OK, I got it working. I don't know exactly what happened, but something certainly did. It's OK now though. Thanks to all who helped. For those curious (there are still mysteries to me) I include what I did to resolve it and what I don't get. Sorry if this is a long post, but I needed to stretch myself a bit, so I pursued this a little longer than necessary.
Hika wrote: You can also provide us your standard output.
As Hika suggested, I ran the game with ./wquake3 > output.log 2>&1
Before uploading it I decided to check it out and I noticed that the "current search path" for pk3 files was /usr/local/games/Westernquake3/. Here's a snippet of the output.
Current search path:
/home/eric/.wq3/westernq3
/usr/local/games/Westernquake3/westernq3/wq_town.pk3 (8 files)
[lines cut for brevity]
/usr/local/games/Westernquake3/westernq3
/home/eric/.q3a/westernq3
/home/eric/.wq3/baseq3
/usr/local/games/Westernquake3/baseq3/pak0.pk3 (102 files)
/usr/local/games/Westernquake3/baseq3
The problem is that I hadn't (to my recollection) installed it there, but there was an installation there. Maybe I installed it there before installing it totally locally (i.e. in /home/eric/Games/). I certainly was not running it from there. I was running it from /home/eric/Games/Quake/WQ3/Westernquake3/. I would cd into this directory and play the game with ./wquake3. I've been doing this since I joined the SA Testers group and had always had success. And no there were no links symbolic or hard between the directories. I also couldn't find the string /usr/local/games/ in my ~/.wq3/westernq3/* files. So I didn't know why it was doing this.
So, I decided to check out the /usr/local/games/Westernquake3/westernq3 and sure enough it didn't have nonamecity.pk3. I copied it over and voila! it worked.
I even played Pardner and Emiru in NoNameCity tonight (did OK, but dang! Emiru and his knives! He gives Dadamungo a serious challenge for knife fighting (Rules? In a Knife Fight? No rules.))
Could this be related to my upgrading to the wq3_sa_engine04? I think this is the first time that the game supported playing from an executable that was not in the directory with the rest of the app files. Is it possible that it *just* looked in that directory and ignored the current working directory?
I checked it out by opening wquake3 in a hex editor and found some strings that sure look like search paths. After running `strings | grep Westernquake3` I got the following strings (all next to each other according to the hexeditor)
/usr/local/Westernquake3
/opt/Westernquake3
/opt/games/Westernquake3
/usr/games/Westernquake3
/usr/local/games/Westernquake3
I opened wquake3 from the older wq3_b22_sa_engine03_game01.zip file (in a hex editor) and it did not have any such directories listed. So I can only assume that the engine04 file introduced this behavior, and it was my bad luck that I had some old, forgotten installation in the search path.
Maybe you could add something to search the current working directory first, before going on to the other search paths. I can foresee testers who want their more stable games to be left alone and to install the test (newest) version in some other directory.
Anyway, I guess you can consider this closed. I'll probably play around as I try to clean up my directory structure, but no worries!
Sorry that this is so long. Not being used to bug-testing/troubleshooting, I'm not sure what information is relevant and what is not, so I've erred on the side of verbosity.