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Playing on Linux or Mac?

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Playing on Linux or Mac? Empty Playing on Linux or Mac?

Post by Loki Mon Sep 17, 2012 9:53 am

IMBA Entertainment has been working on a Mac/Linux port for the Steam version of the game, but for those who'd like to switch now can use WineHQ to run the Windows version.

Big thanks to Belshirash for this info.
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Post by Belshirash Mon Oct 01, 2012 5:59 pm

At least on Linux (latest version on Arch Linux here) there is a bug, which prevents steam from rendering any font. A workaround would be either to compile wine yourself and set the correct flags (more in the wine forum) or to start steam via a small shell script:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-steam    # I have to set the prefix, because I use a separate wine installation for steam
export WINEDEBUG=-all
nice -n 19 wine ~/.wine-steam/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Steam/Steam.exe -no-dwrite  # adjust the path!!!
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Post by science Wed Oct 03, 2012 3:39 pm

I'll take a wild guess: You're using an nvidia card with the binary blob?

AMD/ATI can be commended for many things, decent linux drivers not being among them.

*grumble*
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Post by science Wed Oct 03, 2012 8:09 pm

Having tried it with the stock wine (on kubuntu 12.04) I can report that while steam installs and seems to work fine (no noticable font issues) and the game itself launches and plays, there are no textures and everything sans the skybox, UI and ship names is black. (still managed a few kills though Razz )
This is with a radeon 5870 and the the open source driver.

I might try the fglrx binary at some point but I can't use it frequently as it doesn't play nicely with jackd. (and rebooting frequently defeats the object of playing on linux)

Shame, but not entirely surprising. Roll on the native port I guess.
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Post by Belshirash Wed Oct 03, 2012 8:15 pm

yes I'm using the closed sourcy nvidia driver. unfortunatly the free driver didn't work. I also couldn't see any textures ingame. I don't think this will change with the native port of MB, because until now the free drivers have only poor 3d support
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Post by science Wed Oct 03, 2012 9:03 pm

Tbh I'm not so zealous that I wouldn't use the blob, it's just that the requirements for latency are rarely met in closed source driver code, nor can they be independently fixed. It just wrecks jack stability.

The good news is I was a touch hasty with my last post. I googled a bit and if I
export force_s3tc_enable=true first it all worked perfectly. performance was pretty chronic until I disabled compositing (shift alt F12 with kwin).
I still had to drop to medium settings but even full screen it was silky smooth
after doing so. Maybe a bit of input lag though. I'll have to compare to the windows experience to be sure.

Strangely, it locked up when I tried to run it again and I had to kill it so I'll
have to look into that. 10 points to the open source driver though.
For once my linux pessimism was unfounded.

It also dumps a metric tonne of stuff to stdout so maybe piping that to > /dev/null will help some.

(not sure what it is. some kind of serialisation maybe. Looks like this:
{
2<< "ObjectName": "SHIPUPGRADE_4",
2<< "ItemUnitId": "11494927122305904623",
2<< "ClassName": "ship_upgrade",
2<< "Annotation": "HVY_FTR_4_ENG_4"
2<< },
)
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Post by science Thu Oct 04, 2012 12:42 am

Minor update: It seems to lock up if I attempt to run it without compositing, yet I then have to disable that in order to get useful performance (which is why it was off the second time). When the game crashes, it hangs and needs to be manually killed which is a real pain. I may even need to restart steam which for reasons unknown takes a long time.

Still, I guess I could script the restart and bind it to some key combo.
running it as:

wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Steam/Steam.exe > /dev/null 2>&1 &

does get rid of the console junk (750k of it if you dump it to file from a short few games).

Input lag goes away in fullscreen. Go figure.
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Post by longshot Thu Oct 04, 2012 1:00 am

Hi science, great work you're doing there & thanks for sharing Smile You may want to drop to Low quality settings in MB anyway, as for some reason it tends to make your ships shoot more bullets than with the higher qualities - I for one can't see a visible difference anyway so Low it is for me...
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Post by science Thu Oct 04, 2012 3:13 am

Thanks for the heads up. Will running on low also improve my aim to the point that those extra bullets are worth a damn? Smile

I like to have plenty of headroom for FPS matters so I don't normally play on max, particularly in wine since that normally carries a lot of overhead. Strange that it would affect the bullet count though. (but good to know)

As for the Linux helpdesk, it's probably not generally applicable sadly. Linux is less of a platform than a category of platforms and what holds true for my particular collection of installed apps/libs/distro release/distro may not help many other people. I guess it doesn't hurt though.
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Post by Loki Thu Oct 04, 2012 6:33 am

There's a couple theories floating around that framerate affects your actual fire rate, but is typically only noticable when flying a high DPS ship (Piranha or Swordfish).

I also appreciate the experimentation Smile
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Post by longshot Thu Oct 04, 2012 6:37 am

Yes, a Boomer won't improve its rate of fire on Low quality rendering. Sadly.
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Post by science Thu Oct 04, 2012 1:10 pm

It seems that if there's a lot of smoke on the screen (from nearby damaged ships, inc yours if you are turning tightly) you can kiss your framerate goodbye.

The game could do with an exit button on the main menu. You can fullscreen in linux (borderless windowed mode in effect) but when you decide to leave the game, you're left looking at a screen that you can't leave without pulling up the window manager menu with a key combination.

If/when proper fullscreen mode is implemented, an exit button will be needed
anyway and it seems like a fairly trivial addition.

Also, people should stop shooting me. It's mean. Fly slower too.
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Post by Loki Thu Oct 04, 2012 1:32 pm

lol
Framerate with smoke on the screen is an issue; mine often halves when I'm damaged enough to trail smoke, and usually drops to single digits if I fly through an explosion cloud. Framerate improved when I switched from Chrome to Steam, but it's still a problem.
Low-res smoke option, an exit button, framerate toggle, and full-screen mode have all been requested (several times each).
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Post by science Thu Oct 04, 2012 6:14 pm

Never seen it before. I don't normally play fullscreen though. That could be compounding the problem. Ah well.

If you're using the gallium open driver for ATI then you can add:
force_s3tc_enable="true"
to your ~/.bashrc and it will always be in your environment. This lets you run
steam and then MB from the desktop icon with the necessary compressed texture support.
I still can't run it without compositing enabled and so I just toggle it on to run MB then off again.
When the game crashes (and locks) a simple killall -9 mb.exe will knock it on the head letting you just click MB in steam to restart (making sure to do the the compositing on/off jig if it's necessary on your system)

/tiphat
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Post by science Fri Oct 05, 2012 5:19 pm

Sorry, the bashrc suggestion seems to be wrong. Either it's not passed through to the desktop shell or it's overridden by the desktop file env setting.

An alternative is to add force_s3tc_enable="true" to the command string of any desktop file you want to run.

so in my case I'd change:
env WINEPREFIX="/home/science/.wine" wine C:\\windows\\command\\start.exe steam://rungameid/208030
to:
env force_s3tc_enable="true" WINEPREFIX="/home/science/.wine" wine C:\\windows\\command\\start.exe steam://rungameid/208030
to start moon breakers directly from it's desktop icon.

I expect you can set this in the Xorg config too but presumably compressed textures are not enabled by default for a reason. YMMV.
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