you will need to install package named mono-complete in order to get Renegade X Launcher and Renegade X itself to start. It should be available in your distribution's repository and you can use same method to install it as you did for WINE.

Running the installer

After you installed Lutris and other required software, you can start the Renegade X installation process by visiting this site, where you click on "Show unpublished installers" and then click on "Install" button that appears. By doing so, you should get a prompt where you are asked which program should handle opening this link, and Lutris should be the only option, so confirming the selection will start the installation process. It is recommended to make browser remember this decision so that the prompt does not appear every time you wish to run some Lutris installer. Note that while Lutris automates many parts of the installation, there are still some steps where you will be asked for input and process will not continue until you do so.

You should see main Lutris window appear and on top of a dialog window asking you which version to install. As there is only one option available, you should press "Continue". In next step you are asked where do you wish to have Renegade X installed. This directory will be used to contain not only Renegade X game data but also all the dependencies that will get automatically installed. Either continue with default path or provide a new path. After that Lutris will start downloading and configuring required files. There are quite a few dependencies to be installed, so the process will take some time. You might be asked to confirm download and installation of Wine Gecko and Wine Mono, which you should do in order to make process continue. If it happens that the message <code<Running /usr/bin/wineserver -w. This will hang until all wine processes in prefix=... terminate appears and text in the window does not change for a long time, then you should cancel the process and start the installer again.

After all dependencies are configured there should appear a new window titled "Renegade X Launcher (Beta) Setup". Which is the same window you would get if you were installing Renegade X on Windows. Click "Next", check the "I accept". click "Next" and DO NOT change the suggested path (C:\Program Files (x86)\Renegade X\). If you do, then Lutris will not find and won't be able to start the launcher after installation is complete. Again click "Next" and then click "Install". After that click "Finish" once that button appears. Back in the window where Lutris was installing file you should shortly see it say "Installation finished", asking you whether to "Launch Game" or close the window. You should press "Launch Game", which will close the window and start Renegade X Launcher, which will say that it appears it is your first time launching and ask you if you wish to install the game. You should click "Yes" and follow given instructions. After game is downloaded you will be asked to enter your nickname and then the Renegade X Launcher will start from which you can start Renegade X.

Optional configuration and improvements

There are many options that you can change by right-clicking on the Renegade X banner in main Lutris window and selecting "Configure". Under "Game Options" you can configure Lutris to start 32 bit or 64 bit Renegade X executable instead of Renegade X launcher by changing the executable path. If you have Steam installed and Proton downloaded, you can change configuration under "Runner Options" to use any of downloaded Proton versions instead of currently used version of WINE.

Installing with winetricks

This method assumes that you are familiar with command line tools. It uses winetricks, which is a helper script for WINE that automates installation of various Windows components in WINE and simplifies many related tasks. While you will find a script below that even further automates the installation process, you will need to set up some dependencies in order for provided script to work.

Renegade X

You can choose to either download the installer here or you can find the package containing latest full release.

WINE

WINE is required for winetricks to work and will later be used to run Renegade X.

winetricks

It probably exists in your distro's package repositories, but if not, follow the instructions here to get it working on your system. This guide assumes that winetricks is in your PATH (meaning that you did not just download the script file but that you actually installed it, making "winetricks" one of valid commands in terminal)

DirectX 9 jun2010

Release of DirectX that will be required in one of the steps of installation process. It can be downloaded here.

Other requirements

Make sure that you have cabextract installed on your system, as winetricks requires it for installing Windows components. If you are on Debian, Ubuntu (or any of it's derivatives), Linux Mint or any other Debian based distro make sure to install mono-complete, as it is required for Renegade X launcher to run. X.org server must be running in order for game to work.

Install script

Open new text file, name it renx_setup_script.sh or something, make that file executable by right clicking on it in file browser, opening properties and under "Permissions" check the "allow executing" or something like that. Alternatively, while in terminal use chmod +x /path/to/renx_setup_script.sh to achieve same effect (use actual path to the file of course). After that is done, copy the following into the file:

#!/bin/bash
# used just to get initial wine configuration in case that .wine directory does not exist yet
[[ -d ~/.wine ]] || winecfg 
# assume latest winetricks already installed
# the -q parameter supresses all the GUI warning dialogs, which there are *A LOT* during this process
winetricks -q corefonts vcrun2008 vcrun2010 xact d3dx9_43 d3dx9
# d3dx9 sets WINE to identify as Windows 2003, so switch back to to Windows 7 so that dotnet452 installation works
winetricks -q win7
winetricks -q dotnet452 win7

Now save file and run it, preferably in the terminal by cd'ing to the directory that contains the file and running ./renx_setup_script.sh This will take some time, and there will be a lot of text displayed in the terminal. Script is finished executing when you see that command line prompt is back (meaning that new text has stopped and you see the blinking cursor again).

Installing the game

If you already have RenX installed, skip this step.

Currently, the downloads for Renegade X come in .msi packages. Since WINE is unable to open .msi files directly, we will have to use one of the tools it provides. In the same terminal as the one used in the previous step, navigate to the directory with the Renegade X installer, type wine msiexec /i Renegade_X_Installer.msi into the terminal (assuming that's the name of the installer), and install it like you would on a Windows computer. It is recommended that you install into the wineprefix (drive C: as it appears in the dialog). Afterwards, navigate to the Launcher sub-directory inside the directory you installed RenX in from the same terminal, and run wine Renegade\ X\ Launcher.exe. This will download the actual game data to your PC.

Configuring components

After install script is finished you should be able to start Renegade X, but it has been reported that the game might freeze every few minutes because of some issue with WINE's implementation of xaudio2. If that happens, you can resolve that issue by opening WINE configuration (command is winecfg) and under Libraries tab finding xaudio2_7 on the list (should be at the bottom of the list), click on it, then click "Edit..." button and set it so that it uses ONLY native (Windows) implementation instead of the WINE built-in one.

After that you might notice that game does not crash any more, but has absolutely no sound. That is because the native Windows DLL files that should be used to produce audio do actually not exist. You resolve this issue by finding the extracted files of DirectX jun2010 and using WINE to run the installer (DXSETUP.EXE) and follow the installer instructions.

Running the game

If everything is set up correctly, you should be able to start the game directly by being in the Renegade-X-Open-Beta-5.xxx/Binaries/Win32 directory and running the command wine UDK.exe As Renegade X also provides a 64 bit game executable, you can also run it from the Win64 directory instead of Win32 and running wine64 UDK.exe Additional parameters are also accepted, so it is possible to use, for example, -nomovies to skip intro by using wine64 UDK.exe -nomovies command. See full list here

Potential improvements

It should be possible to use Proton releases that Valve provides to run Renegade X. There are currently no reports of Renegade X being able to run in Wayland-only graphical environment. Finding a way to do so and remove the overhead that comes with having X.org server running should improve performance.

Troubleshooting and bug reporting

Please don't bother Renegade X developers with questions about the installation process or bug reports for issues that are present only when running Renegade X in Linux. For now it is probably best to keep the discussion in this forum thread.

Server

Running Renegade X server in WINE works almost the same as it does on Windows, so everything from the article about managing a Server should still apply. So after changing directory to Binaries/Win32 the example command of running a server would be wine UDK.exe server CNC-Walls_Flying?maxplayers=64 -port=7777. Or use wine64 instead of wine in case you wish to use 64 bit executable from the Win64 directory. There is currently no known way of having server be fully headless, meaning that it can not be ran on server that does not have graphical interface and is accessed only through command line. To be specific, it cannot run on bare metal in such setup, but it is possible to set up virtual machine that has graphical interface and run the server in there.

Tested distributions

List of distributions that are reported to successfully run Renegade X:

• Fedora 28
• Fedora 29
• Arch Linux
• Ubuntu 18.10
• Lubuntu 18.04

On WineHQ's AppDB there are various other reports of Renegade X running in different distributions.