Intro and Questions

[gopher292]

A few weeks ago I downloaded Vegastrike (Ubuntu version--5.0 binaries, 4.3 data) and would like to say thank you to all the contributors--I've never played a Linux game with better graphics.

Notes/critic on usability/learning curve from a new player (I did read through the key commands and background information on the wiki before playing the first time):
- On the starting Oceanic planet's interface, I originally missed most of the locations since the click-able hot-spots are invisible until you mouse-over them. I discovered that you can right-click to cycle after a few minutes. (But if the hot-spots were always visible they would just clutter up the screen and block the gorgeous base renders after you get familiar with the locations. I'm not sure that this should be "fixed".)
- On the mission info screen after launching, the help text at the top left scrolled half the lines off before I noticed it and starting reading.
- Since SPEC cuts out at about 5228km from Atlantis, and you can't land until you get down to about 700km and the mission text says to use 0 instead of Alt+0, I gave up landing the first few times thinking something was bugged. (Maybe this could be cut down a little? It's kind of boring.)
- I wish I could figure out how to get to the Aera systems without wasting a bunch of hops. Vstrade's map helps some with that, though. (I know there would probably be a lot of resistance to this, but maybe the Universe is a bit too large?)

One more thing that would help graphic quality a lot:
- Anti-aliasing. VS would be pretty much unplayable with my ancient graphics card with AA switched on, but I'm sure lots of people would benefit. It would make VS's graphics just as good as commercial games and do real justice to the great models and textures.

The questions:
- For cargo images, does it matter whether they're 3D graphics or edited photos and is this page up-to-date?
- Hmm, forgot the rest .

Thank you!

=B

[loki1950]

Welcome gopher get the 0.5 data set the graphics are even better and a bigger download which is why it is not in the Ubuntu/Debian repos i gather it was too big,fedora has RPMs binaries,data and music you could use Alien to install them or just get the rar archive from our download page.

Yeah finding the hot spots is not obvious right clicking is mentioned in the manual pdf in the documentation folder
The mission text was changed in the current data set but was accurate for 0.4.3 so no need for action there and you can scroll back the text with the "page up" key.
On docking just use the "d" key it doubles as request docking and docking as for the text as a above the current data set has an auto-pilot that drops out closer to planets so landing is not so tedious.

Yeah the universe is huge it has to accommodate a three way war and you do want a few place that are not involved in that conflict for the peaceful players

AA can be turned on in the config file but as you mentioned it will bog down older GPU's so it is not on by default
Now for your question from that pages history pyramid did the last edit in july so i think it is not up t- date so check this sub-forum for the latest submissions http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... um.php?f=4
2d or 3d does not matter really just make sure that the source images are GPL compatible no trade marks etc
Have fun

Enjoy the Choice

[gopher292]

Thanks for the reply

I've been using Alt+0 for docking request, will just use d in the future. I don't see any AA settings in the config for the Ubuntu version, but I'm downloading 0.5 and will try again once I get that installed.
=B

[loki1950]

And if you have any problems just post just checked the config file and only fonts are AA ed so you may need to set it for the desktop with nVidia's Display Settings and IIRC there may be some artefacts that so up my GPU ain't hot enough to see for myself

Enjoy the Choice

[pyramid]

Looks like I did the last commit in July. The page *is* up-to-date, so please go ahead with submissions for the open items. Though there might be a few new images in the thread loki mentioned that I still didn't review.

[gopher292]

Thanks guys, 0.5 is even better! Especially the planet textures.

Too bad about the AA But at least the big un-antialiased bars in the cockpit are gone.

It does take longer to load, but that's to be expected. It wouldn't be bad if I wasn't running Linux off of an external usb hdd (gparted/ntfsresize refuses to re-partition my internal one no matter what I try).

When I'm not really close to planets, sometimes I get these artifacts:

I think it's probably my graphics card drivers, though.

About half the time VS either hangs, or hangs then exits, when I try to go through a jump. (And occasionally when I land at planets other than Atlantis). I'm not sure about this one. I tried reducing settings--maybe because I'm swapping to an external drive?

Hmm, well, thanks again.
=B

[loki1950]

About half the time VS either hangs, or hangs then exits, when I try to go through a jump.

The hang is normal as it loads the next system but crashes are not try running in a terminal that should give you a better idea of what exactly is happening.BTW you can't resize a mounted file system so do it from a liveCD there is a Gparted iso available or the Ubuntu install disc in live mode and there is always Knoppix.Now for those artefacts your right to suspect the driver what's your video card and which version of the driver are you using there was a problem with one of the earlier nVidia versions not processing dtx5 compressed correctly.But is could be something else

Enjoy the Choice

[gopher292]

I've attached a log that I got using "vegastrike > vs.log" in xterm.
I loaded up with Seafood at Atlantis, ran over to the jump to Stirling (which I've gone to before), jumped (which took about 50 seconds), and flew out to a Commerce Center. Everything went well, I saved, sold the fish and filled up on construction materials. I flew back through to Cephid 17 (which took less than 10 seconds to jump ) and was flying towards Serenity without SPEC or Autopilot. (I was trying to get lined up before engaging autopilot so that I wouldn't "drift" when SPEC cut out). I was probably 5-10km from the jump point when VS froze for 2-3 seconds, then went black and my window manager showed back up. The resolution wasn't reset to normal and the mouse didn't work, so I used Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to restart X11.

My internal drive is a NTFS partition with XP on it. ntfsresize says there's a bad sector and won't shrink it, Windows scandisk either finds it and says it's fixing it (but doesn't) or says the disk is fine. The drive manufacturer's Windows tool says there's an error and I need to use the bootable version of their tool to fix it, but the bootable version says I don't have a disk. I suppose I could back up the XP partition, low-level format, re-partition, re-install Windows, the Windows software, and the data, and then set up Linux. I'd consider nuking XP completely, but my sister uses it.

Video Card: ATI Radeon Xpress 200M (lspci appends that it's "5595 (PCIE)", but it might be integrated with the motherboard)
In xorg.conf, all I have is "Configured Video Device", I would guess that it's using default ATI drivers of some sort. Searching in the package manager, there's a xorg-driver-fglrx that says it works with Radeon Xpress 200 series, but when I try to apply it with Synaptic, it says I have to remove a bunch of xserver-xorg-* drivers, as well as xorg itself.

System:
2Ghz (i think) AMD Turion 64 Mobile, 1GB RAM, ~1GB swap, Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 AMD64 (Ubuntu-minimal 8.04 with xorg, openbox, xterm, and other programs installed from repos, then upgraded piecemeal to 8.10 over a few days before/during the official release)

=B

[loki1950]

Well stdout looks ok except for the python warnings but it's stderr that will tell me about the video and installing -fglrx does change some of the Xorg libs from the Mesa ones to ATI's and since it's a laptop it most likely is using shared RAM for VRAM which can slow the game a bit if there is not enough allocated Here's what i use to get both stdout and err

Code: Select all

 ./vegastrike 1>vsoutput 2>vserr

That error on your hard drive may also be some DRM as they are well known for non-standard file types and creative manipulations so you may indeed be better off with that usb drive.I haven't been able to access my XP drive because of a bad boot sector that got that way during a BIOS fault booting into a new kernel of my fresh fedora install about six months ago now so kinda did a cold turkey withdrawal from windows

Enjoy the Choice

[gopher292]

Here are the stdout and stderr from VS. (Locked up a little while after leaving the Commerce Center).

I've also attached the end of what I saw in xterm one time when I run it (but wasn't saving the output to file), that said something about reporting the error. (vs3-short.log) This happened while I was browsing the Cargo Computer on the Commerce Center.

Thanks!
=B

[loki1950]

Code: Select all

Vertex Program Error: Failed to compile lite
Vertex Program Error: Failed to compile default
Vertex Program Error: Failed to compile default
Vertex Program Error: Failed to compile lite

Looks like it does like the current shaders so try without shader support should get rid of most of the artefacts still seeing those Python errors which i have no idea about.

Enjoy the Choice

[gopher292]

I figured out the problem with lockups and hanging--I didn't have enough RAM/swap.

I have 1GB of RAM (According to specs--free reports 895megs) and HAD 970-some MiB of swap. After fiddling with the partitions in gparted in have 1.55GiB. (My old live cd locked up when it was scaling the swap, so I had to learn how to reinstall grub and edit /etc/fstab. (But that's okay with me, since I learned something in the process.)) Vegastrike hasn't locked up since.

For future troubleshooters:
You need at least 2 to 2.5GB total memory between RAM and swap to run VS5.0. (At least with a 64bit Ubuntu system)

Maybe the "Computer" settings in vssetup should be revised since I had it set to "256MB" and it's using ~2GB according to free.

Thanks again for your help Loki.
=B

[loki1950]

Glad you got it sorted and learned something as well

Enjoy the Choice