If you built a custom branded version of the engine, you can run that as is.

Using a generic FTE binary however, you need to specify the game directory. You run ./fteqw with a parameter specifying the game directory:

$ ./fteqw +game base

You can dispatch console commands to be executed once the client is running by appending them to the command-line as launch parameters, prefixed with the + character, as seen above.

./TestGame_x64 +set g_gametype some_mode +devmap some_level

Mod/Game Setup

For mods to show up in the "Custom Game" menu, Nuclide has to either find a liblist.gam file, a FTE-specific manifest file, or , or a Source Engine styled GameInfo.txt inside the respective mod directory.

It'll scan resource archives, as well as loose files in the mod directory, however it will not search inside any sub-directories.

A liblist.gam file can look something like this:

game "My Cool Mod"
version "1.0"
startmap "e1m1"
trainingmap "traininglevel"

You can find the types of key/value pairs a game can use to identify itself in GameLibrary_LibListParse() under src/platform/gamelibrary.qc.

Those settings alone can alter quite a bit of the menu options and branding/presentation of your game.