Linux Gaming: Discussion and support.

[RobbieThe1st]

I am proud to say that I am a Linux Gamer.
By that I mean that the two games I play regularly these days, Team Fortress 2 and Runescape, I am able to play on Linux via Wine or CXGames.

Team Fortress 2 I have played almost exclusively via Wine. Its playable at medium settings, though these days full screen doesn't work any more. I have to say though, despite the fact that I can't get nearly the performance of Windows on the same machine, I love being able to have virtual-desktops and switch between them while TF2 is loading. In Windows, attempting to alt+tab between TF2 in full-screen and anything else is just asking for trouble - In Linux it work(ed).

RuneScape is a Java/OpenGL based game, and it runs natively - Better than Windows even!

Other games I have been messing around with include System Shock 2(Tapewolf got me into it <_<) - Last I played it worked excellently, but it would crash going between the "escape" screen and the game screen, and when it did it would take my whole Linux system with it.

Any thoughts? Have -you- done any Linux Gaming?

[Tapewolf]

I've been playing Morrowind in Wine a lot.  It does have an annoying tendency to crash a bit more than in native windows, and your character appears upside-down on the status page.  Other than that it works very nicely.

Oblivion almost works too - the only problem I have with it is that you can't hit ESC to skip the opening video.  After that it's fine.

I actually have the Linux version of Rune, which took a bit of messing around to make work but actually did, even on 64-bit linux.  Return to Castle Wolfenstein is another one.
And of course DOS games work in DOSbox.

[Drayco84]

Rrrrrrruuuuuuuuuuuune Sssssscaaaaaaaaape......... HrrrrrrAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSS.... (Tot: 1,835. 81, 83, 80, 83, 75, 82, 84, 99, 80, 80, 86, 76, 72, 73, 75, 72, 70, 74, 67, 67, 70, 69, 70, 77. I have an SS, BGS, Dplate/legs/boots, 2 whips, and Ahrim's Top and Bottom. I'm getting ridiculously sick of all the grinding...)

Of course, my gaming situation would be slightly better if I had more robust hardware than a netbook...

[Dannysaysnoo]

As an impatient person, Linux gaming doesn't suit me very well. It also seems to be less likely to be compatible with newer releases, like Bad Company 2 and Alien Versus Predator.

[Fibre]

About once a year or so, I'll fire up Nethack, spend a few weeks on it, rack up "yet another stupid death", and forget about it for a while. Occasionally I'll play through Captain Comic or fail at Commander Keen in DOSBox, too.

I have tried Wine for a few old games that I like too, but it always dies on the copy protection.

(I actually run FreeBSD, not Linux, but close enough for the intent of the thread...)

[Vidar]

Dwarf fortress.
It's the only game I have running on my laptop. For all my other gaming needs I have a Wii and a Windows box(XP, I swear I will never touch Vista).
It's good te hear that many windows games are playable in Linux, but it's still a bit of a hassle to get them working.

[Drayco84]

About once a year or so, I'll fire up Nethack, spend a few weeks on it, rack up "yet another stupid death", and forget about it for a while. Occasionally I'll play through Captain Comic or fail at Commander Keen in DOSBox, too.

I have tried Wine for a few old games that I like too, but it always dies on the copy protection.

(I actually run FreeBSD, not Linux, but close enough for the intent of the thread...)

I realize that I'm treading on thin ice around an open flame here, and if the mods feel they need to, then delete the post.

If you've already legally purchased the game, then there's no major reason that you can't use a crack. Well, other than the fact that it's illegal to circumvent DRM. But, if you've already purchased it new, the developers already got their cut. If you buy it used, they get squat and the retailer makes out like a bandit. (I'm lookin' at you, GameStop...)

[Mao]

It's illegal to circumvent DRM WHERE YOU LIVE.

[Ryudo Lee]

Dwarf fortress.
It's the only game I have running on my laptop. For all my other gaming needs I have a Wii and a Windows box(XP, I swear I will never touch Vista).
It's good te hear that many windows games are playable in Linux, but it's still a bit of a hassle to get them working.

Vidar, you will want to look at Windows 7.  It's got all the shiny of Vista, but it actually works.  I've had no problems running everything I had in XP in 7.

I too have found that running games in Linux is a hassle.  If there were more support for running them natively then I'd quickly switch from Windows to Linux.  In fact, that's the major thing that's keeping me stuck on Windows.  I don't play browser games, but rather the types of games that require heavy 3d architecture.  Linux just isn't viable for me.

There is one project that I have been watching that should (if Micro$oft doesn't sue them into oblivion) solve everyone's problems.  ReactOS has been making some noticeable progress.  At this point in time, MS is ignoring them, but if they can succeed in fending off MS's ninja-lawyers then ROS could be the solution for a free OS that will run all x86 applications natively.

Thoughts on ROS?

[ShadesFox]

I've been following ReactOS for years, and it feels like it has promise, but will never quite get there.  I am hoping that they can make a 64 bit XP, but that would run into major driver problems, especially with graphics vendors.  I really don't understand the major graphics vendors.  "Lets take a huge chunk of code, easily 3 times the size of the whole rest of the OS kernel, and shovel it into the privileged kernel address space.  What can possibly go wrong?"

When it comes to games, or most applications on Linux in general, I find that the real problem is audio.  The graphics end is an increasingly solved problem, and this time next year there should be reasonably fast free software drivers that are higher quality then what ships with the cards from the vendors themselves.  With higher quality being defined as 'crashes less'.  Audio seems to continue to be a quagmire, with a dreadful mix of ALSA, some legacy OSS, a new thrust from the more recent OSS, and PulseAudio gumming up the works for no other reason than because it can.  Every time I get audio working it feels like I can no longer sneeze for fear that it will all crumble again. 

For that reason I've recently just gone the Wintindo route.  There is a desktop, it runs Windows Vista, it plays Divinity 2 right now.

[superluser]

It's illegal to circumvent DRM WHERE YOU LIVE.

Wait until ACTA.

Audio seems to continue to be a quagmire, with a dreadful mix of ALSA, some legacy OSS, a new thrust from the more recent OSS, and PulseAudio gumming up the works for no other reason than because it can.  Every time I get audio working it feels like I can no longer sneeze for fear that it will all crumble again.

PulseAudio (and Phonon) are actually *improvements*, as perverse as that sounds.  In the olden days, you had OSS, but then they decided to add ALSA to get more robust sound drivers.  That's the driver level.  The system itself had to have a program for managing sound, including system sounds, some mixing, and generally providing an API to deal with sound.  That was Esound (Enlightenment Sound Daemon, ESD) and aRts.

If you're wondering why the window manager made the applications use the system sound daemon for its own sound services, that's a good question.  This was especially galling to me, since I didn't use KDE or GNOME but wanted to use a couple of applications that required aRts.  And any one package from KDE tends to require a full install of KDE, for reasons that are unlikely to become clear without copious amounts of mescaline.

People got fed up with this, and now both GNOME and KDE keep their system sound daemon separate from the sound server, which is now PulseAudio or Phonon.  So this is an improvement, and now that they're separate from the WM, we may see some efforts to create a unified audio server, and those efforts may actually have some results.

As for me, most games seem to run acceptably slowly in emulation.  That's changed a little bit with my new monitor, but I have faith that hardware upgrades and improvements to Wine will fix that in time for Portal 2.

[Mao]

Wait until ACTA.

Not every nation in the world has signed up to that one yet nor is it out of Draft.  Also, nations will be able to voluntarily opt out of it too.  As it currently stands, there is a very large public opposition to it here in Canada.  The US is also showing signs of public opposition from several groups.

[Tapewolf]

Vidar, you will want to look at Windows 7.  It's got all the shiny of Vista, but it actually works.  I've had no problems running everything I had in XP in 7.

I've had very mixed experiences with Windows 7, personally.  I've had big problems running everything I had in XP under it, basically the opposite to your experience.  I'm still not sure why as it all worked fine in the 7001 demo version.  It's just the final release that's been a big disappointment.

Basically, Morrowind, Oblivion, SONAR and every other piece of software I need has to run as administrator or the sound system will lock up and play the same noise continuously.  Quitting the game won't help, nor will putting the machine into hibernation as it will start doing it again as soon as it wakes up.  The only cure I've found so far is to disable the soundcards in the device manager and then re-enable them, or do a complete reboot of the system.
The games will also tend to crash randomly unless they're run as admin.  Since this is a very bad practice I'm loathe to simply disable UAC.

Even when run as admin, the OS also has a tendency to silently halt completely, requiring the power button, and sometimes it won't even boot properly.  Oblivion, Morrowind and SONAR often have to be run 2-3 times before they actually start, and sometimes they never do at all.  With the exception of Oblivion, I've taken to simply doing it all in Linux instead, though that's obviously not going to be the best solution for everyone.

There is one project that I have been watching that should (if Micro$oft doesn't sue them into oblivion) solve everyone's problems.  ReactOS has been making some noticeable progress.  At this point in time, MS is ignoring them, but if they can succeed in fending off MS's ninja-lawyers then ROS could be the solution for a free OS that will run all x86 applications natively.

Thoughts on ROS?

I've been watching them for about 12 years now.  I hope they can do it, but at this rate I'm not too hopeful, I'm afraid.

[ShadesFox]

Blah blah blah

Keep telling yourself that and someday it may even come true.  Until then I'm stuck with a pile of crap that tends to break everything that is not part of the default install and ripping it out of the system corrects all the problems.  I keep trying to give it another chance but it keeps failing.

[superluser]

Keep telling yourself that and someday it may even come true.  Until then I'm stuck with a pile of crap that tends to break everything that is not part of the default install and ripping it out of the system corrects all the problems.  I keep trying to give it another chance but it keeps failing.

Meh.  I actually agree with you, but when someone is so pessimistic about something, I think I should provide some sort of opposing view.

My view may be warped by my use of Linux over the past two decades.  Decade one began with me trying and failing to install Redhat 3.0.3 and ignoring Linux for the rest of the decade.  The improvements that I've seen since then are impressive, and consequently, I think that Linux audio will eventually get sorted, though probably not anytime soon.

[VAE]

Well i for one must say that slackware linux + wine satisfies all my gaming needs,,,
but then, the newest game i own and had played is warcraft III datadisk.

[RobbieThe1st]

Don't ask me -why-, but for the last year, ever since I went to Linux about the time Ubuntu 9.10 came out... I haven't had any real sound issues(at least with my two Kubuntu installs). I'm pretty sure I use ALSA for sound, and aside from occasionally having to set an app to use ALSA, or select the default sound card, I haven't had much in the way of problems.
What problems I -have- had, I've been able to solve through Google - as such, I'm happy enough.


Now, much as I hate to admit this, I'm probably going to end up setting up a dual-boot with W7, instead of my once-beloved XPx64. Why? Mainly because I'm going to be upgrading my desktop monitor to a 120HZ(3d-vision compatible)capable display(60hz is too low for me, to be honest... but I like having a large screen).... and next time I have some money, I will probably end up getting a 3D-Vision kit(Because its so *DARN* cool!) - Which only works on Vista/W7.
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any work on 3d-vision drivers for Linux, aside from the Quadro-supported-only Nvidia blobs. And I don't have a Quadro.

[Ryudo Lee]

Basically, Morrowind, Oblivion, SONAR and every other piece of software I need has to run as administrator or the sound system will lock up and play the same noise continuously.  Quitting the game won't help, nor will putting the machine into hibernation as it will start doing it again as soon as it wakes up.  The only cure I've found so far is to disable the soundcards in the device manager and then re-enable them, or do a complete reboot of the system.
The games will also tend to crash randomly unless they're run as admin.  Since this is a very bad practice I'm loathe to simply disable UAC.

I have not yet loaded Morrowind, but I can say that Oblivion works wonderfully well under 7, even heavily modded (so much so that I had to use BOSS to keep everything in working order).

I originally brought up ROS because the dev's work with and on Wine, and are usually on top of sync'ing up with Wine's updates.

[Fibre]

It's such a shame that OSS was essentially killed on Linux for political reasons. And those reasons shouldn't really have been an issue anyway. OSSv4 doesn't even have that "problem" any more, and from what I've heard works well on modern Linux, but unfortunately distributions still don't seem interested...

If you've already legally purchased the game, then there's no major reason that you can't use a crack. Well, other than the fact that it's illegal to circumvent DRM. But, if you've already purchased it new, the developers already got their cut. If you buy it used, they get squat and the retailer makes out like a bandit. (I'm lookin' at you, GameStop...)

I'm sure it's possible, but I don't have any interest in going that route because of both the legal issue as well as the simple practical reason that I don't run software from questionable sources.

[superluser]

It's such a shame that OSS was essentially killed on Linux for political reasons. And those reasons shouldn't really have been an issue anyway. OSSv4 doesn't even have that "problem" any more, and from what I've heard works well on modern Linux, but unfortunately distributions still don't seem interested...

Well, that's life.  Same thing happened to XFree86 (except for the fact that X development had been crippled for years before the license change).

[Fibre]

Well, that's life.  Same thing happened to XFree86 (except for the fact that X development had been crippled for years before the license change).

I wouldn't really consider that a similar incident. Xorg is an example of a license-change based fork done right. I think that the problem is that the folks starting ALSA didn't just fork OSS.

If the people who started Xorg took the same approach as those of ALSA, we'd have something like a brand new, totally incompatible graphics system from the drivers up and Gtk+, Qt, and other toolkits would each have their own conflicting display servers. There have been attempts to do that, of course, but despite the issues with X11, people have not surprisingly pretty much ignored them.

The Xorg developers have since made steady progress to fix the issues and remain compatible, which is the approach that most other systems seem to have taken with OSS. And as a user of a few of those other systems, and given my less-than-satisfactory experiences with Linux/ALSA (and PulseAudio, and JACK,  and ...), I'd have to say that approach has worked much better...

[VAE]

Well, that's life.  Same thing happened to XFree86 (except for the fact that X development had been crippled for years before the license change).

I wouldn't really consider that a similar incident. Xorg is an example of a license-change based fork done right. I think that the problem is that the folks starting ALSA didn't just fork OSS.

If the people who started Xorg took the same approach as those of ALSA, we'd have something like a brand new, totally incompatible graphics system from the drivers up and Gtk+, Qt, and other toolkits would each have their own conflicting display servers. There have been attempts to do that, of course, but despite the issues with X11, people have not surprisingly pretty much ignored them.

The Xorg developers have since made steady progress to fix the issues and remain compatible, which is the approach that most other systems seem to have taken with OSS. And as a user of a few of those other systems, and given my less-than-satisfactory experiences with Linux/ALSA (and PulseAudio, and JACK,  and ...), I'd have to say that approach has worked much better...

I dont know - i never had an issue with alsa failing, Wine or otherwise - even things that were problematic the OSS comp. mode solved (there was some crash in Diablo II i remember)

[Fibre]

I dont know - i never had an issue with alsa failing, Wine or otherwise - even things that were problematic the OSS comp. mode solved (there was some crash in Diablo II i remember)

I don't mean to suggest that ALSA is fundamentally broken or anything; it must work for many or most people, but clearly there are a lot of us for whom it doesn't. I've spent literally days over various points studying ALSA documentation and trying to get it to work satisfactorily but never succeeded. It kind of works, but never really well. My requirements aren't exactly high, standard hardware with flac123/mpg123/mplayer is pretty much all I care about. And then sound servers add a whole new layer of complexity to deal with.

I'm probably doing something incredibly stupid to make it this difficult but sound should not be hard. On other systems I've experienced it's just a matter of having supported hardware, maybe flipping a switch to enable the sound system, and it works with everything. Plus the whole "reinvent the wheel" approach of ALSA, PulseAudio, etc leaves a really bad taste in my mouth in the first place but if I could get it working I wouldn't really care.

Hope I'm not going too much off the topic of Linux-gaming related discussion...

[VAE]

I dont know - i never had an issue with alsa failing, Wine or otherwise - even things that were problematic the OSS comp. mode solved (there was some crash in Diablo II i remember)

I don't mean to suggest that ALSA is fundamentally broken or anything; it must work for many or most people, but clearly there are a lot of us for whom it doesn't. I've spent literally days over various points studying ALSA documentation and trying to get it to work satisfactorily but never succeeded. It kind of works, but never really well. My requirements aren't exactly high, standard hardware with flac123/mpg123/mplayer is pretty much all I care about. And then sound servers add a whole new layer of complexity to deal with.

I'm probably doing something incredibly stupid to make it this  but sound should not be hard. On other systems I've experienced it's just a matter of having supported hardware, maybe flipping a switch to enable the sound system, and it works with everything. Plus the whole "reinvent the wheel" approach of ALSA, PulseAudio, etc leaves a really bad taste in my mouth in the first place but if I could get it working I wouldn't really care.

Hope I'm not going too much off the topic of Linux-gaming related discussion...

Maybe we should make a new thread.
It is funny - what kind of sound card do you have? Was perchance Daryil next to your computer any time? For the things that you state i never have had a problem and i have used linux on hardware ranging from my semi-new laptop to an old PC with Cyrix MII and ISA Yamaha sound card
Always it was a case of either functioning straight out, or compiling kernel with drivers and setting some of the things manually, but it worked , at least for the first two - i use xine instead of mplayer

[Fibre]

Maybe we should make a new thread.
It is funny - what kind of sound card do you have? Was perchance Daryil next to your computer any time? For the things that you state i never have had a problem and i have used linux on hardware ranging from my semi-new laptop to an old PC with Cyrix MII and ISA Yamaha sound card
Always it was a case of either functioning straight out, or compiling kernel with drivers and setting some of the things manually, but it worked , at least for the first two - i use xine instead of mplayer

I've used it on various Intel desktop boards with built-in sound and laptops with similar hardware (various AC97 and HDA hardware) as well as an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 most recently. And maybe a first-gen Soundblaster Live at some point, I think. I think my most positive experience with ALSA was on an AMD Geode LX board, actually.

[VAE]

I've used it on various Intel desktop boards with built-in sound and laptops with similar hardware (various AC97 and HDA hardware) as well as an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 most recently. And maybe a first-gen Soundblaster Live at some point, I think. I think my most positive experience with ALSA was on an AMD Geode LX board, actually.

Y'know the Daryil hypothesis is looking a lot more plausible since AC97 (HDA here on the laptop, and mostly the same experience) is the one i positively never had a singular bad problem with, (after i figured out which driver it is back in my noob days but that is a different story entirely)
That or technology ceases to function around you

[Fibre]

Y'know the Daryil hypothesis is looking a lot more plausible since AC97 (HDA here on the laptop, and mostly the same experience) is the one i positively never had a singular bad problem with, (after i figured out which driver it is back in my noob days but that is a different story entirely)
That or technology ceases to function around you

Yeah, it's kind of baffling. Technology definitely doesn't cease to function around me in general. We may very well have different criteria for "working well" though, I will admit to probably having unusually high standards for technology in general. It's not really hard to get it to kind of work, anyway. But I don't like kind of working.

[VAE]

Y'know the Daryil hypothesis is looking a lot more plausible since AC97 (HDA here on the laptop, and mostly the same experience) is the one i positively never had a singular bad problem with, (after i figured out which driver it is back in my noob days but that is a different story entirely)
That or technology ceases to function around you

Yeah, it's kind of baffling. Technology definitely doesn't cease to function around me in general. We may very well have different criteria for "working well" though, I will admit to probably having unusually high standards for technology in general. It's not really hard to get it to kind of work, anyway. But I don't like kind of working.

Makes me wonder, what exactly are the kinds of problems you have with it??
I cannot imagine a different criterion for audio card other than that it works when you try to play sound , and that it does.
Alternately, what kind of cthulhuous system were you using it with?? If it was a recent problem i would have thought it might be some new crappy drivers - i had quite the emergency after last update since Volkerding put a new slackware kernel up with a new, and apparently unworking graphics driver for NVIDIAs and lacking support for ext2 which incidentally is the filesystem i use....

[Fibre]

Makes me wonder, what exactly are the kinds of problems you have with it??
I cannot imagine a different criterion for audio card other than that it works when you try to play sound , and that it does.
Alternately, what kind of cthulhuous system were you using it with?? If it was a recent problem i would have thought it might be some new crappy drivers - i had quite the emergency after last update since Volkerding put a new slackware kernel up with a new, and apparently unworking graphics driver for NVIDIAs and lacking support for ext2 which incidentally is the filesystem i use....

I don't have the systems anymore so it's hard to give specific configuration information, and I don't remember the exact details. Most of this experience is with plain Arch Linux. For plain ALSA, I recall having to change the ALSA configuration depending on the application and configure each application to get them to play well together, and volume level control was always troublesome to set right. It kind of worked, but was a pain and always rather fragile. I never did get PulseAudio working either when I tried to set it up myself, and PulseAudio seems to be the direction that Linux sound is heading.

Hopefully the situation is improving, anyway. Last week I did a test install of Ubuntu 9.10 on a spare laptop (with HDA) and it seems to have actually worked out of the box at least enough for the startup sounds to play. IIRC I had tried Ubuntu 9.04 a while back on that laptop to test and sound didn't work at all until I wiped out PulseAudio at which point it did kind of work again with plain ALSA.

Your Slackware update experience sounds unpleasant but I don't see why it should be an emergency rather than minor annoyance. Either way, I really, really wouldn't run ext2. Any specific reason you are using it? Which brings up another Linux annoyance, the lack of (production-ready, btrfs doesn't count) modern local filesystems on Linux, but still there is far better than ext2 available...

[VAE]

Hmm, it was an emergency mainly because it was unexpected, and i did not have one bootable CD that could do all that i needed. Also the old packages disappeared from current, and 13.0 contains 2.6.29 which is too old for some of the other programs....
Besides it points out to another stupidity - in the past i used the boot floppies of slackware as an extremely sucessful rescue system
Now after dropping the new version onto an old flash i found out that although there still is lynx, they did not include some libraries it needs to run (or they are somehow messed, i do not know) so instead of getting the files i needed directly, i used wget + dowloading index.html and checking for path all the time... time consuming as well.
The emergency comes from the fact i needed to IM with someone that day later ... i made it 2 hours before , luckily.



As for your sound, i never encountered any such problem with the sound card you describe...
Maybe it was archlinux's fail ... i remember when i tried OpenBSD once i had an obscure graphics problem with the text consoles being corrupted when leaving X... and too, i have not heard much others having the same