Hexen II: Hammer of Thyrion

With the recent release of Doom + Doom II I found myself looking to get a bunch of other early FPS games running on my deck, too. One of them was Hexen II. You could just buy it on Steam and play, I'm sure, but I love to tinker so I wanted to run the game "natively". That means using the source port Hammer of Thyrion.

You can find the flatpak version in the Discover app store in desktop mode and then do the usual right-click -> add to Steam, but when you go to run it nothing will happen. Unfortunately, it doesn't install all the files you need from the normal distribution and it also doesn't tell you the correct location to put the actual game files. So, here's some instructions for proper setup in case anyone out there ever needs it.

• First, you'll need to download the normal linux distribution (x86_64) zip file from their website: https://uhexen2.sourceforge.net/
• Extract the data1 folder to: /home/.hexen2/
• Then, you need to get the pak0.pak and pak1.pak files from the actual game install into that same folder: /home/.hexen2/data1/
• Next, you need to get the ogg music files from the game into: /home/.hexen2/data1/music/
• Almost done. Next, you need to rename all the music files as documented here: https://uhexen2.sourceforge.net/music.html
• Finally, you'll want to change the in-game music options from CD to All Codecs.

I would have just left these instructions in a review within the Discover store, but it wasn't having it. Anyway, enjoy.