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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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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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13 comments
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Demez Dec 18, 2018
Quoting: EikeI have never played Half-Life (yeah, I'm the one).
Maybe I'll do when they have finished.
Sometime in the late 20s...

Crowbar Collective just announced the final chapters of the game (Xen) just a few weeks ago on Half-Life's 20th Anniversary, which is set to release in Q2 2019, so not even in the 20's.
Eike Dec 19, 2018
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Quoting: DemezCrowbar Collective just announced the final chapters of the game (Xen) just a few weeks ago on Half-Life's 20th Anniversary, which is set to release in Q2 2019, so not even in the 20's.

[X] I want to believe. ;)

No, seriously: It seems to be a big project with continous progress and I wish them (and me, that is) best of luck with it.
jarhead_h Dec 19, 2018
Quoting: liamdawe
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...

I noticed the same issue. It's a Source engine game running on my 1060 6GB and it's dropping framerates down into what has to be the 20s or teens. Granted I'm running a TV as a monitor so I'm limited to 60FPS, but I quite literally never experienced this issue with DOOM(2016) on this exact rig running via SteamPlay, but a game running a ten year old engine is having this issue in a native build?

And no, the dev team stopped getting a pass the minute they started charging money. I'm all for them charging money, because this was a massive endeavor, after all, Valve itself couldn't be bothered, but the minute you switch over to being paid you become professionals and have to be judged accordingly.


Last edited by jarhead_h on 19 December 2018 at 6:30 pm UTC
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