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A look at the Penumbra Collection on Linux with Mesa in 2020

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When I switched to using Linux full time in the spring of 2007, my first recourse for gaming was either emulation or playing many of my old ported favourites from id Software. It did not take me long to start looking further afield in search of other quality Linux native titles, but in a time when digital distribution was in its infancy, and the Indie revolution that it would bring had not quite started yet, new games were few and far between.

At the same time, a small startup in Sweden was hard at work trying to expand their original Penumbra tech demo into a series of full fledged episodic horror games. The Penumbra Collection would be the ultimate result of that effort, with Linux support being provided by Edward Rudd. It would even go on to have its first instalment included as part of the original Humble Indie Bundle. The game soon caught my eye due to its strong graphics and advanced physics engine.

I have never been one to be frightened by video games, but thanks to its skilful environmental storytelling, strong writing, and accomplished vocal talent, the Penumbra Collection got its hooks into me all the same. Frictional Games would go on to even greater acclaim with the release of Amnesia: The Dark Descent only a few months after I first played, but it is the Penumbra Collection that is always going to hold a special place in my heart.

It pains me to say then, in spite of the still excellent support that Frictional Games gives to our platform, that the state of the Penumbra Collection for a number of Linux users has become such a mess. Ten years on I found myself with little option other than running my old copy of the Penumbra Collection from the now defunct Desura service; the closure of the company’s own storefront leaving no other recourse for those wishing to avoid the use of Steam.

Regardless, the version of the game that I have (1.1.1 released on December 4, 2014) appears even now to be the most recent release of the Penumbra Collection. This includes a number of much appreciated quality of life improvements over earlier versions such as offering support for more modern display resolutions, better audio handling through the use of an improved OALWrapper, and everything being reworked to run on top of SDL2.

 

At first blush the game installed and ran great, right up until I tried to leave the fishing boat at the start of the first episode in the series Penumbra: Overture. Upon attempting to load the next level the game would immediately crash to the desktop; a similar problem occurred upon using the vice at the start of the second episode Penumbra: Black Plague. It did not take long for me to discover that the solution was to build a custom Mesa package yet again.

For whatever reason, the Penumbra Collection will crash when Mesa is built with compiler optimizations applied. This can be mitigated by Arch Linux users through the use of the Arch Build System, or by generating your own Mesa build manually. Either option is far from ideal of course, and while officially the game does only support proprietary vendor drivers, almost all users of both AMD and Intel graphics hardware on Linux will now run into this issue.

Also alarming is that while trying to diagnose the problem I uncovered a separate bug that causes the game to crash when using modern versions of the libvorbis library. My copy of the Penumbra Collection came bundled with an older "libvorbis.so.0" file included in the the game's various "lib" directories, so I was able to sidestep this issue, but it is always a bad sign when a game refuses to run off the libraries that come supplied with your Linux distribution.

Ten years on the Penumbra Collection plays as strong as ever, even if my appreciation for Overture has increased as my over familiarity with Black Plague has lessened its impact. More than any other game, I wish I could go back to 2010 and play these titles with a fresh pair of eyes, especially since solving puzzles in the wrong order can on occasion confuse the narrative. What need do I have for the severed hand of Dr. Eminiss when I already have one in my bag?

Frictional Games are hard at work on their next Amnesia title, and while I know that keeping old games updated can be an aggravating support burden, I do still hope that the developers can come back to the Penumbra Collection, fix up these issues that will continue to plague a growing number of Linux users, and then spread the game to even more stores. To be left with creaking binaries from a shuttered distribution service is disheartening for a game that remains so dear to me.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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About the author -
author picture
Hamish Paul Wilson is a free software developer, game critic, amateur writer, cattle rancher, shepherd, and beekeeper living in rural Alberta, Canada. He is an advocate of both DRM free native Linux gaming and the free software movement alongside his other causes, and further information can be found at his icculus.org homepage where he lists everything he is currently involved in: http://icculus.org/~hamish
See more from me
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41 comments
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Cyril May 23, 2020
Still sad to see that GOG have not the Linux versions of the Penumbra games... I send an email about it this month and still no answer.
PublicNuisance May 24, 2020
Quoting: CyrilStill sad to see that GOG have not the Linux versions of the Penumbra games... I send an email about it this month and still no answer.

This is just my theory but I think issues like these are why it is not on GOG. To be more specific from what I have gathered GOG is very strict about providing the same support to all potential customers. For instance on the CRPG Beautiful Isolation the Linux version was late being on GOG but the developer mentioned that this was because on Steam they could simply choose to not support those that used AMD CPUs and GPUs on Linux as they had a bug on those setups at the moment. GOG would not allow them to do this and had they released the Linux version on GOG they would have to support all customers not just certain ones. Now luckily that bug got fixed and the Linux version for Beautiful Desolation is now on GOG but it makes me wonder how many Linux games that are not on GOG are due to not being able to blacklist customers like Steam allows them to. Again, just a theory.
x_wing May 24, 2020
Quoting: PublicNuisance
Quoting: CyrilStill sad to see that GOG have not the Linux versions of the Penumbra games... I send an email about it this month and still no answer.

This is just my theory but I think issues like these are why it is not on GOG. To be more specific from what I have gathered GOG is very strict about providing the same support to all potential customers. For instance on the CRPG Beautiful Isolation the Linux version was late being on GOG but the developer mentioned that this was because on Steam they could simply choose to not support those that used AMD CPUs and GPUs on Linux as they had a bug on those setups at the moment. GOG would not allow them to do this and had they released the Linux version on GOG they would have to support all customers not just certain ones. Now luckily that bug got fixed and the Linux version for Beautiful Desolation is now on GOG but it makes me wonder how many Linux games that are not on GOG are due to not being able to blacklist customers like Steam allows them to. Again, just a theory.

I doubt that it works that way. Beautiful Desolation still has a bug that makes the game unplayable on Linux with Mesa drivers (unless you want to cheat). Whatever restriction or problem they have with GoG is probably completely unrelated with the current state of the game on Mesa.


Last edited by x_wing on 24 May 2020 at 9:22 pm UTC
Hamish May 24, 2020
The Linux version of Metro: Last Light Redux was bounced by GOG.com quality control:
QuoteIn this case that responsibility was on us ... We encountered a number of technical issues while preparing our DRM-free Linux and Mac OS X versions and made the call to hold back the releases until we can be confident in the quality of our product. While we are trying to fix the problems, we cannot make any promises if and when the DRM-free versions will be ready."
Source: https://news.softpedia.com/news/Deep-Silver-Refuses-to-Provide-Linux-DRM-free-Builds-to-GOG-com-for-Metro-Last-Light-Redux-481335.shtml

Also seems to be true with Postal 2 as well:
QuoteWe had planned on having Mac and Linux ports done for this release, but we ran into some really bizarre problems in trying to get them to run, that we haven't sorted out yet. So we had to push those plans back for a while. Unfortunately, I can't give you an ETA on when we might get them done. :(
Source: https://www.gog.com/forum/postal_series/linux_version_of_postal_2_and_paradise_lost/post2

Which is why when I played Postal 2 again earlier this year I had to use my old outdated Desura copy like I did with the Penumbra Collection.


Last edited by Hamish on 24 May 2020 at 9:26 pm UTC
Desum May 25, 2020
I vaguely recall Frictional saying they planned to open source the other two Penumbra games along with Amnesia:TDD at some point.
PublicNuisance May 25, 2020
Quoting: x_wing
Quoting: PublicNuisance
Quoting: CyrilStill sad to see that GOG have not the Linux versions of the Penumbra games... I send an email about it this month and still no answer.

This is just my theory but I think issues like these are why it is not on GOG. To be more specific from what I have gathered GOG is very strict about providing the same support to all potential customers. For instance on the CRPG Beautiful Isolation the Linux version was late being on GOG but the developer mentioned that this was because on Steam they could simply choose to not support those that used AMD CPUs and GPUs on Linux as they had a bug on those setups at the moment. GOG would not allow them to do this and had they released the Linux version on GOG they would have to support all customers not just certain ones. Now luckily that bug got fixed and the Linux version for Beautiful Desolation is now on GOG but it makes me wonder how many Linux games that are not on GOG are due to not being able to blacklist customers like Steam allows them to. Again, just a theory.

I doubt that it works that way. Beautiful Desolation still has a bug that makes the game unplayable on Linux with Mesa drivers (unless you want to cheat). Whatever restriction or problem they have with GoG is probably completely unrelated with the current state of the game on Mesa.

From the GOG forum for the game coming from an employee of Brotherhood:

"GOG is a lot more strict about release. They are not going to let me isolate an entire processor manufacturer (AMD) for a platform"

https://www.gog.com/forum/beautiful_desolation/linux_version/page1

On Steam they were literally allowed to put in the system requirements that the game wouldn't work on AMD CPUs or GPUs on Linux and weren't going to be officially supported. Then behind the scenes they fixed the bug; got it released on GOG; and removed that language from Steam.

From the Steam forums when asked if a Linux version was coming to GOG after the fix:

"Yip, it is at GOG for review now. They take some time to make sure everything is ok (they actually play the game). I think we should have it up by next week. Ill update this thread once it is there."

https://steamcommunity.com/app/912570/discussions/0/1749024519676236016/?ctp=10

People can say what they will about GOG but they do excel in certain areas over Steam such as in QA on what games are allowed on their store and trying to make sure they work.
x_wing May 25, 2020
Quoting: PublicNuisancePeople can say what they will about GOG but they do excel in certain areas over Steam such as in QA on what games are allowed on their store and trying to make sure they work.

I can't talk of how they test the game but I can tell you: the game is not yet playable with AMD GPUs. I have the game and I reported an issue with the codex (basically you can't see the contents) and that makes the game unplayable as it's a vital component for the story and game riddles.

Whatever tests GOG did, it wasn't with an AMDGPUs or they didn't try to play the game properly.


Last edited by x_wing on 25 May 2020 at 4:10 pm UTC
erolmatei May 26, 2020
Sorry to break it to you but you are all wrong about the cause. It has nothing to do with OpenGL binding wrong textures. The reason why the game breaks on Linux with the most recent Mesa drivers is because the game uses AngelScript which can cause stack misalignments. When loading some functions from within AngelScript (for example, load an OGG file or a 2D texture) the stack gets misaligned and loses the 16-byte boundary, and since both Mesa (the video driver) and libogg use SSE instructions, stack misalignment causes CPU exceptions.

I had these issues myself when playing the game, and my solution was to compile the game on my own and set AngelScript to preserve stack alignment. For more details, see https://www.frictionalgames.com/forum/thread-56758.html

That said, yes, to fix the issue you need to build Mesa so that it does not use optimized SSE instruction (one of the effects of the -O0 flag btw). This is, imho, not a clean solution. The problem is, on the forum people complained about stack misalignment and devs did not integrate the AngelScript modification (literally just define a simple macro) into the newest Linux builds. Penumbra is still a sold game, it is unaccepta
Hamish May 26, 2020
Quoting: erolmateiThat said, yes, to fix the issue you need to build Mesa so that it does not use optimized SSE instruction (one of the effects of the -O0 flag btw). This is, imho, not a clean solution.
I am sure it is like swatting a mosquito with a sledge hammer, but it worked for me.

I do wonder if a complete Penumbra source port could be constructed from the Overture code.
erolmatei May 27, 2020
> I am sure it is like swatting a mosquito with a sledge hammer, but it worked for me.

Yeah yeah, I mainly meant "unacceptable to the end user", as the end user should not meddle with system drivers. If needs must, one can still keep the unoptimized library in a separate folder and source them with the LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH environment variable.

I guess that having stack alignment issues

To add pain to the injury, trying to run Penumbra with Proton results to a dark screen during the game, probably nvidia-cg does not like wine.

> I do wonder if a complete Penumbra source port could be constructed from the Overture code.

Overture and Black Plague are very alike, at least this is what I can tell judging from the function signature (they did not get stripped from the linux binary, wow). I think that at this stage not opensourcing Black Plague is not very wise.

But frankly, I do not see much interest in the developers to maintain the old Penumbra saga. The forum looks dead, and there are some pending PRs in the engine/openal wrapper that have completely been ignored for the last few years. It is quite understandable as the developers moved on to other spicier projects like Amnesia, then SOMA. See https://github.com/FrictionalGames/HPL1Engine/issues/15 (mine)
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