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With MXGP3 - The Official Motocross Videogame now on Linux from Milestone S.r.l. With porting from Virtual Programming, I took a look. Note: Copy personally purchased.

As the first game from Milestone to land with Linux support, it didn’t get the best start. For a day it didn’t work for anyone and after that it crashed quite often. It was quickly fixed up, so thankfully it does work fine now.

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What is the game? In their words:

Experience all the adrenaline of Motocross with the official Championship’s only videogame! MXGP3 - The Official Motocross Videogame offers the most involving game experience ever, with completely new gameplay and graphics thanks to Unreal® Engine 4. Race on 18 official tracks and in the MXoN with all riders and bikes from the 2016 MXGP and MX2 seasons and be the first to experience the thrill of riding one of the 10 2-strokes available! Render your rider and your bike unique, with more than 300 official components for a complete customisation!

When first loading the game, the logo screens can’t be skipped. A sin games simply shouldn’t commit, but not a major issue more of a simple annoyance. As your first glimpse though, watching some of the logo screens stutter quite badly isn’t great. If they’re going to be forced, at least make sure they’re smooth!

When it comes to actual in-game race performance, honestly, it’s really not great. To get it a somewhat acceptable performance level, I did need to adjust the settings down quite a bit. Even with it only on the Medium preset, with no AF and no AA turned on it’s repeatedly gone right down to 30FPS. There’s an annoying stutter at certain times to, where the game will very clearly freeze for just about a second and then catch up, it’s just nowhere near smooth.

When you have drops down from 60FPS one moment, to around 30FPS quite often and some stutter, a racing game like this can be quite unplayable. In some games and genres it can be overlooked, but it completely messes with your control over the bike here. Considering the game isn’t all that much to look at visually, I would have expected quite a bit better performance. When doing a Time Attack, the performance seems quite a bit better. It seems having other riders on the track is what really brings it down. Considering that's a large and most interesting part of the game, it's a problem.

There’s also a few graphical issues, most noticeably people at the sidelines seem to have their character model constantly flashing along with some banner adverts also flashing. It’s not huge, but it becomes incredibly distracting when you notice it.

The bigger issue is the rain:

Raindrops are not only a little green, but they also start and stop on a very clear loop where it’s raining for all of a second or two, then the rain vanishes and repeat. On top of that, the rain effect is also clearly moving on you, instead of you moving through it. Although, the rain issue is not a Linux-specific issue, I’ve seen plenty of people noting just how bad it is on Windows too.

You should see pretty clearly here how it repeats itself:

It’s just an awful weather effect.

If you do still have issues with it repeatedly crashing, try deleting this file:

~/.local/shared/vpltd/mxgp3/eONprecompiledShaders.dat

That improved it for me, likely something left over from the initial release problems.

It's a shame, since I quite like Motocross myself, having been to watch it a number of times I completely get the pull with it. An exciting sport, one where anything can happen and some of the accidents are quite spectacular. Sadly, the actual gameplay thanks to all these issues just doesn't give off any excitement like I expected from it.

It does at least work perfectly with the Steam Controller, switching between that and Keyboard works perfectly so there's no issues on that side of things.

Overall, I’m really quite disappointed. I’ve seen a lot worse, but I expect a lot better than what we have right now. I will take another look in future if performance gets patched, but until then I’m not going to recommend it.

You can find With MXGP3 - The Official Motocross Videogame on Humble Store and Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Racing, Steam
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23 comments
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Jmsnz Dec 1, 2018
Quoting: Leopard
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: Leopard
Quoting: Eike
Quoting: ImnotarobotWhy even allow anymore wrapped games to have Linux stamp with them? At least on Steam either do a native version or just leave it for Proton. Im not so technical so im not so sure about the wrapping thing, but i think it's like WINE or something like that?

In the end, it's comparable to WINE, at least in the effect of running Windows binaries on Linux. They are tuning it for single games, though, and are giving support for them. And, perhaps most importantly, they've built their technology before Proton was a thing. I guess they've not been too happy about the news.

If they would have invest to Vulkan like Feral did , that wouldn't be an issue though.

VP might well have done so, but perhaps this game missed the cutoff, or internal work isn't ready yet. I'm personally hopeful that VP do have a Vulkan backend in the works, as it would definitely help them greatly I think. Just easier for mapping from directx rendering, as far as I know.

I also suspect that anyone with an old enough graphics card to not have Vulkan driver support probably wouldn't be able to run this game (nor likely future ports) anyway, so not a whole lot of reason to remain with OpenGL going forward.

OGL 4.1 usage indicates they didn't want to bother with seperate Metal and Vulkan ( or OGL 4.5 ) renderers.

If VP will keep doing that ; i would say that would be better to not have native ports from VP.

For a good native port ; my bar is set to it should at least be on par with DXVK or even better than DXVK.

They’re using Metal on macOS, so that excuse doesn’t work.
Jmsnz Dec 1, 2018
Quoting: 1xok
Quoting: rick4003dddThanks,
i have seen this video days ago but i don't undestrand how to install this game with DXVK.
I have to use lutris? any help?

Yes, Lutris is the easiest. But MXGP3 doesn't have an installer yet.

https://lutris.net/games/mxgp3-the-official-motocross-videogame/

It would be more than helpful if you could tell Proton not to use the native Linux build of a particular game. There are just too many bad ports. Not least thanks to Apple and their outdated OpenGL version, which many porters stick to when porting to Linux and MacOS.

Meanwhile it would certainly be better in many cases if the porters would simply use DXVK instead of their self-written OpenGL rendering processes. Or support official Proton. There are a number of excellent OpenGL ports. But unfortunately also a lot of dysfunctional garbage, missing features and and eternal bugs. For example Ark will probably never see a clean Linux port.

They’re using metal on the macOS version....
Leopard Dec 1, 2018
Quoting: Jmsnz
Quoting: Leopard
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: Leopard
Quoting: Eike
Quoting: ImnotarobotWhy even allow anymore wrapped games to have Linux stamp with them? At least on Steam either do a native version or just leave it for Proton. Im not so technical so im not so sure about the wrapping thing, but i think it's like WINE or something like that?

In the end, it's comparable to WINE, at least in the effect of running Windows binaries on Linux. They are tuning it for single games, though, and are giving support for them. And, perhaps most importantly, they've built their technology before Proton was a thing. I guess they've not been too happy about the news.

If they would have invest to Vulkan like Feral did , that wouldn't be an issue though.

VP might well have done so, but perhaps this game missed the cutoff, or internal work isn't ready yet. I'm personally hopeful that VP do have a Vulkan backend in the works, as it would definitely help them greatly I think. Just easier for mapping from directx rendering, as far as I know.

I also suspect that anyone with an old enough graphics card to not have Vulkan driver support probably wouldn't be able to run this game (nor likely future ports) anyway, so not a whole lot of reason to remain with OpenGL going forward.

OGL 4.1 usage indicates they didn't want to bother with seperate Metal and Vulkan ( or OGL 4.5 ) renderers.

If VP will keep doing that ; i would say that would be better to not have native ports from VP.

For a good native port ; my bar is set to it should at least be on par with DXVK or even better than DXVK.

They’re using Metal on macOS, so that excuse doesn’t work.

So my take here is :

They didn't care about Linux port. Shame.
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