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The Black Mesa team have pushed out a new Linux beta

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Black Mesa, the fan-made recreation of Half-Life has a fresh brew available for Linux gamers that should make it a better experience.

The new public beta version for owners of the game aimed to address these issues:

  • Mesa drivers with OpenGL 3.0 showing black screen
  • Black props and NPCs on closed driver for NVIDIA
  • Inadequate memory usage on big maps and/or long playthrough

They've also pushed a couple of updates to the new beta since it went live, which they say adds in full support for Shader Model 3.0 in OpenGL mode, reduced memory consumption, libtcmalloc_minimal was added for supporting distros other than Ubuntu and other bug fixes.

To access it, you need to opt into the "public-beta" branch on Steam. To do so, right click on the game and go to properties, from there select the beta tab and pick it from the drop-down menu. They're asking for feedback in this Steam forum post.

Find Black Mesa on Steam.

Have tip to x_wing.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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13 comments
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Eike Dec 18, 2018
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I have never played Half-Life (yeah, I'm the one).
Maybe I'll do when they have finished.
Sometime in the late 20s...


Last edited by Eike on 18 December 2018 at 9:58 am UTC
ChiKin Dec 18, 2018
Will this fix the sudden, terrible frame drops that make the game unplayable?
Liam Dawe Dec 18, 2018
Quoting: ChiKinWill this fix the sudden, terrible frame drops that make the game unplayable?
Possibly, if that was related to memory use then it might help quite a bit. Can't really test myself, as my main unit is NVIDIA and my laptop is Intel but a bit too low powered for such testing. I really need to get my hands on a nice AMD GPU next year...
poke86 Dec 18, 2018
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Dammit I uninstalled the game just last week because of a recurring crash... Guess I need to try again, hooray for broadband!
MayeulC Dec 18, 2018
Did they fix the crash that required moving the bodies around a chopper before blowing up the tank truck? This was quite annoying, although I didn't test in a long time...
The only other bug I can think of was a weird thing with shadows, but that probably has been fixed by now :) Oh, and vortigaunt's terrible aim.

Nevertheless, I am glad to see them working to polish it on Linux! Very much appreciated!
rea987 Dec 18, 2018
Quoting: poke86Dammit I uninstalled the game just last week because of a recurring crash... Guess I need to try again, hooray for broadband!

Quoting: MayeulCDid they fix the crash that required moving the bodies around a chopper before blowing up the tank truck? This was quite annoying, although I didn't test in a long time...

Test chamber and chopper crash have already been solved in public-beta branch. You need to restart the map FYI.
poke86 Dec 18, 2018
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Quoting: rea987Test chamber and chopper crash have already been solved in public-beta branch. You need to restart the map FYI.

Thanks for the tip, I was restarting from a quicksave maybe that was it.
Creak Dec 18, 2018
Quoting: liamdaweI really need to get my hands on a nice AMD GPU next year...
I've heard they'll announce new GPUs soon (I think there are even new IDs in Linux 4.21).
x_wing Dec 18, 2018
Quoting: ChiKinWill this fix the sudden, terrible frame drops that make the game unplayable?

I detected some drops, but nothing that affected a lot the game (never less than 30 fps). Anyway, I just played a little bit the start of the game, I'll try to play a little more during weekend and will let you know if there is something else to be worried about.

P.S: enabling AA will crash the game, no matter your settings. So, keep it off for now :P


Last edited by x_wing on 18 December 2018 at 2:46 pm UTC
rea987 Dec 18, 2018
Quoting: poke86Thanks for the tip, I was restarting from a quicksave maybe that was it.

As far as I understand, public-beta branch pushes tweaked versions of those 2 problematic maps. Loading a quicksave most probably loads the old version of the map. I can confirm loading chopper section from a quicksave reproduces the crash while restarting the map with following command loads the new map which works just fine.

map bm_c2a5g 
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