Quoting: burningserenityI second this. I thought we are the Fringe. What, do you mostly play obscure DOSBox games or something?

Sometimes I do, yes. ;)

More to the point though I don't use Steam, and have not played a single title from Feral Interactive. I remember back when the first few Humble Indie Bundles came out we ALL had a common experience of buying and playing them. Now the market is so diverse that you can be a Linux gamer and not play ANY of the games your peers are playing.

Granted I have always been a retro gamer at heart, so my tastes are always going to lag behind the trend. But even I have a ton of newer Linux releases waiting to be played in my backlog.

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Man, seeing all these titles I have no relationship with makes me realize how completely divorced I have become from the mainstream Linux gaming community these days. :|

If anyone has any doubts how much the Linux gaming scene has grown, you just have to look at people like me sitting on the margins. Back in the day, it was simply not big enough for there to be margins.

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Hit Somebody!

View video on youtube.com

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Here is my full AutoExec.cfg file for the record:
seta r_useSMP "1"
seta sys_videoRam "512"
seta r_multiSamples "2"
seta image_downSize "0"
seta image_downSizeBump "0"
seta image_downSizeSpecular "0"
seta image_filter "GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR"
seta image_ignoreHighQuality "0"
seta image_roundDown "0"
seta image_useCompression "0"
seta image_useNormalCompression "0"
seta image_anisotropy "16"
seta image_lodbias "0"
seta r_renderer "best"
seta sys_lang "english"
seta s_alsa_pcm "hw:0,0"
seta com_allowConsole "1"
seta s_numberOfSpeakers "2"

When SMP works I am getting a near solid 60 FPS in most instances now. :)

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: g000hNot sure if you guys have noticed, but right now FTL is 78% off on Humble Store [External Link] and not only do you get the Steam key, but DRM-free download from Humble and browser-play from Humble and iOS version too.

But the version they sell (as DRM-free) is still from 06/02/2014 :(

Strange, since the GOG.com release got the update.

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I have to admit that the first time I won FTL was by save scumming it, which involved manually moving and backing up the save files using my file manager from outside the game. Then a few attempts later I was able to win the game with no trickery using the same strategies I had used previously. Part of the problem I think is that the game itself actually does a remarkably poor job in teaching you how to defeat the flagship.

I also credit watching Kikoskia's incredibly fortunate Let's Play with helping me get there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2wyBHX_6fA&list=PLTvwKQHVid4bzdxY1nJYqFUrfPGGBwLpa [External Link]

Sometimes you just need to know that the game is in fact winnable. :|

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Quoting: ArdjeI've found that if you want to do real gaming, you also need a real sound card. Not those cheap ass HD single PCM channel things.

Considering that my left speaker has a loose cable and keeps cutting in and out, I think my use of an on-board sound chip is the least of my problems. ;)

Quoting: no_information_hereA minor grammar question: "...such as this one ran by the fan website Quaddicted." The use of "ran" here doesn't look quite right?

It seems you are correct, looking into it. Fixed now.

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Quoting: rea987Actually Prey is the only old id Tech 4 game whose vanilla Linux version doesn't suffer from ALSA related sound problems. In fact, that's a symptom of many pre-PulseAudio titles; as ALSA requires additional tweaking for its own, emulating OSS via OSS Proxy Daemon (osspd), PulseAudio OSS Wrapper (padsp), ALSA wrapper for OSS applications (alsa-oss) provides much better and stable sound performance. Haven't tried with surround systems though.

When I first started gaming heavily on Linux starting back in 2007 on Fedora games using OSS were the bane of my existence, as even with the methods for emulating it under ALSA and then later PulseAudio it almost never worked well for me. Just using ALSA for Quake 4 works fine in my experience as long as you specify the correct PCM device and it is not engaged.

Quoting: rea987Not sure how you managed to enable SM acceleration without libSDL-1.2.id.so.0. Cause, it is a proprietary library that use couple proprietary SDL functions that I mentioned before. I suggest leaving that particular library as it is.

Yes, I had to restore that library for quake4-smp to launch. If nothing else I have edited the article to not mention removing that particular library as both versions of the game launch fine with it in place, but I am still unsure about going back and mentioning SMP unless I can get it to reliably always be on with every launch. All the information you need for it is in the comments anyway.

EDIT: I would also like to provide a link to a blog post I found from someone writing about the same topic:
http://thesynrgy.blogspot.ca/2016/01/quake-iv-linux-pc-gaming-2016-quake-4.html [External Link]

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Well, I am going to walk back what I said earlier - launching the game with quake4-smp does actually provide me with a much smoother frame rate as long as I am playing at 2x AA and have seta r_useSMP "1" included in my Quake4Config.cfg file along with the previously listed options. Nice call rea987. :)

I am seriously tempted to amend the actual article.

EDIT: So the only way I could get SMP to stick after a restart was by creating a separate AutoExec.cfg file instead of just using the main Quake4Config.cfg file. Even then it does not always handle SMP right on first launch, but on the plus side keeping all of my configuration changes in a separate file means I do not need to be as worried about overwriting them from inside the game's graphical configuration menus.

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As always thanks for the feedback everyone. :)

Quoting: rea987Cool article! Keep in mind the game's quake4-smp script executes SM accelerated quake4smp.x86 binary which provides more framerate.

Thanks for letting me know about this, although the difference it seems to make for me is minimal. I am pretty sure my frame rate is being bottlenecked by r600g anyway though, seeing as how scaling the graphics settings down seems to not improve my frame rate either. I dug up some old Phoronix articles for those interested into reading into this further:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=455&num=1 [External Link]
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NTgx [External Link]

I should also mention that I actually played the game with 2x AA enabled as it gave me the best performance, but kept it at 8x AA for the article and when taking screenshots.

Quoting: rea987By the way, best way to solve the sound issues is to let the game use OSS instead of ALSA and install osspd-pulseaudio alsa-oss:i386.

Indeed there are multiple ways to tackle the sound issue, I just went with what worked well for me.

Quoting: rea987Will you cover other Linux supported id Tech 4 titles like Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Prey?

I was actually planning on making this a double feature with Prey to start with, but I ran into so many issues with Quake 4 it just made more sense to have it go out as its own article. So yes, that is definitely something I am open to doing in the future.

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