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This is awesome to see. XCOM 2 has beaten the all time peak player counter of some pretty high profiles games in only a few days. I took a look at a few noteworthy entries on SteamDB to compare them.

XCOM 2's all time peak is: 133,022

Let's compare that to Civilization V: 80,658

Or ARK Survival Evolved: 84,961

It even beats out Valve's own free to play title Team Fortress 2: 104,323

That's pretty impressive, but why I am talking about it? It's on Linux, let that sink in a moment. We have what could be one of the most popular games for the entire year if the player count doesn't drop too far, and it came on Day 1 thanks to Feral Interactive. Nice.

I've already put eight hours into it, and apart from the bugs and performance issues I am loving it. I will have a full review done in about a week once I've put enough time into it. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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Eike Feb 9, 2016
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Quoting: wolfyrion

Let me guess, he missed his 99% chance? :D
zeb Feb 9, 2016
Quoting: edddeduckferalWe've had 5 people including you mention this in the steam thread (4) or via support email (1) and there are few if any common denominators.

Out of those users we have 3 different distros, 3 different versions of drivers and 3 different series of Nvidia graphics card in use. However none of those cards, distros or drivers reproduce the issue and we also have a huge number of Linux players playing on exactly the same setups without issue. It's puzzling but if you have a spare partition and are willing installing a new distro it would be worth seeing what a fresh distro does as it should just work fine.

We'll keep tracking the data we get here an update you via support if we notice anything suspicious that could be the cause of this rare issue.

I was also counting this 6th user: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/linux-gaming/850104-here-is-what-happens-when-trying-to-use-non-nvidia-drivers-to-play-xcom-2-on-linux?p=850114#post850114 but you are right, this one crashes instead of having corrupt rendering. Could be different.

I will try in the end a new install (quite a lot of work to do :) ) and return to you. Then if it is working, I could try to play the difference game...


Last edited by zeb on 9 February 2016 at 10:44 am UTC
edddeduck_feral Feb 9, 2016
Quoting: zebI was also counting this 6th user: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/linux-gaming/850104-here-is-what-happens-when-trying-to-use-non-nvidia-drivers-to-play-xcom-2-on-linux?p=850114#post850114 but you are right, this one crashes instead of having corrupt rendering. Could be different.

That looks like the crash caused by VPN being enabled which you can work around by disabling VPN. We have a fix for this in the next patch.

Quoting: zebI will try in the end a new install (quite a lot of work to do :) ) and return to you. Then if it is working, I could try to play the difference game...

Sorry and thank you for trying it out! Your results will definitely be very useful please do pass them onto Gerard. If we find anything else out we'll let you know.


Last edited by edddeduck_feral on 9 February 2016 at 10:48 am UTC
zeb Feb 9, 2016
No problem. One last question: do you use Xorg 1.17 or 1.18 at Feral? Have you tested any system with Xorg 1.18?
edddeduck_feral Feb 9, 2016
Quoting: zebNo problem. One last question: do you use Xorg 1.17 or 1.18 at Feral? Have you tested any system with Xorg 1.18?

1.17 is the version included by default in Ubuntu so that's the one we used during testing.
zeb Feb 9, 2016
Thanks. However I checked with other users on Archlinux forums, and one person returned to me, having no issues with xorg 1.18/nvidia 361.19.
edddeduck_feral Feb 9, 2016
Quoting: zebThanks. However I checked with other users on Archlinux forums, and one person returned to me, having no issues with xorg 1.18/nvidia 361.19.

Yep I don't think the distro, card or driver version is the key to this issue. I guess it's something else but what that is is the million dollar question :)
rkfg Feb 9, 2016
Glad that Feral is actively working on stuttering. In the meanwhile, this advice really helps for the gameplay part at least. Cutscenes with the shuttle still lag as hell but battles are much, much better. Thank you, pedrojmartm, for sharing.
zeb Feb 9, 2016
Quoting: edddeduckferalYep I don't think the distro, card or driver version is the key to this issue. I guess it's something else but what that is is the million dollar question :)

On Arch forums, WorMzy has the same graphics card, but for him the game is working fine, despite having the GL context error too. So the context error are likely to be a red herring. We are trying to find out differences.


Last edited by zeb on 9 February 2016 at 9:58 pm UTC
zeb Feb 10, 2016
Quoting: edddeduckferalYep I don't think the distro, card or driver version is the key to this issue. I guess it's something else but what that is is the million dollar question :)

So as discussed, I have used a blank hard drive to do a full reinstall of Archlinux 64, nvidia drivers 361.28, xorg 1.18, pulseaudio and LXDE desktop. Then installed Steam and imported XCOM2. Guess what? It works fine!

Please note the GL context errors seems to be still there, so they are not related to the bug.

Now where do you want to take it from there? It would be great to find out the key difference between the working and non-working systems, this would be so informative. Of course, the cause of the issue could be numerous, since my "non-working" system, which I have used for years, is quite different from the newly installed one. IS it a specific package? Or an update that messes up some links? Could it be related to installed fonts? They look a bit different in Steam on the new install. Or the Desktop manager?


Last edited by zeb on 10 February 2016 at 1:44 pm UTC
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