What’s the distribution you’re trying to install the game on, if you can’t use .deb packages?
I’m planning to update the script to make it compatible with Gentoo, Arch Linux and derivatives, but I don’t know when I will have the time to work on it.

If you do this, you’re not using the required compatibility libraries. You need to run the game from /usr/local/games/alpha-centauri (vanilla Alpha Centauri) or /usr/local/games/alpha-centauri_smacx (Alien Crossfire expansion).

I got Loki libs from here: https://www.dotslashplay.it/ressources/alpha-centauri/

I installed SMAC on Debian 10, Elementary OS 5.1 and Ubuntu 18.04, each time it worked flawlessly. What OS do you use?

I'm trying this on Arch Linux, and for this I used the script provided by Kakise. I was under the incorrect impression I had mentioned this (probably lost it during some pre-posting edit). I'm sorry, that was key information.

I know in Debian you can use alien to extract the contents of deb archives. I could find the .tar.bz2 archive, so I went with that.

Ah, now I feel like I'm getting somewhere! Now I get the error
/usr/local/games/alpha-centauri: line 16: /lib/loki_compat_libs/ld-linux.so.2: No such file or directory

... and there is no /lib/loki_compat_libs in my system! Nor do I find one in the Arch Linux package that was generated. But by extracting the loki_compat_libs-1.5.tar.bz2 at that location, the game runs! (And at least the network play window comes up! Great improvement over the Wine version!)
Once I find the time I'll take a look where things went wrong in package generation.

There are two details, however: I cannot skip the videos and I cannot hear any sound!
Trying aoss for OSS emulation I get:
./smac.dynamic: error while loading shared libraries: /usr/$LIB/libaoss.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I suppose that should be /usr/lib32/libaoss.so. So, any idea how to fix this detail? Ahhhh, so close!

Thank you for your interest and your help!

I see Kakise posted a script that should fix some sound issues here. This is not using aoss but the "snd_pcm_oss" kernel module.

He did, and I took a look at it. However, I was under the incorrect idea that lsmod listed the installed kernel modules, but instead it listed the loaded modules. His solution did indeed work, and I can play with sound. Great!

I finally took the time and identified what went wrong creating the package: I have no sudo installed on my system. I did not notice the error on the scrolling text and it was not mentioned on the dependencies.

I don’t know if Kakise is still maintaining this script, but it wouldn’t hurt to open an issue about this.

Good idea! I'll do so once I've taken a better look at the script and comparing it with your original.

I ended up modifying Kakise's work (in a clumsy way) so that I could use it with GNU stow. I like having my files neatly organized. :-)
Next task is making the Loki libraries install in /usr/local/lib. That way I could place everything in the same folder (/usr/local/stow/alpha_centauri)!

@Gede Can you still run SMAC/SMACX under latest ArchLinux? After setting up the LD_LIBRARY_PATH and libraries as described in loki I get this error:

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/loki-compat-libs/ /usr/local/lib/loki-compat-libs/ld-2.2.5.so ./smac.dynamic

BUG! (Segmentation Fault) Going down hard...
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri 6.0a
Built with glibc-2.1 on x86
Stack dump:
{
0xf7cf96b8
0xf7c4059f
0xf7c39c0e
0xf7c394f4
0xf7c396a6
0xf7c3a628
0xf7c3a6c6
0xf7c59726
0xf7ecec61
0xf7ea530b
0xf7ea45e2
0xf7ea466c
0x806f33b
0x829d19a
0xf7ce914f
0x804d2c1
}
Please send a full bug report,
along with the contents of autosave to: support@lokigames.com
Unable to execute loki_qagent - exiting

It’s actually part of our plan to extend the current ./play.it support for Alpha Centauri to include Arch Linux and Gentoo (and any derivative).

You can follow the progress of this update on our forge: Rewrite all 1.x scripts into latest 2.x version

Thank you very much for sharing your hard work! I switched to Manjaro last year (yeah, 2020 and 4 years after this post but I think it's never too late for a thank-you) so I'll give this a go.

It’s not too late, we’re still working on ./play.it ;)

This thread will no longer be updated, see this post on the general forums for more details: End of website maintenance

There is no longer a need to download an archive shipping the special projects movies in the format expected by the native Linux engine, instead the video from the Windows version of the game are automatically converted using ffmpeg and mjpegtools.

Due to the videos shipped with the Loki Linux release of the game being higher quality than the ones included in the Windows version, we still provide the ability to download the Loki movies: https://downloads.dotslashplay.it/games/alpha-centauri/movies/ (through BitTorrent only).

To use these movies instead of the ones included in the packages generated by ./play.it, pick the movie files from the common and english directories of the torrent and put them in ~/.local/share/games/alpha-centauri/data/movies/ (you might have to create this directory).