This article contains tips about running doomsday in a Unix-like environment.

If you prefer to launch the game from the command_line or using a custom shell script, there are two ways you can load pk3s and wads:

• Use the special automatic resource directories. You have two options: the user-specific auto_directory, or the system-wide auto_directory.
  • The user-specific auto_directory is located in the runtime_directory. The userdir_option_ defines the runtime_directory. By default, the current directory is used.
  • Let's say you have installed doomsday into the directory PREFIX. You will find the subdirectory share/deng/Data/ under PREFIX. If you have a resource_pack for j_doom, placing it into the system-wide auto_directory PREFIX/share/deng/Data/jDoom/Auto/ will cause it to be automatically loaded when any user starts j_doom. (Note the capital “A” in “Auto”.)

• Use the file_option_ when you start doomsday. If you e.g. have the resource pack ~/mydir/model.pk3, just use

1. file ~/mydir/model.pk

The snowberry launcher is available for Linux.

If you prefer launching from the command_line, I recommend creating your own startup scripts for j_doom, j_heretic and j_hexen. In them, you can specify any command line options you wish to use. Below is a simple example.

#!/bin/sh
if [ -d ~/.deng ];
then    /bin/true;
else    mkdir ~/.deng;
fi
/usr/local/bin/doomsday -game jdoom -file ~/wads/doom.wad -userdir ~/.deng

the runtime_directory ~/.deng will be created automatically by this script if it does not exist. All savegame files, message_logs and other such files will be stored in this directory.

The default location for the doomsday executable is /usr/local/bin, but that can be changed by providing your own prefix for the configure script (see compilation_with_cmake).

You can give the option –without-opengl to the configure script if you don't want to compile the open_gl_renderer_plugin at all.

Start the game as you normally would, but use the dedicated_option_. This will make doomsday run in a text-only console mode.

See also: dedicated_server

doomsday can play midi_music using a program of your choosing. The environment variable deng_midi_cmd_env_ determines the command that will be used when starting playback of a midi_music file.

I recommend using MIDI only with sound cards that have hardware support for playing MIDI music (e.g., SB Live). Otherwise, it is advisable to just disable music playback with nomusic_option_.

For example, the deng_midi_cmd_env_ environment variable could be set like this:

export DENG_MIDI_CMD="aplaymidi -p 65:0"

The default program for MIDI playback is timidity. Note, however, that music playback may become choppy since timidity plays music entirely in software. It is best to experiment with different timidity settings (e.g., buffering and process niceness) if you would like to reduce any artifacts in software music playback.

Beginning with version_1_8.1, doomsday can generate gl_bsp_data automatically. It is no longer necessary to run gl_bsp separately on your WADs.

However, if you need it, you can get glBSP from http://glbsp.sourceforge.net/.