Play Dungeon Keeper with KeeperFX
June 16th 2020
I bought Dungeon Keeper in the last summer sale on GOG. A very last minute sale, at first it looked fine, but honestly it felt really different what I remembered, everything was too close even in full screen. The GOG version comes with DosBox, but it was also a Windows 95 games, as I clearly remember dungeon95.exe or something similar.
What is Dungeon Keeper?
Dungeon Keeper is a real-time strategy game where you build a dungeon with various creatures to defend it, and expand it. You are playing the bad guy for a change. The game is from 1996, with decent graphics, and amazing feature that let's you posses and control your creatures in the dungeon. Back then it was so amazing flying over lavas, scouting and discovering the dungeon from first person perspective.
KeeperFX
I honestly didn't know that there is an open-source engine project, which makes to run on modern computers much easier. It has widescreen support and other good stuff like fan made missions and campaign. It's called KeeperFX, and there is an active community behind it.
It's rather simple to install it on Linux too. I use the GOG installer:
- Install the game via Wine.
- Download KeeperFX. You need p7zip to extract it!
- Extract KeeperFX to a directory, inside the Wine prefix you use for the game.
- Copy the game.gog from the installed Dungeon Keeper directory to the KeeperFX directory.
- Run KeeperFX 'Launcher.exe' and point to the installation directory, and let it copy files to the KeeperFX directory.
- Run settings and change to the desired resolution. And save it.
- Click on 'Start game'.
- Make a menu entry to Launcher.exe.
Of course at first it wasn't that simple. Because I didn't copy the game.gog file (which is an iso btw), the game I could play but certain little things were missing, like I couldn't build rooms, and the tutorial part didn't start. :)
After I copied the game.gog file, and started the installation part again, everything was fine. The game looks good, very speedy, playable. There are bunch of fan made missions with KeeperFX.
Little tip: Press Alt+R in-game to switch to the higher resolution. You can zoom in with the mouse wheel, and rotate the camera with Del and PgDn.
Other resources:
- KeeperFX Unofficial - this is called unofficial, because it's the fork of KeeperFX.
- Lubiki's Dungeon Keeper page - tons of resources with maps and other fan stuff, for both DK and DK2.
- Keeper Klan - biggest DK forum on the net.
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This post was day 30 of #100DaysToOffload. I can't believe it that I am almost 1/3 through. Which means that even if I don't write just every other day, I can complete the challenge this year!