OpenArena
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Installing OpenArena[]

Windows[]

System Requirements[]

  • Minimum
    • Pentium II 233MHz / AMD K6-2 300MHz or equally powerful processor
    • 64MB of system memory
    • OpenGL supported video card with 16MB of video memory. (Voodoo Banshee, TNT and up)
    • 300MB of hard drive space

Technically, the game can run on a 486DX machine but for minimal requirements we expect a certain level of playability to draw the line.

Installation[]

  1. Download the latest zip archive(s) of OpenArena from one of the Download Mirrors or BitTorrent.
  2. Unzip the archive(s) using a program like WinZip or 7-Zip.
  3. Open the extracted folder and launch "openarena.exe".
  4. Frag away!

Linux[]

System Requirements[]

  • Minimum
    • Pentium II 233MHz / AMD K6-2 300MHz or equally powerful processor
    • 64MB of system memory
    • OpenGL supported video card with 16MB of video memory. (Voodoo Banshee, TNT and up)
    • 300MB of hard drive space

In theory, the game can run on any Pentium-class processor with a Voodoo2, but don't expect much performance over 20fps and expect loading time to be over a minute.

You must have accelerated drivers for your video card installed for best results. This may require using the not-entirely-open-source NVIDIA drivers for NVIDIA cards. This also means that some video cards may not work even if they meet the above-stated minimum requirements.

IMPORTANT: Various Linux repositories contain OpenArena packages. Such repositories are run by third-party, so their OA installs may have some small differences from the official packages. Sometimes, these differences may cause some problems. To avoid such problems, you may prefer to manually download an official OpenArena package from http://www.openarena.ws, as explained below. It is the recommended way. If you wish to try with Linux repositories packages anyway, you can read the distro-related sections below.

Installation (ZIP)[]

Make sure you have the prerequisite libraries. They may include:

  • SDL
  • openal
  • curl
  • libvorbis

Get the official package of the game from one of the download mirrors, then extract all the contents of the zip.

The following versions are available:

*.i386 are for 32-bit PC processors. (386, 486, 586 and 686)
*.x86_64 are for 64-bit PC processors, such as AMD Athlon64 processors.

For a typical desktop or laptop PC, the following will work:

/usr/local/openarena/openarena-0.8.1/openarena.i386

The archives' contents itself are the game. They simply need to be extracted and run.

You can create a launcher on your desktop for convenience.

Ubuntu[]

Be aware that these packages may be outdated, regarding Ubuntu's release calendar and OA's release calendar.

  1. Open the Software Center, go to the Games category, go to the Arcade subcategory and choose OpenArena.

Alternatively...

  1. Open a console and write sudo apt-get install openarena.

In both, after installing...

  1. Select the OpenArena entry, from the Applications menu, under Games.

If you have problems with it running, see the FAQ/Troubleshooting page.

OpenSuse[]

Packages for openSUSE are being built in the openSUSE Build Service. RPMs are available for all supported version of SUSE Linux / openSUSE, including SLE.

Use the one click installer for your version at openSUSE Build Service: Search for openarena

Mandriva[]

Use the GUI rpmdrake to install openarena as described in installing and removing software documentation.

Type "urpmi openarena" in the terminal as root.

Debian[]

Type "apt install openarena" in the terminal as root

Fedora[]

From a console or terminal emulator:

su -c "yum install openarena"

Alternatively, you may use your package manager of choice to select OpenArena under the "Games" category.

Pardus[]

  • Click the "Add/Remove programs"
  • Under games you will find "openarena"
  • Select it
  • Press install button

Gentoo[]

sudo emerge -av =games-fps/openarena-0.8.8

You might want to check your curl, openal and vorbis USE-flags.

Source Mage GNU/Linux[]

OpenArena is available in z-rejected grimoire. If you don't have this grimoire installed yet, you can add it by doing from a console or a terminal emulator:
scribe add z-rejected

Once you have z-rejected grimoire, you can install OpenArena by doing from a console or a terminal emulator:
cast openarena-bin

Arch Linux[]

OpenArena is no longer in the official Community-repository. Instead, install yaourt to access the Arch User Repository and run the following command to install OpenArena:

yaourt -S openarena

Mac[]

Extract the zip file to a folder of your choice. Double click on the application. Simple as.
However, if you are using OSX 10.7.5 or later, please read the notes about "unsigned apps" below. In case of OpenArena 0.8.8, please also read the following section about it. Since OSX 10.12, things are more complex, and since 10.15, they are even worse.

If you want to install it: copy the folder to /Applications.

Notes:

  • If you have not enabled running "unsigned apps" on your machine, hold control while you click, then select "Open" from the menu. You might get a message asking you to confirm the first time and then it should work flawlessly. According to Apple Gatekeeper support page, this should apply to OSX 10.7.5 and later.
  • Since OSX 10.12 (Sierra), an additional security mechanism has been added: "App Translocation", which applies to "downloaded" apps: their executable files are temporarily copied to a different path and run there, isolated from other files they may have been shipped with... to prevent even "signed" apps from running "unsigned" stuff contained in additional files. So, if you try to run OA after downloading and extracing it, it cannot access the required PK3 files and immediately shuts down.
    Simplest solution is probably to first extract the ZIP file and then MOVE the whole OpenArena folder somewhere else (under /Applications or anywhere you prefer), because doing that removes the "com.apple.quarantine" attribute from the extracted files. Other solutions include using command line to manually remove the attribute from either the ZIP file (before extracting it) or from the whole OpenArena folder and its subfolders (if you already extracted it; example xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine openarena-0.8.8/). See here and here for more infos.
  • OSX 10.15 (Catalina) removed the ability to run 32 bit programs on 64 bit Mac. As no official 64 bit OA Mac binaries are available yet, for the moment workarounds are not exactly great: you may use a virtual machine running a previous OSX version, Linux or Windows, or maybe use a software like CrossOver (which is paid software) for running the 32bit Windows OA binaries under OSX (untested!). Or maybe using a Linux bootable USB stick to run the Linux version, or maybe the free PlayOnMac software to try running the Windows version (untested!). There is an attempt to create 64-bit binaries for macOS happening here, and see also this issue.
  • "Open Arena" version you can find in Mac App Store here is a third-party package, NOT an official release from OpenArena Team. We don't know which changes it has got from the official version. Official OA version is the one you can manually download from http://www.openarena.ws.

About OA 0.8.8 on Mac[]

About OpenArena v. 0.8.8, the 0.8.8 "full" (unified) package has been created using Windows, and Mac binares contained there lost some attributes required to execute them. This means that users have to use chmod command to set "+x" attribute to the openarena.ub file using:

chmod +x /path-of-your-oa-installation-folder/OpenArena\ 0.8.8\ r28.app/Contents/MacOS/openarena.ub
or
chmod +x "/path-of-your-oa-installation-folder/OpenArena 0.8.8 r28.app/Contents/MacOS/openarena.ub"

Example: chmod +x "/Applications/openarena-0.8.8/OpenArena 0.8.8 r28.app/Contents/MacOS/openarena.ub"

Alternatively, you can either download the 0.8.8 "patch" package, or download 0.8.8 Mac executables only, and copy the Mac binaries you find there into your installation directory, overwriting those that you previously extracted from the "full" 0.8.8 package (other files -most notably, Windows executables, Linux executables and pk3 files- from "full" package are OK, and you can use them directly).

Notes:

  • 0.8.8 Mac binaries are those in "OpenArena 0.8.8 r28.app". Those in "OpenArena.app" are previous 0.8.1 binaries instead: they may be used (after chmod-ing them!), but do not include GLSL support and some other fixes.
  • The note about running "unsigned apps" above still applies (OSX 10.7.5 and later)!
  • A little tip... In OSX it is possible to drag a folder to command line: you may use this feature to automatically write the path of your OA installation folder into the command line, while typing the commands mentioned above.
  • If you wish to use dedicated server binaries, you can apply the "chmod +x" command above also to the "oa-ded.ub" file (which is in the same folder as "openarena.ub" above). After doing that, you can launch the dedicated server from command line. Dedicated server binaries on OSX should work, but have not been extensively tested by us.

See also[]

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