LoweyPages - The Next Inevitable Step

Unreal Tournament Decompress 0.1

Welcome to the Unreal Tournament Decompressor, v0.1.  This is a simple script to decompress all the maps that arrived with your Unreal Tournament Game Of The Year (GOTY) Edition CDs.  The installer from Loki should, really, deal with this - but it doesn't.  It leaves many of the maps in compressed form which causes Unreal Tournament to crash with a SIGIOT error.

You could, of course, just sit in front of your computer and manually decompress every one of these files manually, but it would take a while.  Alternatively you could download [UT Decompress 0.1] and let it do it for you.

Using The Script

It should be fairly easy (it's not rocket science, it's just a simple script).  After you've ran the Loki installer, [download the script] and save it to a suitable temporary location.  Unzip it:

Next you will need to edit the script using Vim, Emacs, Kate, Nedit or whatever you normally edit your text files with.  You need to find these two lines:

and change them to suit your needs.  Set "maps" to point to wherever you want to install your maps FROM.  If you've ran the Loki installer then you will likely want to set this to the directory where Loki installed your maps to (default: /usr/local/games/ut/Maps/).  Don't forget the final / it is important!

Set "dest" to be the location where you want the maps to be decompressed TO.  If you've installed the maps already then this will probably be the same as "maps".

When you're done editing, save the script and exit.  Next, run the script:

The script should then decompress all the scripts and put them in the "dest" directory.  When it is finished, you should be able to run ut without any SIGIOT errors.

Notes

ALERT: Development of the next version of UT-Decompress has ground to a halt as I've not had much time or motivation for such things.  If I start work again I'll update the site.

I am in the midst of creating an entire second-stage install script.  The idea being that you run the Loki installer and then run my second stage installer.  It then automagically fixes everything that the Loki installer does wrong with minimal effort on your part, and this is simply a conversion of one part of that installer.  When my second stage installer works correctly (currently it is no better than the Loki installer!) I will make it available for downloading.

The script contains no error checking.  I plan on updating the script in the near future to add several new features:

1. Abstraction of the setup parameters

It'd be far better for everyone concerned if it was not necessary to edit the script directly to change where to install from and to.  A better solution would be to have a seperate file which contains the details of where to install from and to.

2. Automatic detection of the from and to

To make it easier for people who do not want to have to muck around editing the files it would be nice if the script could detect the CD and find the maps on it, then find where you installed UT to.  Those who want to over-ride the defaults can then edit the abstracted setup file mentioned in point 1 (above) to set up their specific installation parameters.

3. One-at-a-time decompression

Currently the script decompresses all of the maps into the ~/.loki/System/ directory (UCC automatically puts them there) and then moves all of them to the install directory when they are all decompressed.  This is bad practise because people will need to be logged in as root in order to perform the install.  Root's home directory is usually /root which resides on the / mount.  The / mount is often quite small, and so there is a large possibility that we will run out of space before all the maps are decompressed.

A better solution is to decompress each file in turn to the ~/.loki/System/ directory and then move it to the install directory.  Then decompress the next...

4. Error detection and retry

Currently the script just blunders on blindly whether a decompress fails or not.  Failure to decompress is strangely common with UCC, so it would be far better to check each map has been decompressed and retry if it hasn't.  I plan on coding it to try to decompress up to 3 times before giving up.

Last updated 27th of September 2004 at 22:23

For web design go to Shoestring Websites!