ET is on Steam!

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was released on Steam.

A dream come true for so many of us who have been with this game for years. If you actually missed the news, yes this is real. With the official Steam release of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory we've seen an unbelievable resurgence in player counts for the game across all clients (Steam version of ET, original ET and ET: Legacy). To put it into perspective, the first day after the announcement over 6000 new downloads have been registered on our website for ET: Legacy 2.80.1 'Path Cleared!'. Yes, six THOUSAND! Before that, the daily average was around 300 per day, which already is amazing, but this recent increase is unprecedented. According to Steam Charts we have had an average of nearly 300 concurrent ET players this week and this is only counting those with the Steam version. Additionally to this, you also have those players that use ET: Legacy or vanilla ET clients. The increased interest in a nearly 20-year-old game is incredibly motivating and for a community project like ours opens up so many opportunities.

Therefore, let's take a moment to talk a bit about what the Steam release is and isn't and what options it brings with it.

ET: Legacy on Steam

The most important question regarding this Steam release for our project obviously is: Can we now bring ET: Legacy to Steam as well? Yes and no. Unfortunately, the Steam version of ET does not include a Steam Workshop integration. Therefore, we cannot simply move ET: Legacy to Steam as a 'mod' to the original game. We still would require a Steam page of our own. Much like RealRTCW does for the Steam version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. However, you can still make ET: Legacy run with the Steam version of ET. For instructions on how to do that, please check the following two video tutorials by Aciz.

How to play ET: Legacy with ET Steam release

How to run ET: Legacy natively on Linux through ET Steam app

That being said, having Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory on Steam significantly improves the chances of ET: Legacy coming to Steam. We are currently getting in contact with the right people to make ET: Legacy on Steam a reality. On a more personal note, we are excited to play around with the Steam features, which is why we are investigating the possibilities that steamworks integration would bring to the project. So far, however, this is new territory for us. If you know your way around handling Steam integration into games and are interested in bringing in your expertise into ET: Legacy, please reach out to us!

Game Version has changed

The Steam version of ET is not simply any of the previously available ET versions put on Steam. Most likely due to legal reasons, the source code has been recompiled, for example to remove Punkbuster and implement an ETKey generator straight into the client. Among other things, this means that unmaintained mods validating the client gameversion (e.g. ETPro) will not work with this release.

How to play

If you are still looking for a more competitive experience, please check out the ET: Legacy Competitive Discord. There, you can find like-minded players who you can join for a few friendly scrims. If you are rather interested in more relaxed and casual games, you can look for public servers on third-party game trackers like TrackBase.

Performance on modern machines

As there haven't been any major changes regarding the engine, the performance and compatibility issues of the original ET remain. This means that even on modern hardware, most users will experience significant performance issues. This is mainly due to incompatibility with modern OpenGL drivers and the game's graphics pipeline relying heavily on CPU while lacking any multi-threading. Aside from that, the game does not support modern resolutions without tweaking and renders UI elements at 4:3 aspect ratio. You can somewhat accommodate these issues with adjusting in-game CVARs, however, this poses a significant entry barrier for players used to 'plug-and-play' games. If you require technical support for ET, please feel free to join the ET: Legacy Discord. We do recommend reading through the FAQ on our wiki as a first step of troubleshooting.

Additionally, we have compiled a few quick Q&As for using ET: Legacy with the ET Steam version:

I am getting NewItemIOError in PowerShell when trying to create symbolic links for etl/etlded?

Make sure you deleted or renamed the original binaries - symlink creation will fail if a file with the name already exists.

I am getting Error 0x800700E when copying the ET: Legacy binaries to ET Steam folder?

Your antivirus software is flagging etl/etlded.exe as a potential virus - no need to panic! Just whitelist the binaries in your antivirus software. This is mainly caused by ET: Legacy code not being digitally signed by Microsoft, and the fact that the current release is less than a week old, so antivirus software have not yet learned that the game is not in fact a virus. Remember, the project is open source, anyone can view the code in our GitHub repository.

My antivirus is flagging etl/etlded.exe as Trojan:Win32/Wacatac.B!ml?

See previous answer.

How do I restore/add exclusions to ET: Legacy binaries in my antivirus software?

This will depend on your specific antivirus software, here and here you can find instructions for Windows Defender.

The game is crashing with FS_CreatePath: failed to create path "C:\Documents\ETLegacy"?

Sometimes the game incorrectly tries to set the default homepath. To fix this, start the game with +set fs_homepath C:\Users\<user>\Documents\ETLegacy where user is your Windows username. You can also change this path to whatever you want to, as long as it's not the same as the installation directory. We're investigating this error and hope to address it in a future release.

I am not seeing any servers in the server browser?

The Steam installation of ET ships with an etconfig.cfg that sets sv_master2 to blank. This cvar is used as an additional master server, as the original master server is down from time to time. To fix this, navigate to your Steam ET directory, find the etconfig.cfg in the etmain folder, open it with a text editor, find the sv_master2 entry and set the value to master.etlegacy.com. You might also need to do this to your profile-specific config in C:\Users\<user>\Documents\ETLegacy\legacy\profiles\yourprofile\etconfig.cfg.

ET: Legacy Scrims

Any FPS game with e-sports ambitions requires a dedicated competitive scene, so for this blog post we want to thank the 'ET: Legacy scrims' community for their long-standing commitment. The 'ET: Legacy scrims' community was created and is organised by eMMiel, Bystry and n'papo?, is powered by TeamMuppet with dedicated server infrastructure and facilitated by Kimi with the Gathermaster bot, so all in all a wonderful example of community commitment. Therefore, we plan to officially support and integrate this community into the ET: Legacy Discord, making it easier for the interested players among you to join in and get to know the more competitive side of ET: Legacy. While this integration still has to be ironed out here and there, we are happy to already announce this partnership to help grow the emerging competitive scene on ET: Legacy. The current format are daily matches for 3on3 or 6on6, depending on the amount of online members. There are no skill brackets for now. Everyone is welcome to join and play a few test matches to see whether it's a fit. For further information, please visit their #rules channel which contains extensive info regarding the organisation and gameplay of the played scrim matches.

Depending on the reception among you, the playerbase, future plans range from experimenting with other scrim formats to organising one-day-cups or tournaments as was successfully done in the past. All that's left to say is, go check out their Discord server and play a few matches to get accustomed!

Container System

You may have noticed that since a few weeks your main menu looks wonderfully clean. This is due to the container system which was initially introduced in ET: Legacy 2.77 and fixed in the 'Recapture the City!' 2.77.1 hotfix. In short, this system isolates all paks downloaded from an ET server and ensures your client looks clean and most importantly, remains usable on launch.

This is a major change addressing a long-standing issue, which we probably all are familiar with. After playing on a server the main menu has been tampered with in one form or another. This raises several issues for regular players. For example could it be that the main menu was translated by the previous server (quote6.png below), it also raises security concerns (quote7.png below) as those modifications to the game client happen without permission, but in general, it's probably simple annoyance (quote3.png below) by the constant alterations. Unfortunately, @stealth6 (quote2.png below) put it quite well, as the ET community lost the battle. However, Radegast, our founder, indicated plans to fix this issue (quote4.png below) once and for all and we finally did! 8 years later, but we got you Radegast! Your plans and vision for this project are in good hands. At least we hope so!

Short backstory

"Players. Admins. PK3s. Developers. Long ago, the four parties lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Admins discovered the tilde ~. Only Radegast, founder of ET: Legacy, could stop them, but when the Players needed him most, he rightfully took a well-deserved retirement. Eight years passed and the current ET: Legacy dev team developed a new way to protect Players, the dlcache container system. And although our motives were good, we botched the early tilde block attempt in 2.76. But, We believe the dlcache container system can save the Players."

Long backstory

When connecting to a server, the pk3 get downloaded to your fs_homepath. Historically, all files from all the servers you connect to, get put either into etmain or the mod directory (e.g. legacy, silent,...), which are the same directories the game pulls the content from when launching the game. This enabled server admins to force players to download pk3 containing the aforementioned custom menu files, which the game then uses to initialise the main menu on launch. Because all the files from all the servers got put into the same respective directory, a war broke out between servers for who can put more Z or tilde ~ characters in front of their custom menu pk3. This was done because the game goes through the respective directory on launch alphabetically and overwrites previously loaded files with whatever comes after it. In other words, the game loads pak0.pk3 and finds a menu file. It then loads z_custom_menu.pk3 and finds a menu file which it uses to overwrite the one from pak0.pk3. Then zz_custom_menu.pk3 comes along and even after all the Zs the tilde (~~custom_menu.pk3) pk3 come along overwriting everything ones again. Hence, in 2.76 we tried to implement an early measure against all of that, by blocking the pk3 with the tilde ~ character from being downloaded. This, however, prompted righful backlash by our community as it also prevented you from joining those servers even if you understood and accepted the risk. Another solution was required and here we are.

Functionality

Now, pk3 get downloaded into a new sub-directory called dlcache rather than the base directories (e.g. etmain, legacy,...). This means that for example maps get downloaded into fs_homepath/etmain/dlcache instead of fs_homepath/etmain and server pk3 get downloaded into fs_homepath/legacy/dlcache instead of fs_homepath/legacy. These new sub-directories do not get initialised on game launch, which means that custom paks do not get loaded. This is different to the initial plan of the per-server container system described in the initial proposal here as that would have required players to always download all pk3 when connecting to a new server, because even maps would have been stored in each per-server container separately. That would have presented an immense inefficiency for your required disk space, which is why we are even more happy with the current implementation.

Things to keep in mind

• Third-party mods Exception to this are third-party mods (e.g. silent, nq,...) as changing the folder structure is very likely going to break functionality of those mods. Therefore, it is recommended to keep legacy as the default mod on game launch (+set fs_game legacy).

• Manual work-around The good news is that you can still manually install custom menu files for quick access to your favourite server. Simply check the pk3 from your favourite server or ask your server admins which of them contains the custom menu and move that to fs_homepath/etmain. Ideally, to minimise any risk, that pk3 should only include the necessary menu files, so please double check with your server admins if you have any concerns.

• Local host When trying to host a game locally or when simply using /map or /devmap the contents of dlcache are not considered. You will have to manually pull those maps that you wish to test/play locally from fs_homepath/etmain/dlcache and put them into fs_homepath/etmain.

For further questions as well as if you, dear player, server admin, interested follower or else, are interested in contributing to this project, we are always looking for helping hands to speed things up, so please don't hesitate to reach out to us on Discord.

Quotes:

• quote2.png: 'Lost battle' (source)

• quote3.png: 'General annoyance' (source)

• quote4.png: 'Radegast's plans' (source)

• quote6.png: 'Translated menu' (source)

• quote7.png: Security concerns' (source)

Public snapshots are available!

For the more adventurous among you we have great news today!

While we are preparing a full-fledged release coming along your way soon(TM), we have restructured our build procedure and are now able to provide public development snapshots. In short, this means that everyone now has the option of using the game including all the latest features. This is especially advantageous since it comes without the need to set up a development environment to compile the code yourself. It is important to note, however, that these snapshots also come with all the latest bugs as well! A stable gaming experience is not necessarily given, so use them at your own discretion. If you do use them, please let us know of any bugs and issues you are encountering as that helps us in providing a stable experience to everyone with the next full-fledged release. If you want to read more about what these snapshots do and why we are so excited about providing them to you, please have a look at this ticket for further explanation.

What you can look forward to in these snapshots and the upcoming release? Why all the prestige and honour of being a beta tester, certainly. If that shouldn't be enough, however, we are happy to say that among an incredibly long list of additional features and bug fixes, the implementation of the server pk3 isolation system and the fix of the VM_Create error stand out. The latter has been a nasty bugger for quite a while, but should be dealt with now properly. For 2.76 we implemented an initial attempt of protecting players against potentially malicious server pk3. Unfortunately, that implementation was not an ideal solution and has since been replaced by the above. This means that now the players can still connect to servers running the wildest range of pk3 if they so choose, while still enjoying proper protection as those pk3 can for example no longer hijack the player's main menu. To read more about this feature in particular, please have a look at this ticket (Custom main menus for quick access can still be installed manually.)

To provide us with feedback you can either file an issue directly on Github or if you prefer community interaction then we would be happy to welcome you on our Discord as well. There you will also have access to the latest news regarding ET and RTCW and can actively engage in shaping this game.

Download the snapshots here

Another round of updates for the map overhauls!

Hello everyone. It's time for another round of updates for all four existing map overhauls. This time, the changes are ranging from quality of life improvements to fixing game breaking bugs.

The last version of 'Bergen, by Detoeni', unfortunately, contained an incorrectly named entity which caused the game to crash. This has now been fixed along with the addition of proper footstep sounds on the terrain. These were also not working correctly on the last version of 'Supply Depot, by ginc', which has also been taken care of. Aside from that, the map has received substantial performance improvements (huge thank you to hatcher for extensive support) as well as the addition of another optional feature that was requested by ETc.Jay. Server admins now have the option to toggle the truck (in-)vulnerable. By default the truck remains invulnerable as this suits the competitive environment of the map better, but for public play this option now exists thanks to Ensiform who found the perfect way to do this. For 'Frostbite, by Moonkey' the focus was on further improving the player collision to ensure smooth movement and gameplay. Huge thank you to Aciz for extensive feedback in that regard. Lastly, 'Ice, by id software' did not receive many bug reports so the changes are primarily improving quality of life. The maximum player count on all four maps has been raised to 32 vs 32 and the overall settings for lighting and terrain blending have been adjusted to reduce data and improve performance.

This round of updates, however, is not the end. There are plans for future additions to the maps highlighting key events and famous plays by the community, so make sure to keep an eye out for this blog, but even better, join our Discord to always stay on top of things.