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Battletech unplayable LC_ALL doesn't help
Koopacabras Nov 28, 2019
Battletech is unplayable, loading screens take ages and when the game does load performance is really bad. Anyone knows what the problem with this game is??
joppek Nov 29, 2019
Hey! Strange. I just started playing Battletech myself here with the 1.8 release. Haven't experienced those problems myself.

I'm running Arch with NVIDIA driver version 440.31. Had some issues (in all games) with version 440.36, so I had to downgrade for the time being. Perhaps that's your problem?
Koopacabras Nov 29, 2019
Quoting: joppekHey! Strange. I just started playing Battletech myself here with the 1.8 release. Haven't experienced those problems myself.

I'm running Arch with NVIDIA driver version 440.31. Had some issues (in all games) with version 440.36, so I had to downgrade for the time being. Perhaps that's your problem?

how much memory do you have?? I'm on 8gb cause I'm waiting for a replacement of a 8gb module that died. I filled a bug report on the paradox forums and several users told me to try with more memory.

Last edited by Koopacabras on 29 November 2019 at 6:45 pm UTC
Quill Nov 29, 2019
I tried to play it some time ago on toaster with Ubuntu 18.10. On the minimum settings the game was running mostly smoothly, but loadscreens took like forever. And than game starts randomly crash, after the few missions it get unplayable, no response from devs. My PC did not meet all requirements (but I hoped it will be OK).

Try to set the game to lower/the lowest settings. Loading time could get a bit better. (but I presume you did so and that is why you call for help, do not know what LC_ALL means, I hope that is not that what I just recommended to You)

Or read a book, play a musical instrument, do something different but amusing in the meanwhile (I am sorry, I am just trolling you... that was as I played all games like thirty years ago and I am mostly happy that times are gone :))

I hope you will be soon able to play it without annoying waiting, it looks like interesting game...
Schattenspiegel Nov 29, 2019
I assume you have the game installed on an SSD, because if you are using a HDD this game can indeed take ages to load (not that ssd makes loading short, but acceptable at least). Cant't say that what the last patch did to the performance, but it was playable before with with 6gb ram and an occasional restart to get rid of the lag in the menues on my old potato. Guess it depends what one considers acceptable performance.
Koopacabras Nov 29, 2019
Quoting: Quilldo not know what LC_ALL means

LC_ALL is setting the language variable because Unity game engine has a bug.

Quoting: SchattenspiegelCant't say that what the last patch did to the performance, but it was playable before with with 6gb ram and an occasional restart to get rid of the lag in the menues on my old potato. Guess it depends what one considers acceptable performance.

I can go and walk the dog to the park and back and the game is still loading.
joppek Nov 29, 2019
Quoting: The_Aquabat
Quoting: joppekHey! Strange. I just started playing Battletech myself here with the 1.8 release. Haven't experienced those problems myself.

I'm running Arch with NVIDIA driver version 440.31. Had some issues (in all games) with version 440.36, so I had to downgrade for the time being. Perhaps that's your problem?

how much memory do you have?? I'm on 8gb cause I'm waiting for a replacement of a 8gb module that died. I filled a bug report on the paradox forums and several users told me to try with more memory.

I'm on 16 GB RAM as well as an SSD, so that might explain why it works well for me. Loading a mission is like 15 secs at most.

From what I heard, Battletech was not great with memory before. It seemed to have memory leaks and would slow down the longer you played. I have to say though, that 1.8 seems pretty good so far.
Koopacabras Nov 29, 2019
yeah it seems that 8gb of RAM is not enough, I'm playing at medium settings. I set the swappiness to zero and now I'm getting out of memory messages on the dmesg log.
 oom-kill:constraint=CONSTRAINT_NONE,nodemask=(null),cpuset=/,mems_allowed=0,global_oom,task_memcg=/,task=steamwebhelper,pid=7011,uid=1001
[161986.109616] Out of memory: Killed process 7011 (steamwebhelper) total-vm:912428kB, anon-rss:5560kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:251388kB, UID:1001 pgtables:1695744kB oom_score_adj:300
[161986.112596] oom_reaper: reaped process 7011 (steamwebhelper), now anon-rss:0kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:252072kB


that explains, the game was swapping memory like crazy, once I turned off swapping it ran out of memory, my swapping partition is on a SSD but even then swapping can be really slow.


so this is a game where minimum requirements are lying, 8gb of RAM is not enough, at least for playing at 1080p at medium settings, maybe at lower resolutions you can get away with it.

I'm gonna try running on a lightweight desktop like IceWM or Fluxbox, KDE takes 2gb of RAM doing nothing.

Last edited by Koopacabras on 29 November 2019 at 10:45 pm UTC
Koopacabras Nov 29, 2019
hmm yes the problem is my Plasma/KDE desktop . It's just using too much memory! with fluxbox it works as it should, it still takes like 2 minutes to load but it's bearable .

weird because more demanding games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider work ok for me with this amount of memory on KDE.

Anyways it's a well known fact that unlike Windows, Linux can behave really odd if it runs out of memory.


thanks everyone for the help!

Last edited by Koopacabras on 30 November 2019 at 12:30 am UTC
Koopacabras Nov 30, 2019
just posting this update so maybe this could help someone in the future...


seems I got lucky and the game ran OK but just for a few hours... now I don't know why (maybe bigger map? more units?) it's requesting more RAM, so I'm getting out of memory messages again, this time I'm running the fluxbox WM, so practically only steam and Battletech are running.

oom-kill:constraint=CONSTRAINT_NONE,nodemask=(null),cpuset=/,mems_allowed=0,global_oom,task_memcg=/,task=BattleTech,pid=13537,uid=1001
[179402.323031] Out of memory: Killed process 13537 (BattleTech) total-vm:12802788kB, anon-rss:5614148kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:3172kB, UID:1001 pgtables:14266368kB oom_score_adj:0
[179402.477067] oom_reaper: reaped process 13537 (BattleTech), now anon-rss:0kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:3172kB


so I was right, Harebrained Schemes is lying when they say that the game requires 8gb RAM, this game leaks memory, makes me remember the case of Batman Arkham Knight, if you had plenty of memory then it would run OK, but if you were memory limited then it's was a nightmare, same here. That's why a lot of ppl are saying that for them it runs fine.

I'm not touching this game till I get my 8gb replacement from RMA.
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