Linux Running Issue

Comments

• little_duckling Member Posts: 16

  April 2018 edited April 2018

  crose said:

  I'm not sure if this is more a question for a Linux forum or not but maybe someone could help me out.
  

  Here is fine.

  crose said:

  
  I'm running BG EE on an old X60 ThinkPad with Xubuntu.
  Managed to install without too much trouble, the game starts and plays though the movies and the menus really smoothly but when it comes to gameplay there is almost no response at all. I wouldn't even say that it runs slowly, the mouse has no lag but any action or command takes so much time that the word "slow" no longer applies. It is far beyond slow.

  
  They've added new graphical features like fog weather & smooth sprites. The shaders are probably where your hardware & intel graphics driver is getting hung up.
  
  From what I see online the X60 ThinkPad has a Intel GMA 950 graphics controller, looks close to the Intel 945: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/51173/bg2ee-not-working-on-linux
  
  In that thread I linked to he said it worked fine on windows, so I think it is an issue with the Linux Intel graphics driver lacking support. It is possible that updating the intel graphics driver can fix the issue, but I doubt this, it is a lot of work, and it is easier to just "disable" the shaders.
  
  "Disabling" the shaders:

  • Try disabling graphical options in the in game menu settings or bauldur.lua (like sprites/highlighting/outlining), this should hopefully fix the slowdown your computer experiences. There is a guide here which edits bauldur.lua: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/68847/all-games-possible-fix-for-lag-slowing-graphical-issues#latest
    
  • If you know GLSL code you could try apitrace and go through the procedure I wrote here:
    https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/759770/#Comment_759770
    You can then put the text of the shaders into the override folder. I don't know if the later shaders I attached would work for your BGEE version. The idea with overriding shaders BGEE uses is to put a simpler shader there that your hardware & driver can handle. Should the menu options not allow you to disable the troublesome shader(s), a custom written "pass-through" shader placed in the override folder would be "overwrite" the troublesome shader, and allow your game to run without trouble.
    

  
  But if you want to try updating the Linux Intel graphics driver route a 'Linux forum' would be better, but here is my understanding:

  • The Intel Mesa driver has user-space and kernel-space components (the kernel-space component is a kernel module). So to get a newer version of the intel graphics driver you'd have to both update your kernel (or build the module against your current kernel) and update the user-space mesa with apt-get (the intel driver is included in mesa as it is open-source IIRC).
    
  • I don't remember what user-space packages would need to up updated, maybe libgl1-mesa-glx and others.
    
  • Updating the intel graphics driver is harder than nvidia, since nvidia's installer automagically builds their kernal-space component against whatever kernel you have installed. For intel you have to either update the kernel, or build the kernel-space component yourself (maybe there is a wizard out there but I don't know of any). It is a tricky procedure to update the kernel, as libc would be updated and a bunch of other stuff, possibly resulting in an unstable system. Much easier to just "disable" the shaders.
    

  I don't have BGEE but I have an old install of BG2EE. I don't know how much has changed since then but since we have similar hardware & Linux I assume this advice is still sound.

  Post edited by little_duckling on April 2018

  0
• little_duckling Member Posts: 16

  April 2018 edited April 2018

  [merged above]

  0