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Bohemia Interactive have put out Virtual Programming's latest update of Arma 3 [Steam] for Linux, it includes 64bit support and finally fixes the texture issue I had.

Note: The Linux version of Arma 3 is still considered experimental. There is no SteamOS icon on Steam due to this, but it is fully playable.

The problem I had, was that I couldn’t select textures above Low and sometimes Normal. This is due to the way OpenGL works with 32bit applications, but no more! I still find it strange not many others saw the issue, but the 64bit built works perfectly allowing me to change all the graphical settings. For me, this is such a massive change that I can now actually play the game.

The Linux version previously sat at 1.64 since December 2016, so this update is a pretty big one for us. Both in terms of the time it took to come out and what’s changed. We’re now at Arma 1.70, but we are still lagging behind the Windows version, so you might have trouble finding people to play with online.

To be honest, the amount that has changed between 1.64 and 1.70 is insane in terms of the changelogs. The game has gone through literally hundreds of tweaks and trying to parse them into anything meaningful for an article was a bit of a nightmare. In the end, I gave up, because if you’re into Arma 3 you’ve likely kept yourself up to date anyway.

However, here’s a few cool things I found when browsing through the updates: It has a new audio engine for footsteps, Ambient Occlusion was overhauled, 64bit support, sounds for vehicles colliding with water, improved airplane audio, Sounds when getting in and out of helicopters, Rain sounds on car surfaces while inside of the vehicle and the list just goes on and on. Seriously, I don’t think I can overstate just how big of an update this is for us.

You can see what’s new in Arma 3 1.70 here, we also jumped past the 1.68 update so take a look there too. Also, since we’re now on Arma 3 - 1.70, this also means the Jets DLC will be compatible expanding the game even more for us (VP confirmed this).

Performance does seem better than when I originally tried it. There are some big dips when new areas are loading in, but they do seem to eventually smoothen out. Apparently that's an issue in the Windows version too. Some areas do have quite low performance unless I turn down quite a few settings, but it is much more playable than it was before.

Tip: If you have more than one monitor, you should be able to move it around using this as a launch option:

--eon_force_display=*monitor*Where *monitor* is a number.

Good work from Virtual Programming. Hopefully they can get some of the newer updates out a little more quickly, but that likely depends on Bohemia Interactive too, since ultimately they control what happens with it.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Kithop Sep 25, 2017
Quoting: GuestCould you look at the controller with a version of jstest which uses the evdev api, and see how things are detected?

Apologies for the delay - I'm not 100% sure if the version of jstest on Ubuntu (package 'joystick') is using evdev or not, but I've put together a quick video just now running through all the axes and buttons on my X52 Pro:

View video on youtube.com
slaapliedje Sep 26, 2017
For what it's worth, Debian Sid's version of 'joystick' is 1.6.0 and has a recommend for evtest. You could probably start that up next to jstest. I'll do that now.

Edit, they certainly all look like they work through evdev.


Last edited by slaapliedje on 26 September 2017 at 1:46 am UTC
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