Linux Support (Beta)

[Imuniser]

A (unmoddet) savegame would be helpful to ensure there's nothing going wrong inside of it.

I believe I got to the bottom of this.

It was caused by a mod (I will post a list here though I haven't tested which one of these).

The game runs smoothly now.

Disabled mods list:

- TeterTrade
- ReactionForce
- RandomSupply
- God Mode Ship and Station x4
- Fly-by-Looting
- NPCs Recovered by Gramston

I have also managed to easily manipulate the CPU governor and frequency using https://github.com/konkor/cpufreq

Thank you all for your involvement!

Best of luck!

[Rastuasi]

I use tatertrader and fly-by-looting with no issues, if that helps you narrow it down.

[Alan Phipps]

If you want devs to take an interest in issues posted here then you really must stick to reporting problems in vanilla gameplay.

[Imuniser]

If you want devs to take an interest in issues posted here then you really must stick to reporting problems in vanilla gameplay.

Stating the obvious but correct nonetheless.

[vanFair]

https://imgur.com/a/oxNksPn

Hi I've been getting the above error when I try to start the game recently. I got it before during long game-play sessions but the game would generally start right back up. Now I get it immediately when I try to start it with not way of actually getting in the game.

[Imuniser]

Bugreporting:

Please attach screenshots & savegames for almost any issue, it'll help a lot. In case you can't or don't want to include it in the forum post, my email address is: tim13on ( on ) egosoft.com, of course remove the 13 and ( on ) is @ (hope not too many spam bots figure that out);p

If you notice anything "pink/blue/green" the best thing to do is give us a screenshot & savegame.
If you notice something looking ugly it would help a lot if you can verify it's linux specific first, then give us a screenshot & savegame.

To get a debug game log (in desktop mode) please:

• Completely close steam
• Open a terminal/console
• Type in: steam -console
• Steam should now run and redirect all of its output to that terminal/console window.
• Launch X4 from steam, you should get output from the game to that terminal window.

You need to provide the above. I have reported a bug via e-mail and Timon actually responded.

[knro]

Good news for those who want to play with Dual Joysticks on X4 Linux version. I have Dual 16000M joysticks and was only able to see one of them inside the game. I decided to checkout libsdl from GIT and dig through the code. After a couple of hours, I came up with a patch and submitted it to libsdl that would enable the dual joysticks to appear just fine in the game.

Now playing with the dual joysticks in X4 without any issues!

If you can't wait for the patch to be applied to libsdl, you can apply it yourself.

1. Download libsdl from Github.
2. Apply the patch in the bug report posted above.
3. Run cmake and make -j8 to compile it
4. Copy the libSDL2-2.0.so.0.12.1 file to lib folder under $STEAM/steamapps/common/X4\ Foundations/lib/libSDL2-2.0.so.0

You'd probably want to make a backup first of that file in case something goes wrong.

[steve_v]

I came up with a patch and submitted it to libsdl that would enable the dual joysticks to appear just fine in the game.

Legend.
I mean, I don't actually have dual joysticks, but still. Free software FTW.

[kouteiheika]

I just bought X4, and I've encountered exactly the same annoying (and personally game-breaking) bug I had in Rebirth - when using a controller the ship sometimes keeps rotating after letting go of the analog stick. I've previously reported this in https://www.egosoft.com:8443/jira/brows ... 3D%20XRNIX, but apparently one game later it still isn't fixed. (Apparently the engine is the same, so it would make sense that a bug from XR is still here in X4.)

This happens on a fresh installation of the game immediately after jumping into a ship in the flight tutorial start. Steps to reproduce:

1. In Settings -> Controls -> Manage Controllers -> Set it up so that only Steam Virtual Gamepad is used.
2. Load the "Default - Controller" profile.
3. Try rotating the ship with the right analog stick, and suddenly let go of the stick. Sometimes the rotation will stop, sometimes it will keep going indefinitely. As far as I can see this is totally random. It especially likes to trigger if you quickly flick the stick to one side and let go.

I haven't thoroughly investigated it, but I'm pretty sure the root cause of this is the same as in XRNIX-67 where the game is simply randomly ignoring SDL events it's sent.

I'm really surprised no one has noticed this though; am I the only one having this issue? It can't be a hardware or an exotic software issue because I'm using an entirely different controller (a Switch Pro Controller, and I was using a PS3 controller previously), an entirely different computer (new CPU, new motherbord, new disks - everything new) and a fresh, cleanly reinstalled operating system compared with when I was playing Rebirth, and yet I'm still seeing this issue. Surely someone else is playing this game on Linux with a controller, right? Either no one is, or I'm simply cursed or something.

So, could anyone who plays this game on Linux with a controller please confirm whenever this issue happens on their system?

[YorrickVander]

As much feedback as bug report since it's very low impact:

I run 2x 1080 monitors on my ageing GTX980ti and Ubuntu 20.04 installation. The game can see I have 2 monitors and shows both in the drop down to select, but they are not enumerated and selecting one or the other has no effect.

When running in Fullscreen or Fixed Window modes if I click away from the game the window vanishes and takes between 7 and 15 seconds to return. In the windows client this only happens for fullscreen. I can run fine on windowed mode but if there's a fix or workaround I'd be glad to know of it

[shmerl]

Loading Vulkan layers bug is fixed in the latest GOG release.

[shmerl]

There is a new bug though (version 3.20).

Every time I minimize the game, restoring it causes graphics corruption and I have to kill the process to exit it.

KDE Plasma 5.17.5.
RX 5700 XT, radv (Mesa master, happens both with llvm 11 and with aco).

Is there any workaround and is it a known issue?

Another strange thing I noticed, the game loads both Vulkan and OpenGL shared libraries. Why is that happening if it's only using Vulkan?

[daifuco]

Hi, maybe the question is out of the scope of this thread, but... has anyone managed to run the game with Freesync? I guess the option is Adaptive sync but it appears grayed out in my settings.

[Hoborific]

Still experiencing the issue where if I tab in and out the game takes up to a minute loading what I presume is the vulkan renderer, I have tried on both KDE Plasma and Gnome (latest for both from repo), 3.20 steam

[steve_v]

Anyone else having mouse cursor problems recently?

I'm seeing my OS cursor sporadically in game, appearing only when I move the mouse, guessing where it is still allows me to click elements. Can't seem to get any mouse-control in-flight. X4 custom cursor nowhere to be found.
Not sure when this first appeared, but everything was working properly just after 3.10 release. First run with 3.20, 3.10 installer gone from GOG so can't test. No system changes bar regular gentoo updates.

Gentoo amd64.
Plasma 5.18.5
Nvidia 450.57 (same result with "stable" 440.100)

[sineastris]

Linux Optimisations

I'm seriously impressed with X4 on linux, it's been running flawlessly on my debian testing and ubuntu 20.04 installations via steam.

Bravo to the developers, for the outstanding game, and for supporting the growing amount of linux gamers out there.

I wanted to share a couple of tips that have improved the experience even further for me, and will apply to any linux distribution.

The first is gamemode from Feral Interactive, to quote the readme from the linked github page:

GameMode is a daemon/lib combo for Linux that allows games to request a set of optimisations be temporarily applied to the host OS and/or a game process.

Packages are provided for many distributions, and some distributions are already packaging it themselves. It's already part of the default installation on ubuntu 20.04, and is ready to use OOTB.

The second is the SDL hint SDL_VIDEO_MINIMIZE_ON_FOCUS_LOSS, I use this to seamlessly switch between the borderless fullscreen game window and other workspaces when using a tiling WM such as i3wm. This eliminates the several seconds waiting for the X4 splash screen when I switch back to the workspace running the game.

In my configuration, I apply both of these things to the game launch command in steam:

Code: Select all

SDL_VIDEO_MINIMIZE_ON_FOCUS_LOSS=0 gamemoderun %command%

I hope this helps anyone that's been having issues with CPU powersave or ondemand governors, or is frustrated with a workspace switching delay!

[Panos]

Linux Optimisations

I'm seriously impressed with X4 on linux, it's been running flawlessly on my debian testing and ubuntu 20.04 installations via steam.

Bravo to the developers, for the outstanding game, and for supporting the growing amount of linux gamers out there.

I wanted to share a couple of tips that have improved the experience even further for me, and will apply to any linux distribution.

The first is gamemode from Feral Interactive, to quote the readme from the linked github page:

GameMode is a daemon/lib combo for Linux that allows games to request a set of optimisations be temporarily applied to the host OS and/or a game process.

Packages are provided for many distributions, and some distributions are already packaging it themselves. It's already part of the default installation on ubuntu 20.04, and is ready to use OOTB.

The second is the SDL hint SDL_VIDEO_MINIMIZE_ON_FOCUS_LOSS, I use this to seamlessly switch between the borderless fullscreen game window and other workspaces when using a tiling WM such as i3wm. This eliminates the several seconds waiting for the X4 splash screen when I switch back to the workspace running the game.

In my configuration, I apply both of these things to the game launch command in steam:

Code: Select all

SDL_VIDEO_MINIMIZE_ON_FOCUS_LOSS=0 gamemoderun %command%

I hope this helps anyone that's been having issues with CPU powersave or ondemand governors, or is frustrated with a workspace switching delay!

Thank you for your guide
Had some issues last night trying to make the game run. Followed your guide in addiction using the latest PPA MESA activating ACO and the game run way faster on the Ubuntu 20.04 than the Windows 10 on same settings and system

(3900X, 5700XT AE, 2560x1440, SSAA 2x and ultra settings)

[Panos]

I am baffled. Same settings between W10 and Linux. However on Linux the game isn't only faster but also looks better.
SSAA 2x works properly on Linux while on windows can still see the jagged lines. I do use latest drivers on W10 (v 2004) yet over the course of the last 18 months playing the game it didn't look that good.

[Rastuasi]

I am baffled.

Welcome to the Linux club, nothing to be baffled by. When you get rid of the malwareOS that takes 70% of your computer resources, you'll find a lot runs much better.

[ezra-r]

So Linux version working now better? I remember it would get degradated performance quickly before 3.20 after a while playing.

@sineastris thanks for sharing your linux optimizations tips, will sure to try them out when I get the chance to play x4! Someone stick those somewhere please!