# installing punkbuster for RTCW



## skeletonboss12 (Jul 8, 2020)

I am trying to setup punkbuster for iortcw, so I can join PB enforced servers.  

I have the command line version of pbsetup.run for 32-bit linux games, and a linux compatibility environment setup. 

However, pbsetup.run does not want to take any path for rtcw, I have tried ~/.wolf/ and /usr/local/share/iortcw and it rejects both.. maybe it was not meant to be, since this is a native port and pb is running with linux compat


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## ekvz (Aug 22, 2020)

I am probably a bit late to be any help to the topic starter but PB won't work with any kind of open source engine fork since all of IDs GPL releases have support for it removed.

It's not like it's a huge loss as it has never been a particularly good piece of software and for most (all?) of those classic games the central infrastructure has been turned off years and years ago anyways. To bad GPL and clientside anticheat don't mix all that well so a community driven replacement is rather unlikely to happen. I guess that's why server admins still enable it after being dead for so long.


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## skeletonboss12 (Aug 25, 2020)

I see. I feel stupid for posting this, I am unable to even start the game anyways.


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## ekvz (Aug 25, 2020)

skeletonboss12 said:


> I see. I feel stupid for posting this, I am unable to even start the game anyways.



Don't feel stupid. It's not like this is obvious in any way. I've been playing around with those engines quite a lot back in the day so i am pretty familiar with the technical details. I wouldn't expect anyone to know what is in the open source release and what isn't.

Concerning the retirement of PB: This used to be a somewhat big topic back then as it broke the client id generation for a lot of people (that's easy to work around luckily). I am not sure about RTCW but at least for Enemy Territory this happend back in 2013 (or even earlier?) i think and it kinda marked the final decline from popularity. I mean those games had been HUGE for a long time. Considering their age and the average life span of games these days the position of those still isn't to bad but i'd say their prime was <= 2010 and Evenbalance pulling the plug kinda solidified what a lot of people at the time already felt and it was discussed quite broadly.

Given that there seems to be some interest around this forum it might be worth to see if there are enough people to warrant setting up a server with actual native FreeBSD support. When i replied to the other topic it did a quick test to see if ETlegacy (which is what i would recommend as far as RTCW/ET engine forks go) would build on FreeBSD natively and after turning some knobs it did. Some of it seemed rather untested but it recognized the OS and with a small bit of work (basically copying files from the official binaries and repacking client pk3s) it should be possible to host servers supporting FreeBSD, Linux, MacOS and Windows clients at the same time.

The reason i am recommending ET over RTCW (aside from not knowing any RTCW project similar to ETlegacy) is that ET is free and thereby easily accessible for anyone interested. All of the open source Quake engine forks still need official pk3 files to play and even if it should be possible to "locate" the RTCW ones "somehow" it's officially still a commercial game that costs money. Atmospherically RTCW is of course the better one of the 2 and i know a couple people dislike the gameplay mechanics added in ET but in general ET is RTCW with extensions and most of the old maps ported long ago.

Sorry for the wall of text. I got a bit nostalgic writing this. Still makes me sad how RTCW/ET never got a worthy sequel. Neither gameplay nor engine wise.


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