May have found where all the players are....

[novacadian]

Been away for a while yet not new to planeshift. Even had the server compiled and running at one point. After a recent Ubuntu install thought it would be nice to check how things are going with PS. Grabbed a copy of PlaneShift-*.run and installed. That went smoothly. Loading the game, however, it was acting cantankerous so ran a repair. Low and behold it started downloading dll's and win exe stuff. Ran the setup again and got into the game yet had a flurry of "neveau <mem address>" in the term window and too lagged out to do anything.

No doubt some step was done wrong on my part... however if that was the case then it is very likely that others, less familiar with PS's workings, would have even more woes.

There had been great progress with in game development when last on. Perhaps a similar effort could be made with getting new players into the game in the first place.

Even with my history and interest in PS, after a number of attempts the effort ended up in the trash can and my gaming time back to Wesnoth.

- Nova

[LigH]

Well, "nouveau" is the OpenSource Nvidia driver for Xorg. It should already be quite capable and fast in modern versions, but still you might prefer trying the proprietary Nvidia drivers (nvidia-3xx), which have to be activated manually in "Additional drivers".

[iridia]

does nouveau work with MESA?

[novacadian]

Well, "nouveau" is the OpenSource Nvidia driver for Xorg. It should already be quite capable and fast in modern versions, but still you might prefer trying the proprietary Nvidia drivers (nvidia-3xx), which have to be activated manually in "Additional drivers".

Yeah a system specific compile seems the way to go yet it does not seem to warrant the effort for just a check in visit. To a new player wanting to simply check out the game it is even less likely. My point is only that if that hurdle could be passed there would, likely, be no shortage of players. Until it is resolved there will be the same hard core player base wondering why new players are such a rare commodity.

Something was seriously messed up, though, to have win ddl's coming at me during a repair on an Ubuntu system.

- Nova

[LigH]

Downloading Win64 binaries is a misconfiguration of the update server, known for years, never fixed ...

[bilbous]

Mostly using the binary driver comes down to selecting a check box asking if you want to use them. The days of manually recompiling your kernel and compiling the driver are pretty much gone. It is all done for you in the package manager.

On the other hand if you are just an OSS purist you probably shouldn't be using Ubuntu in the first place. You should be using some esoteric distro that I can't think of right now that comes with a seal of OSS purity as touted that prominent OSS purist whose name I also can't remember right now.

[Roled]

Hi "Nova" good to see you again, Lady!
the problems I've had over these past 8 years + have always ended up being the appropriate drivers. And being non-techie, it's often been months to even a year in solving, despite the generous efforts of many here in the forums and in game and in pms.  The most recent solution for me involved buying a new laptop with non-Intel drivers. An expensive fix....

  I second your suggestion that a high priority is to make the game easier to download and to join for people of all technical skill levels and interest.   

RR

[novacadian]

On the other hand if you are just an OSS purist you probably shouldn't be using Ubuntu in the first place. You should be using some esoteric distro that I can't think of right now that comes with a seal of OSS purity as touted that prominent OSS purist whose name I also can't remember right now.

bilbous : Yeah since the 90's my flavour of choice has been Red Hat; mostly due to the fact of working on servers running that distro. The last year has found me exploring crypto currencies and compiling the Devcoin wallet on RH was not working so installed Ubuntu on my home system to get around that. Must say though Ubuntu has gone the distance to make installs a very user friendly experience. If you can burn the iso onto a DVD you pretty much have the install under control.

Roled: Hello to my fave elf! Your technical woes are a PS legend.