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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Quoting: tuubiSpeaking of long games, Linux as a gaming platform hasn't had time to fail or succeed yet ... thanks to a whole bunch of companies and organisations working towards this rather recent goal of making Linux an awesome gaming platform.

Actually Linux has already had a long and turbulent history in the gaming market, even in the AAA market. Loki Software was at least as successful as Aspyr Media and Feral Interactive at porting big AAA titles to Linux, and arguably did even more than Valve to make Linux a viable gaming platform by shepherding the development of SDL and the like. When they and the hype around them died, it did take commercial Linux gaming a long time to recover. So yes, it has in fact "failed" once already, in one sense at least.

Quoting: tuubiTo me it's already a success though. No hoping or dreaming necessary. I can buy and play awesome games on my Linux system, and if that isn't success, I don't know the meaning of the word anymore.

On this though we can fully agree. ^_^

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Quoting: Lakorta

Quoting: SalvatosI guess I'll abstain from voting since I've only played maybe 2 games that came out in 2017...

You could still vote on things like "Favourite FOSS project", "Favourite fully open source game" or "Most promising Early Access game".

Yeah, being in the same boat of not having played any games released in the past year, I am going to be voting for my "Favourite FOSS Project", "Favourite fully open source game", and "Favourite Linux game porter of 2017".

I will be saving my hard voting for the Ganymede & Titan Pearl Poll...
http://www.ganymede.tv/pearlpoll/ [External Link]

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Quoting: GuestWhat "hexen-a-like" game? You have my interest...

I think he is referring to Apocryph:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/gory-fps-apocryph-now-has-a-linux-test-build-to-try-pretty-damn-good.10925

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Another game with DRM free builds absent on Humble Store...

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Quoting: KetilI don't know how the game balance is, but I much rather meet a wolf than a moose when I am out in nature in real life.

I've encountered several moose while out on the farm or when going to bee sites, and as long as you are sensible and do not get too close and show them all due respect, you should be okay. Now, if you are unlucky enough to hit one them with a car it is another matter... my aunt had to ditch and roll her vehicle to avoid a collision a few months back. Then you have a problem.

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Sorry, I could not resist.

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