Linux support thread

[aspbazi]

Big thank.
Great work!

[timon37]

Just wanted to say big thank you to whole Linux team.

Why thank you! I, a.k.a. the whole Linux team, appreciate the moral support;)

[jeckhack]

Hi! First of all, thanks for 4.0 for linux. I've been waiting it since 2013, and it's great port.

But i have some strange problem since 4.0 beta (that was not the case in 3.61). When i start campaign and get to the Auspicious excavation for the first time to meet Borman's thip, when I enter the system there occurs some weird stuttering and fps drop, which persists no matter what I do. Flying to other systems, reload save doesn't help. Game just becomes jerky, like there's not enough ram. But I checked, and game uses just around 3GB of 12. CHanging graphics options has no effect. CPU load in this case no more than 50-55% on all cores, so it's not cpu bottleneck.

Specs: I3 4130, gtx 960, 12gb ram.
Otherwise, in Free Play, i maintain stable 45-60fps , completely smooth, with no hiccups or else. This problem appeared only since latest betas of 4.0 and on linux only.
Is this a known problem on linux version ?
Thanks

PS. I suspect that for in that area may cause this. I have stuttering even when in highway and Auspicious excavation system starts rendering far away.

P.P.s. Latest drivers, clean system, Openbox with no composite manager.

[timon37]

@jeckhack

Hmm send me your config.yaml, and a savegame a bit before the stuttering starts.
Also a few questions:
1. how much gpu-memory do you have?
2. can you check gpu-memory usage you can run this in a terminal: nvidia-smi -l 1
3. does the stuttering suddenly occur? or does it progressively get worse over a few moments?
4. does it happen if you fly to that location in free-play start?

[jeckhack]

1 - gtx 960 2gb
2 - i will check when i get home
3 - it starts right at the moment i arrive to auspicious excavation. To be more precise, when fog and rocks start rendering 2 seconds before i leave highway in that system. After that i can fly anywhere , stuttering pursuits me even in empty space between sectors. Entering/leaving highways after that causes 3 - 5 seconds lag. Reloading game doesnt help. Stuttering looks like when you ,say, panning camera in heavy game when there is not enough ram. The only option is to start new game.
4 - i'll check at home and will send you savefile.

Thanks.

[timon37]

3 - hmm and what if you make a savegame, quit the game completely, start and load the savegame?

[jeckhack]

I can even reboot pc - somehow the cause of stutter gets to savegame. Anyway, i'll test it and send you files in the evening.

I even may assume that my i3 isnt strong enough, but again.cpu load is 50% without spikes. A ran game in window with htop opened to test it. Theres no sign of cpu struggling. And with my subjective experience it's not like cpu, most likely vram. I'll monitor it and write back. Thanks.

[jeckhack]

You know what - whatever. I just realized that i have massive fps drop in Ausp. excavation in windows version too. This wasn't the case in 4.0 betas, at least I think I would have noticed that. So the linux bug is that stuttering persists - in windows it's gone when I leave this sector.
Peolple on steam say that they have stable 60fps, so the only reason for this is my CPU. I'll put this game on the shelf until upgrade.
Thanks anyway and sorry for borrowing you time. Overall the linux port is great, like x3 was.

[Caldazar]

I've been playing the Linux version from GOG since release and want to give a bit of early feedback on it.

Installation
The GOG installer works very well. It installs everything into your home directory, so you don't even need admin access.

Language Selection
IMO language selection is still an open problem. The GOG download page lets you select a language (English, French or German) for the base game, but the DLCs are only available in English. That's already a potential problem for people who don't want to play the game in English. In the end, you get a multi language version anyway. Is there a way to label the download appropriately on GOG?

When you launch the game, it uses the system language. In my case that's German, even though I had selected English before downloading the game. I shouldn't have to a) read the start.sh script to figure out how and b) use environment variables to change the game language. An (ingame) option to change the language would be much better IMO. Admittedly, that part is not Linux exclusive.

Renderer
Good news first: On my GTX 760 with proprietary drivers the game runs smoothly on ultra settings. I've had one random FPS drop. I like that the game uses border less window mode and automatically chose the correct monitor on my system. Good job!

Once I tried to set AA to 32. That slowed the whole game to a crawl and took the window manager down as well. In the end I had to kill XR from the terminal. Then I launched the game again. The main menu ran at an estimated 0.1 FPS, so it took a while to change AA back to 4.
I've come across some rendering glitches and bugs. I can't make a proper report yet, but Yisha looks especially strange. Maybe it's the shadows? Not sure.
Is the OpenGL render (theoretically) on par with the DirectX one, as far as graphic

Minor Annoyances
I want an ingame FPS counter to satisfy my curiosity, but I haven't found a way to do it.

Code: Select all

./start.sh -showfps

doesn't work. How can I do it?

Every time I launch XR, it creates a folder "GOG_Games?Rebirth" with a few subfolders in my home directory. The main problem is that this folder messes with bash autocompletion. Why is it there? What does it do? How can I get rid of it?

System Information
I run Debian testing on an i7-4790k with 16GB RAM and a GTX 760.

That said, the problems I described are generally minor. Thanks a lot for porting XR to Linux.

[sirdeiu]

@timon37 First many many thanks for your work on porting the game to Linux.

I have a question, on my PC, running Fedora 23 x64 with an AMD 8350 stock CPU and Radeon 280 (using opensource radeon+mesa drivers), the game is hanging while loading a new area. For example while in a highway and entering a new sector, the game hangs for a while (while either the area is loaded or maybe shaders get compiled), or entering a station and walking etc.

Any way to fix this ? If it's shaders, maybe the new shader cache support in mesa will help ?

Or am I the only one getting this and it's something on my end.

Thanks again.

[tero]

SInce the new update the game won't start anymore, all i get is a message that the steam-client can't be found. (which is running of course) Both dlcs are installed.
I'm on Mint 17.4 with a amd 8350 and a nvidia with proprietary drivers.

EDIT: Nevermind - after a reboot the game is working again

btw: good work with this port

[kerberizer]

(...) (using opensource radeon+mesa drivers), the game is hanging while loading a new area. For example while in a highway and entering a new sector, the game hangs for a while (while either the area is loaded or maybe shaders get compiled), or entering a station and walking etc. (...) Any way to fix this ? If it's shaders, maybe the new shader cache support in mesa will help ? (...) Or am I the only one getting this and it's something on my end.

You aren't.

But first, __huge__ thanks to @timon37 from me as well! I've been genuinely impressed and even amazed with the quality of this port -- particularly on the open source drivers -- from the very first alpha. The love and devotion that had obviously been put into this has certainly made me a devout follower of Egosoft -- and I'd gladly prove my devotion with my wallet on every possible occasion. So, @timon37, if you haven't yet asked for a pay rise -- now may be the time. Seriously though, great job, indeed!

Back on the locking issue: I've had this -- or very similar -- problem since the first alpha. It is most pronounced in the highways, indeed, where the game would freeze for a second to several seconds very often, usually (but not always, at least from what the human eye can see) when new objects pop up. In the alpha, this also lead to white rectangles being visible during the freeze, before an appropriate object icon took their place once the freeze was resolved. I made some tests back then on the lowest settings and resolution and noticed that during freezes one thread seemed to occupy the whole CPU time: AssetEnabler if my memory serves me well. The white rectangles problem has been since solved, but I'm mentioning that for the record.

The latest experiences: just before HoL, the freezes seemed to be fewer in general, but travelling on the highways still could become a PITA at times. Worse though, I've had on a couple of occasions freezes -- interestingly, not on the highways, but just flying around stations -- that never seemed to resolve, at least for many tens of seconds.

As for the newest 4.0 version, unfortunately I haven't yet tested a civilized enough sector -- I just fell in love with Toride -- but the experience outside of highways has been so far extremely pleasing visual quality- and performance-wise. The freezes outside of highways still _do_ happen, and in one case (strangely enough, it was simply near an empty jump gate) it took quite many seconds (probably 10-15) to resolve.

From what I've read around, the culprit probably is indeed the shader compilation, and the shader cache (even not being a true on-disk one) will likely help (a lot, perhaps?), but I suppose @timon37 can better answer this. Sadly, Mesa built with these commits currently leads to nasty GPU faults for me, so I haven't yet had the chance to properly test them.

Once again, though, truly outstanding job on the Linux port!

[kerberizer]

Oh, I actually forgot to mention a second problem that I've encountered. I haven't yet tested it in 4.0, but in 3.61 (pre HoL) enabling shadows with any quality (even low) was leading to very low framerates on _some_ stations (just to be clear: when landed, not in space). Again, that's on the radeonsi Mesa driver (usually latest Git and always latest LLVM from svn since I currently maintain the respective AURs for Arch Linux). I'll see if the problem persists with 4.0 and report back with more details if it does.

[gilboa]

Hello,

As I recently switched to a big-ass 4K display, I decided its time to ditch my X3:TC/AP XRM games and join the cool people @X:R *

However, not all is smooth sailing.
My X52 joystick that more or less worked out of the box in all the X series games (X2/linux, X3:R linux, X3TC/wine and X3AP/linux) doesn't really work under X:R.
1. The games seems to see 3-4 axies out of the joystick's 11. E.g. I cannot use any of the POV (either axis ones or "botton" ones) to strife, same goes for actual POVs.
2. Deadzone value seem to be ignored.

BTW, even on a lowly GF780 (non-TI) @4K on "high", performance seems to be acceptable. Kudos to the people involved in this Linux port!

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

- Gilboa
* Actually, being old with less-than-perfect eye sight, I need a telescope size magnifier glass to see the tiny fonts in X3AP, but lets leave it at that...

[rboerdijk]

@gilboa: Can you double-check somewhere in the config options that it's actually configured to be a joystick? The default is "controller" ( =xbox-style ) and using that setup with a joystick leads to the weirdest defaults and generally doesn't do what you'd expect.

[gilboa]

@gilboa: Can you double-check somewhere in the config options that it's actually configured to be a joystick? The default is "controller" ( =xbox-style ) and using that setup with a joystick leads to the weirdest defaults and generally doesn't do what you'd expect.

I can see the X52 in the Joystick selection screen.
I can see ~5 axis in the control customization menu (X/Y/Z and two "sliders").
I can more-or-less control the ship via X/Y/Z joystick axis (but only them).

In theory, (E.g. X3:AP) I should be able to select 11 different axis.

E.g. select "starf left/right" -> edit -> move the POV axis (axis 8/9 in evdev) -> select the axis.

- Gilboa

[sirdeiu]

@kerberizer It seems we are on to something here regarding the shader cache, a user on phoronix forums reports things improved:

So far for me X Rebirth, Civ 5 and Metro Redux(es) are way more FPS stable now(Pending Cities Skylines since a mod is crashing it after the update beside traffic++)

And

this patch should not speed up any games, is not an optimization(normally at least), this avoid stalling the render thread while compile shaders over and over again during game play by just compiling shaders once and reuse from memory from that point onwards.

So Before patch

60fps -> 10fps(compiling) -> 60 fps -> 8 fps(compiling) -> 60fps ......

After patch

60 fps -> 10fps(compiling)-> 60fps -> 60fps(reusing) -> 60fpsfps -> 60 fps(reusing) .......

note this patch don't cache GS shaders yet, so tessalation can still trash up your fps for compilation but should be a lot less than before

See here: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/li ... post853957

So now, I guess we need to wait for mesa to 11.2 with this feature.

[UniTrader]

just for information, no help wanted:

i finally got my new Lappy and installed ubuntu on it - and couldnt resist to try XR on it

well, the Framerate was stable - at 8fps in free space and 3 fps in Tubes but didnt really expect it would ran smoothly since this thing only has a Intel HD4000 i think.. still surprised a bit it worked at all ^^

Also another suggestion: would you enable the XR Tools for Linux? i know that they are not specifically written for it, but extracting seems to work fine via wine - currently extracting it

here my extract_XR_in_subfolder.sh which i use for this atm:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
mkdir ../X\ Rebirth/XR\ extracted
wine ./XRCatTool.exe -in ../X\ Rebirth/01.cat ../X\ Rebirth/02.cat ../X\ Rebirth/03.cat ../X\ Rebirth/04.cat ../X\ Rebirth/05.cat ../X\ Rebirth/06.cat ../X\ Rebirth/07.cat ../X\ Rebirth/08.cat ../X\ Rebirth/09.cat -out ../X\ Rebirth/XR\ extracted

[aspbazi]

I wrote Timon broken dead zone on the two joysticks.

- F310 Gamepad.
- Cobra Def M5.

Today xpad checked off and connection xboxdrv, no dead zone operation.

* For games and X3TC X3AP dead zone works.
* I checked a variety of games (15 units), working 100%.

[UniTrader]

just improved my extraction Script - now it also extracts all currently available Mods* and, if necessary, deletes previously extracted stuff so only the current files remain

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
cd ../X\ Rebirth
echo "================================================================"
# Delete previously extracted Files - we want a fresh extraction
if [ -d XR_extracted ]; then 
  echo "============= removing previously extracted Files.. ============"
  rm -rf XR_extracted
  echo "============= done.™ ==========================================="
fi
# Create Folder for Extracting all Cats/Dats and extract them there
mkdir XR_extracted
echo "============= extracting current Game files... ================="
wine ../X\ Rebirth\ Tools/XRCatTool.exe -in *.cat -out XR_extracted
echo "============= done.™ ==========================================="
#
# Do the same for all Extensions present - seperate cases for subst(itute) and ext(ension) cats/dats
for f in extensions/*; do
  echo "================================================================"
  echo -ne "================================================================"\\r
  echo "=========== extracting $f "
  if [ -f "$f/ext_01.cat" ]; then
    echo "= ext part ====================================================="
    if [ -d "$f/ext" ]; then 
      rm -rf $f/ext
    fi
    mkdir "$f/ext"
    wine ../X\ Rebirth\ Tools/XRCatTool.exe -in $f/ext_*.cat -out "$f/ext"
  fi
  if [ -f "$f/subst_01.cat" ]; then
    echo "= subst part ===================================================="
    if [ -d "$f/subst" ]; then 
      rm -rf $f/subst
    fi
    mkdir "$f/subst"
    wine ../X\ Rebirth\ Tools/XRCatTool.exe -in $f/subst_*.cat -out "$f/subst"
  fi
  echo "= done.™ ======================================================="
done
echo "= Extraction of Game and Mod Files complete - have fun ;) ======"
echo "================================================================"

*still has problems with Mod Folders containing a whitespace, but this is no priority to fix..