Mapping for UZDoom on Linux - Getting Started with Ultimate Doom Builder

I like my Doom, and I like my Linux, however getting them to coexist often leads to headaches, especially when it's Ultimtae Doom Builder. Luckily there are a few things that can help. If you've done any research on this topic, you may have seen mention of using Steam Proton to run Ultimate Doom Builder. I tried this method, but ran into issues when installing the required .NET frameworks. I was however able to get Ultimate Doom builder running fairly reliably using wine and some configuring.

Running Ultimate Doom Builder on Linux using Wine

If you haven't already, you will need to install wine and winetricks.

You will also need the portable version of Ultimate Doom Builder. You can download it from the Ultimate Doom Builder site. Extract it someplace wine will have access to it.

Run Builder.exe using wine to bootstrap the wine setup. If you already have wine set up on your PC, you can probably skip this step.

wine path/to/UltimateDoomBuilder/Builder.exe

You will probably notice that UDB looks pretty messed up. This is caused by missing .NET libraries, and missing system fonts. we can install both using winetricks.

Configuring wine

1. First, run winetricks in your terminal.

2. When prompted to choose a wineprefix, choose: Select the default wineprefix

3. Choose Install fonts from the menu.

4. We need to install the core Microsoft fonts. Sort the list by Publisher, check off any of the Microsoft fonts, then click ok.

5. Next, choose the option Install a Windows DLL or component

6. Choose the dotnet472 package from the menu and install it. (Note: This will take an annoyingly long time, and you will constantly have to acknowledge prompts during the process, but it's worth it to not have a janky UDB UI.)

7. Next, choose Run winecfg.

8. Click the Desktop Integration tab, and set Theme to (No Theme).

Additionally, you may want to mount your Doom folder to a convenient drive letter by mounting it in the Drives tab.

That's it for configuring wine. The next time you run UDB with wine, the UI should look much better.

Installing the Doom Engine

Next you'll want to set up a Doom engine. We'll use UZDoom.

You have two options here, you can either run the linux native version of UZDoom or run the Windows version of it inside wine.

The latter option has a little less configuring, but you will likely take a big performance hit running UZDoom inside of wine. Nontheless, it's the option I will document here.

To set up UZDoom in wine

1. Head to the UZDoom releases page and download the your preferred version for windows,

2. Extract the release zip to your wine's drive folder. By default, this is ~/.wine/drive_c

And that's it really.

UZDoom in native Linux

Installing or compiling uzdoom for your distro is kind of out of the scope of this article, but no matter how you install it, you will probably want to create a small shell script to start your mod.

This script will run MAP01 in your mod in a 720 uzdoom window:

/path/to/uzdoom -iwad /path/to/DOOM2.wad \
    -width 1920 -height 720 \
    -nostartup \
    -skill 3 \
    -file /path/to/your/mod \
    /path/to/your/MAP01.wad +map MAP01

Anyways, happy mapping.