Linux Client Bug?

[nelliott]

I\'ve noticed the longer I play, the choppier the graphics get.  It doesn\'t seem to be linked to a particular area of the world, and I\'ve tried adjusting both the distance and the game resolution.  The FPS counter still shows high FPS (100+ in some cases), but the game gets progressively choppier until it is nearly unplayable.  At this point I can quit, and re-login and the game is smooth again.

Memory leak??  I haven\'t had this problem running the Windows client on the same PC\'s.

Both machines have modest NVidia cards (GeForce3 and GeForce4MX)  both have over 512M RAM.  One has the 6629 NVidia drivers and the other has 6111 drivers.

Hey, on the plus side:  The linux client doesn\'t suffer from the black-textures-at-night-bug, and I can also get to Oja in Linux.  

Keep up the good work guys, this game has tons of potential and we appriciate your hard work!  

[Karosh_Steinkatz]

Hmmm I haven\'t noticed that before. I can play for hours and I don\'t get slowdowns (except for the crowd of powerduelers at the plaza again). But on the other hand, I have 1GB ram  :rolleyes:

[nelliott]

Interesting - One of my systems has 1G, the other has 640M - both have moderately slow processors (1.4GHz and 900MHz)...both run fine for the first 15 minutes or so.

What processor and video card do you have with that setup?

[Karosh_Steinkatz]

Athlon XP 2800+, 2x512MB DDR Ram, 128MB GeForce FX 5900XT

[nelliott]

I wonder if it could be related to video memory, rather than system RAM?  Hmm...

Well, I\'m sure the dev\'s have bigger fish to fry right now anyways.

[Tharizdun]

I have only heard of one other person talking about a progressive slowing down of PS and that was under windows. What kernel are you running, do you have any funky scheduler or swapping code or patches installed? What filesystem are you running on? How much free physical ram/swapspace are you launching the game with?

Getting to and from Oja is nice, I agree. Lots of good business opportunities in being able to access weaponry and other items that the majority of other players are unable to reach :]

[nelliott]

The system I am on right now is:

900MHz AMD
GeForce4 MX440 (128M) w/ NVidia 6111 drivers  (The 6629 drivers don\'t work with many MX series cards...)
Mandrake 10.1 (2.6.8.1-24mdk kernel)
640M RAM  
EXT3 Filesystem
I don\'t have any custom kernel patches, and I\'ve disabled pretty much all non-critical services.

From \'top\' right after booting into X:

Mem:    645988k total,   124244k used,   521744k free,     9048k buffers
Swap:  1020116k total,        0k used,  1020116k free,    53324k cached

Window Manager is XFCE 4.2
With the desktop @ 1280x960 glxgears shows a pathetic 220FPS, but if I set the desktop to 1024x768 I get a slightly less embarassing 949FPS.  I\'ve wondered if this has anything at all to do with PS, and have tried running the game both in full-screen and windowed mode with no changes.  I\'m wondering as I type this if I\'ve tried running it with the desktop @ 1024x768, I\'ll make sure and try that this evening.

I\'m running PS @ 800x600, 32bit, Vertex Buffer Object OFF

---Update---
After spending a little time paying attention to testing rather than playing the game, it looks to me like the issue may be linked to the \"distance\" function in the camera section??  Two observations:

    1) The game seems to be ignoring the manual setting and picking it\'s own settings.  I had it set to 30, but I could see everything in the plaza, the towers around it, the temple, everything.
    2) The choppy bug seems to surface if I adjust the distance setting while playing.  Adjusting the setting while playing DOES cause changes in the rendering.

I\'ll pay closer attention to this in the next day or two and post results.

[Tharizdun]

Well your video card and RAM are more than sufficient. The CPU speed is below the \'minimum reqs\' for planeshift, but I think there is a lot of leeway in these criteria and your cpu speed should not be a problem, assuming you arent doing a lot of sql crunching or compiling or encryption or whatever in the background.

You might try using the updated nvidia drivers, the lowish glxgears bench suggests that not everything is as good as it could be with respect to OpenGL performance. I\'m using 6629 plus a couple of other patches on a GeForce4 MX 440 and it works very well. The glxgears performance I gained from upgrading to the 6629 drivers was from 1800 fps to about 1930 fps, so there is a nice jump if all else is equal.

But static game performance is a seperate issue to having a performance that degrades over time..  I can only recommend that you use the latest gcc / glibc / kernel that Mandrake have available if you arent already. Then try installing from source via CVS or via using kronon\'s Linux Install script, which handles the CVS install and compiling for you.

-Edit, corrected who wrote the install script, thanks Karosh_Steinkatz

[Elster]

I have the same problem.

my  Computer:

CPU:AMD XP2800+
Ram: 1 GB
Grafikcard: Nvidia FX5900

Update: Sorry, I have Linux Debian SID installed

[Karosh_Steinkatz]

Originally posted by Tharizdun
But static game performance is a seperate issue to having a performance that degrades over time..  I can only recommend that you use the latest gcc / glibc / kernel that Mandrake have available if you arent already. Then try installing from source via CVS or via using Karosh_Steinkatz\'s Linux Install script, which handles the CVS install and compiling for you.

Ehh, I think you are confusing something here, the CVS install script was made by Kronon, the binary installer is from me
And here is my detailed system config:

Hardware:
CPU: AMD Athlon 2800+(@2200+)
RAM: 2x512MB Infineon DDR266
Mainboard: Epox 8RDA3+
HDD: 160GB Western Digital WDC1600J IDE (8MB Cache)
GFX: nVidia GeForce FX 5900XT, 128MB
SND: SB Audigy Player

Software:
OS: Arch Linux 0.7
KERNEL: 2.6.9 vanilla
FS: ReiserFS
X: Xorg 6.8.2
DM: KDE 3.3.2
GFXDRV: nvidia 1.0-6629

[Tharizdun]

Thanks for the correction Karosh_Steinkatz, there are so many Linux installers floating round these days, I was confused

I would have suspected an older kernel / glibc combintion to be behind a memory leak issue, but Debian Sid should have the latest & greatest of all revisions, and Mandrake 10.1 is much the same..

Maybe try building from source if you are currently using the binary installer and vice versa, see what works best for your system.

[nelliott]

I tried building CS from CVS using the slackware guide as reference.  Everything seemed to build fine, but it didn\'t build the updater binary...?  So, I downloaded the updater from mortalsaviour.de, it downloaded some updated binaries but got a crystalspace.kernel.vfs error when it tried to download the art files.

I searched the forum archives and saw some mentions of this error in conjuction with what looked like complete build failures, but nothing that looked like my problem.  I was a bit rushed when I did all this, so I\'ll step through it again when I have a little more time.

Any ideas what I might have done wrong?  I feel sure I had the environment variables (CRYSTAL, CEL, CSCONFPATH) all set properly.

Thanks

[Tharizdun]

I dont know how well mixing compiled code with binaries from some other system will work, but its worth a shot.

Step through the cvs process again ( skipping the login/checkout step since you already have the latest code ), paying particular attention to the output of the configure scripts. Verify that the script can happily locate all the components it needs - cal3d, cs, cel, curl and openal  (if you are using this sound library). Then after running jam make sure there have been no failed attempts to update something. If any of the objects fail this is likely due to a bug in the CVS tree or the lack of a dependant library, and this will disrupt later stages of the build process that require these libraries to exist.

If everything else except the updater has been built, its likely a curl problem. Make sure you have the curl development stuff ( header files and libraries especially, IIRC Mandrake calls this libcurl-devel or curl-devel or something like that ) installed as appropriate for your distribution and try rebuilding this part.

-Edit, I found this, its the curl devel package for Mandrake 10.1:
http://rpmfind.net//linux/RPM/mandrake/10.1/i586/media/main/libcurl3-devel-7.12.1-1mdk.i586.html

[nelliott]

OK... I was wondering this after my last post:

If I\'m going to \"roll-my-own\" from CVS, then I probably need to re-checkout and re-build when updates come out, and just use the updater for art, correct?

Thanks for the tip on curl - I\'ll retrace my steps.

[Tharizdun]

Yep, there is no need to checkout the entire cvs tree again. Just go to the top level directory for the part you are updating ( CS, cal3d, cel or  planeshift ) and \'cvs -z9 update -dP\', which pulls down any differences between the remote server and your local system. Then configure and run jam/make as normal for this part.

If you update any part that others need ( like CS needs cal3d, cel needs CS, planeshift needs them all ) then you should recompile the \'downstream\' dependancies too so that they arent still pointing at dynamic libraries that may have changed or been deprecated, just follow the order in the build guide and there will be no problems.

The planeshift updater build current as of today will produce an error incidentally because its of a newer version than that of the server -
 
Your updater version is newer than the server\'s..

There are workarounds listed elsewhere on the forums that involves editing one of the source headers and changing the version that the updater reports, so that they match. If you havent gotten the art yet you will either need to do this, or wait until the planeshift update server catches up in versions before running the updater.