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Although the Linux version looked promising, the performance was poor. During the trial period of 8 hours, I crashed 4 times, "lost" 3 missions during normal game-play, and needed to hard-reboot my computer after each session. This game performs like a 1980's vintage DOS game (on a powerful computer running Ubuntu 13.10).
The language on the 100 channel was mostly vulgar. I am sorry to say that I cannot support you at this time.
The language on the 100 channel was mostly vulgar. I am sorry to say that I cannot support you at this time.
There is no game, of any kind, that should be able to produce a situation that forces you to hard-boot your computer. What you are describing is a hardware problem, probably an overheat scenario.
I'm surprised your performance was so poor, the basic OpenGL version is pretty light weight, people play on quite aged hardware. Perhaps the CPU of your computer may be "powerful", but the GPU is not up to the same standard? Many "integrated" laptop-style GPUs have very poor performance, as they're designed to prioritize battery life at the cost of anything else. My high-end cellphone, for instance, has a GPU that's about twice as fast as the integrated unit in my Core i5 laptop. The CPU in my laptop is plenty powerful, but the GPU is terrible.
We do have users who exhibit undesirable behaviour on chat. We're a tiny company, and don't have the ability to monitor it at all times, but if serious issues are reported we will look into them. You can also elect to "/ignore" irritating players, and remove their chat from view.
I'm surprised your performance was so poor, the basic OpenGL version is pretty light weight, people play on quite aged hardware. Perhaps the CPU of your computer may be "powerful", but the GPU is not up to the same standard? Many "integrated" laptop-style GPUs have very poor performance, as they're designed to prioritize battery life at the cost of anything else. My high-end cellphone, for instance, has a GPU that's about twice as fast as the integrated unit in my Core i5 laptop. The CPU in my laptop is plenty powerful, but the GPU is terrible.
We do have users who exhibit undesirable behaviour on chat. We're a tiny company, and don't have the ability to monitor it at all times, but if serious issues are reported we will look into them. You can also elect to "/ignore" irritating players, and remove their chat from view.
Sounds like something was set up wrong on your end (possibly you had the game set to use the new experimental graphics system). I've been playing on Linux for years with great performance (initially on Puppy Linux, then on Linux From Scratch for a while, and for the last several years on Arch Linux). It doesn't behave anywhere near as poorly for me as you describe. This is actually one of the least problematic 3d games I've played.
Most likely your graphics card isn't using hardware acceleration. Run glxinfo and see if DRI is enabled. If not, basically all 3D games are going to perform poorly. You may have to fiddle around with your Xorg configuration to fix it if DRI is not enabled (seek help on the Ubuntu forums for that).
Also, start the game and look at Options->Video->Change driver. Make sure it's set to "OpenGL Reference GKGL driver", not "OpenGL 4 GKGL driver". The OpenGL 4 one is new and experimental. It can cause problems. If you need to change it back to the old one, make sure you restart the game afterwards because sometimes it doesn't switch cleanly.
Most likely your graphics card isn't using hardware acceleration. Run glxinfo and see if DRI is enabled. If not, basically all 3D games are going to perform poorly. You may have to fiddle around with your Xorg configuration to fix it if DRI is not enabled (seek help on the Ubuntu forums for that).
Also, start the game and look at Options->Video->Change driver. Make sure it's set to "OpenGL Reference GKGL driver", not "OpenGL 4 GKGL driver". The OpenGL 4 one is new and experimental. It can cause problems. If you need to change it back to the old one, make sure you restart the game afterwards because sometimes it doesn't switch cleanly.
That's a good point, if you're not running DRI, your CPU is trying to render all your 3D content, which is incredibly slow. That's an easy mistake to make, and a relatively common problem in the Linux world. From the standpoint of the game, it can't actually tell if you're hardware accelerated or not (OpenGL was designed to obscure this), so it can't easily warn you either.
True, the old driver worked marginally better. My hardware is a 16- core Cybertron with a Nvidia 550 ti video. There is no overheating problem. I am running the Nvidia 304.88 video driver.
Other 3D games perform very well. And, you are quite right--no other software bombs Ubuntu like this game. Something is wrong with it.
Other 3D games perform very well. And, you are quite right--no other software bombs Ubuntu like this game. Something is wrong with it.
I'm telling you.. it's not the game. Linux is a memory-protected OS. Our software has no means to crash your computer, as an unprivileged application.
In the DOS days that was not true, everything could crash everything.. but Linux is a very different animal, with privilege separation and memory protection, so hardware and OS-level crashes are NEVER the application's fault. They are demonstrations of a fundamental instability at a lower level.
What you are experiencing is some other kind of serious issue, either hardware or driver/kernel related. This kind of thing happens all the time with games that push the hardware in different ways (look at the changelog on any new driver release to see all the specific fixes and workarounds). A driver codebase is incredibly complex (prone to bugs), and the actual GPU hardware is more complex than the CPU these days.
Just because a single application exposes a problem, does not make the given application responsible for the problem. It just takes one bug in one piece of driver code to make a minor issue become a major one that impacts hardware stability.. and not all applications may trigger that particular problem, and the problem may only exist in one driver version.
We also suffer from the fact that we are not the most prominent of games. The old rule used to be "drivers are the most stable for.. John Carmack". Basically, everyone would test Quake or Doom or whatever, and then stop testing. So if Quake didn't expose a particular bug, then it was left for every other game to deal with. These days driver-developers are a bit broader, but they're still more likely to be concerned about the most famous possible titles. Linux drivers, unfortunately, are also less tested than on Windows (at least by the major manufacturers.. open-source driver developers tend to be pretty attentive to issues, but may still lack the development resources to really fix things quickly).
I would suggest trying a different driver version?
We also have a number of optional settings in the game, you could try changing some of them to see if they improve the situation. Turning off FSAA or glow effects or whatever.
It's all kind of stabbing in the dark, but it would be for us as well. Even if your game crashed in a debugger, we would only see it crashing somewhere deep in code that is not ours (driver binary blobs, etc). So it is literally beyond us to fix it. The best we can ever do is report the issue to the company responsible (NVIDIA in this case? Unless it's an open-source driver), and hope they can reproduce and fix it in a later driver revision.
In the DOS days that was not true, everything could crash everything.. but Linux is a very different animal, with privilege separation and memory protection, so hardware and OS-level crashes are NEVER the application's fault. They are demonstrations of a fundamental instability at a lower level.
What you are experiencing is some other kind of serious issue, either hardware or driver/kernel related. This kind of thing happens all the time with games that push the hardware in different ways (look at the changelog on any new driver release to see all the specific fixes and workarounds). A driver codebase is incredibly complex (prone to bugs), and the actual GPU hardware is more complex than the CPU these days.
Just because a single application exposes a problem, does not make the given application responsible for the problem. It just takes one bug in one piece of driver code to make a minor issue become a major one that impacts hardware stability.. and not all applications may trigger that particular problem, and the problem may only exist in one driver version.
We also suffer from the fact that we are not the most prominent of games. The old rule used to be "drivers are the most stable for.. John Carmack". Basically, everyone would test Quake or Doom or whatever, and then stop testing. So if Quake didn't expose a particular bug, then it was left for every other game to deal with. These days driver-developers are a bit broader, but they're still more likely to be concerned about the most famous possible titles. Linux drivers, unfortunately, are also less tested than on Windows (at least by the major manufacturers.. open-source driver developers tend to be pretty attentive to issues, but may still lack the development resources to really fix things quickly).
I would suggest trying a different driver version?
We also have a number of optional settings in the game, you could try changing some of them to see if they improve the situation. Turning off FSAA or glow effects or whatever.
It's all kind of stabbing in the dark, but it would be for us as well. Even if your game crashed in a debugger, we would only see it crashing somewhere deep in code that is not ours (driver binary blobs, etc). So it is literally beyond us to fix it. The best we can ever do is report the issue to the company responsible (NVIDIA in this case? Unless it's an open-source driver), and hope they can reproduce and fix it in a later driver revision.
I played for years on Ubuntu before I switched to Arch Linux.
You can view my fabulous youtube channel to see the kind of video performance I got.
The rig on which most of those were recorded was like a pre-sandybridge(?) i7 with a Nvidia GTX 260. So wayyy older graphics spec than you're running and I was able to run great graphics AND video recording over the top of it which is a huge hit to even a high end system.
That said, Ubuntu really is the worst linux distro. I know its considered cliche in the linux world to have that attitude but if I were you i'd seriously consider switching over to an Arch build or an Arch-based distro (like Manjaro, for instance) if you want to play games.
You can view my fabulous youtube channel to see the kind of video performance I got.
The rig on which most of those were recorded was like a pre-sandybridge(?) i7 with a Nvidia GTX 260. So wayyy older graphics spec than you're running and I was able to run great graphics AND video recording over the top of it which is a huge hit to even a high end system.
That said, Ubuntu really is the worst linux distro. I know its considered cliche in the linux world to have that attitude but if I were you i'd seriously consider switching over to an Arch build or an Arch-based distro (like Manjaro, for instance) if you want to play games.
Sounds like you got some video driver problems for sure...
This game performs like a 1980's vintage DOS game
I ran Vendetta entirely on the CPU (Mesa llvmpipe) on a Core2 Duo T7200 just for kicks once and I still wouldn't describe it like that. It went almost as fast as that box's GMA950!
This game performs like a 1980's vintage DOS game
I ran Vendetta entirely on the CPU (Mesa llvmpipe) on a Core2 Duo T7200 just for kicks once and I still wouldn't describe it like that. It went almost as fast as that box's GMA950!
Solution: Windows
Winblows isn't a solution for anything. Unless you want it interfering with your MBR. In which case, good luck booting any UNIX OS at all while Winblows has a choke on your system.
It's not impossible to dual boot windows with your linux machine, but even i'll admit my last dual boot config consisted of two harddrives and i changed the one i wanted to use at bios. I mean, the windows bootloader is like an insecure partner slapping you every time a pretty member of the opposite sex walks by.
Just update your drivers, if that doesnt work, consider a dual boot with another linux distro. The ubuntu linux driver binaries wont be anywhere near as up to date as the arch linux ones. That's for sure.
Just update your drivers, if that doesnt work, consider a dual boot with another linux distro. The ubuntu linux driver binaries wont be anywhere near as up to date as the arch linux ones. That's for sure.
I use Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (I know it's not the most recent LTS version) but I've encountered no problems along the way, even though I'm Triple-Booting with MacOSX/Win7 and Linux.
I'll admit I have a rather overkill hybrid GPU but it still works fine. Perhaps a bug in 13.10? Dunno.
I'll admit I have a rather overkill hybrid GPU but it still works fine. Perhaps a bug in 13.10? Dunno.
Me too run VO on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, as newer LTS's kernel doesn't support the old laptop GPU through the factory driver. Nevertheless I experience no regular crashes at all. I have never ever had to hard reset my laptop due to the game.
I'm going to seize this opportunity to call you both newbs. Get a real linux distro!
Let's not drift off topic. The moral here is that the game runs very well on Linux, for most people. Having to reboot indicates a deeper issue.
(Also, I've been running Linux since pre-1.0 kernels, and used to have to three-stage compile my own distribution, and Ubuntu is fine. Different layouts, package management and stock kernels have different tradeoffs, but it's not really a BESTEST thing).
(Also, I've been running Linux since pre-1.0 kernels, and used to have to three-stage compile my own distribution, and Ubuntu is fine. Different layouts, package management and stock kernels have different tradeoffs, but it's not really a BESTEST thing).
The game does run very well on Linux, but as a fellow Linux user who does run this game with excellent performance, I doubt you're going to get him to take much action without working with him to identify what the actual problem is rather than just assuming it's video driver related (which it probably is).
Find out what driver he's using, get log files, work together to find the problem. If I come across a game that performs horribly for my version of Linux (Slackware) I make an effort to get it working, but the stability of my system is more important than configuring my system for a specific game. If only a single game exposes a problem, I'm more inclined to forgo the game than to track down some obscure problem that only exists with one piece of software that isn't mission-critical.
Find out what driver he's using, get log files, work together to find the problem. If I come across a game that performs horribly for my version of Linux (Slackware) I make an effort to get it working, but the stability of my system is more important than configuring my system for a specific game. If only a single game exposes a problem, I'm more inclined to forgo the game than to track down some obscure problem that only exists with one piece of software that isn't mission-critical.
The fact that his computer requires rebooting means that we cannot help him. We deal with thousands of these issues, across all platforms (going back to game debut in 2002). More recently, people on mobile are unhappy that their device overheats+reboots and blame the game ("it doesn't happen with Angry Birds!"), but to try debugging that on our end is a black hole of nothingness which yields no information of value and wastes however much time is invested.
I suggested he try a different driver. If he does that, and reports that it works, and tells me that they're NVIDIA's own drivers, I can report the differential to NVIDIA directly and they may do something.
But there's nothing we can do with debugging the game code to meaningfully "fix" his issue.
If he had reported the game crashing, I would have immediately asked for all of the logs, and started on a completely different process. But if the system and OS are fundamentally unstable, very long and hard-won experience has taught us that there's basically nothing we can do.
I understand that he's far more likely to just stop playing the game, than to spend time on the issue. But I don't have an alternative solution, nor can I burn a huge amount of time and energy on something I know will be fundamentally fruitless.
I suggested he try a different driver. If he does that, and reports that it works, and tells me that they're NVIDIA's own drivers, I can report the differential to NVIDIA directly and they may do something.
But there's nothing we can do with debugging the game code to meaningfully "fix" his issue.
If he had reported the game crashing, I would have immediately asked for all of the logs, and started on a completely different process. But if the system and OS are fundamentally unstable, very long and hard-won experience has taught us that there's basically nothing we can do.
I understand that he's far more likely to just stop playing the game, than to spend time on the issue. But I don't have an alternative solution, nor can I burn a huge amount of time and energy on something I know will be fundamentally fruitless.
The way Ubuntu handles the 3rd party drivers is what makes it NOT THE BESTEST!
You're too scientific about it incarnate, don't you know your choice of computing software these days is all about being hip and cool and expressing your personality. Its not about function or anything like that, silly!
You're too scientific about it incarnate, don't you know your choice of computing software these days is all about being hip and cool and expressing your personality. Its not about function or anything like that, silly!
I'm using Kubuntu 14.04 and Vendetta runs like a champ. And I've run Vendetta on probably every version of Ubuntu from 11 at some point. I think the OP is a one-off situation and it seems like a hardware problem. Admitting the possibility of a bad graphics card or CPU is inherently difficult, particularly when they work okay when not pushed to perform.
The first computer I played VO on was debian linux with a K6-2 350 with an ATI Radeon 7000 (no hardware T&L) in 2003
It ran like crap mind you but playable then I got a Tbird and a radeon 9200 and everything was golden. Odds are that shitty old setup would probably still play the game.
Psst, not currently still using a Tbird or radeon 9200
It ran like crap mind you but playable then I got a Tbird and a radeon 9200 and everything was golden. Odds are that shitty old setup would probably still play the game.
Psst, not currently still using a Tbird or radeon 9200