PA on Linux kinda sucks

So, I bought this on Steam and tried to play it. The screen doesn't draw unless you move the cursor of the window and back into it except sometimes it will flicker. It almost seems like its drawing to the wrong buffers and/or not flipping them during double buffered. When I can finally get into a game, clicking on the right toolbar causes the entire GUI to stop working, but the game still functions and I can select units and move the camera.

So, I installed it on OSX and played my first real game. It was laggy, slow, and the AI is obsessed with planes, but the laggy and slowness is probably because my MBP only has an Intel 4000 GPU.

A few units or buildings or features I expected to be there weren't: no repair/build assist turret, no advanced vehicle AA, no AA for the commander, no repeated orders (such as patrols).

See this forums for discussion of linux play: viewforum.php?f=73

about missing units/stupid ai:
The game is still incomplete. It's alpha after all. If you want a complete game come back in December.

Says I'm not authorized to see that thread.

Also, I'm aware its alpha, but I'm hoping the game errs towards less micromanagement and more actual gameplay. TA (for those that remember it) had a pretty decent balance. Also, I'd like to see being able to upgrade buildings in place without having to manually remove them (T1 defenses -> T2, T1 mining -> T2), and also possibly T3 and T4 units.

Edit: Logging out and logging back in fixed the forum issue

The game is inspired by TA gameplay but it won't be the same game. You might be disappointed with the final release if you continue thinking like you do now

What Linux distribution you using? Are you sure you have latest drivers from git?
Actually Linux performance should be better than on OSX:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... ksgl&num=1

Also I'm running PA with R600g driver and I quite happy about that. Game actually pretty stable, probably even more stable than with Catalyst on Windows. Performance is bad and I only have something like 60-70% of of Windows perf.

There is also some icons bug, and few little graphical problems, but I have no crashes at all and there is no texture corruption which I have on proprietary driver (on both Linux and Windows).

PS: You also need to consider that Intel HD it's very low-end iGPU. I's performance only comparable with 3-4+ years old middle-end AMD/Nvidia videocards. Actually HD 4000 it's minimal supported card for release, but currently you need decent hardware to play.

in any semblence of logic, linux version should run much better than windows on same hardware, but wait for final release for such results.

I'm using fglrx, not radeon, since I'm on radeonsi (a 7970) and that isn't sufficiently finished to use yet. I wrote the guide here: http://adterrasperaspera.com/blog/2013/ ... -on-debian (for anyone else that wants to run the entire stack from git)

I'm aware Intel 4000 is a low end GPU, but even with the quality settings set to lowest, it has poor performance. I'm aware OpenGL performance under OSX is bad no matter what hardware you own, and every version of OSX they improve it but its still slower than Windows and Linux on the same hardware usually.

As long as it doesn't turn into the disaster that was Supcom2, I'll probably be happy.

If your using a radeon card then the screen not updating can be fixed by switching away from an openGL compositer or disabling tear free in your driver options. I would recommend trying a different compositer as it seems to help on Nvidia cards as well and disabling tear free often causes cursor flickering. While this is not an ideal solution it does make the game playable.

Further discussion can be found here: http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=73&t=48482&start=20

PM a dev if you don't have access

Hope this helps.
Tyler Seacrest

TA has about the same amount of micro PA had. The AI is soooo broken in this update, it gets free resources and enough factories to overrun you with Bombers, it is much better to play against h00mans.

I hope the micro will be reduced a little as well. Currently macro will still beat micro though; if you expand to consume the planet and only make broad-stroke movements with your tanks, you will have a lot more resources and army power than the player that micros his Levelers.

Admittedly the micro happy player will put you under a LOT of pressure, and will beat you if the two of you spawn close together, and you will tank more casualties than him, but in the end you will usually win.

I'M LOOKING AT YOOOU, NEPTUNIO.

I use neither a compositor nor tearfree.

On Linux we have to deal with bad AMD graphics drivers, but there is open source driver which work fairly well.
And I can say that for me planet generator working faster on Linux than on Windows, no idea why.

Then you need to rename this topic to "AMD drivers on Linux kinda sucks" :mrgreen:
Because It's not fall of Uber that AMD got bad proprietary drivers. Unlucky you, radeonsi was really slow when I tested it last time.

I think we need get together and report problem that occur to on AMD forums.

Yes, Intel 4000 got performance of 4 years old middle-end discrete card.

We also have notes out to AMD and Nvidia to try and make sure PA is specifically white listed in their drivers. This should help guarantee optimal compatibility with their drivers and our game. It's not clear if that means it will hit all three platforms (win mac and linux) but i know they tend to be pretty diligent on Windows compat. Because most mac updates (at least on laptops) are done through Apple, less clear there how often they get updated, and no idea at all regarding Linux, but as it seems to be being targeted a strong Windows alternative for gaming, hopefully they're keeping a close eye on it.

Out of curiosity does this mean stuff like "Up 10% in Planetary Annihilation" will appear in the Nvidia driver patch notes?

I my experience Nvidia have some long-term bugs/problems which they don't fix for long time, but others bugs fixed fairly fast because they Nvidia got shared codebase (this information was shared by Nvidia engineers) for all platforms. So if you report some bug for Windows it's also will be fixed for Linux. Probably for same reason of shared codebase they have long-term Linux bugs which not fixed because they break Windows driver or just require lot of platform-specific work.

Situation with AMD are different. I don't know where their Windows driver developed, but Linux Catalyst got many platform specific code and I know it's in the main developed/suppored by Luxoft subdivision in Kyiv Ukraine. And I actually know few guys who work on it.

Anyway Linux users should report their problem on official forums:
http://devgurus.amd.com/community/steam-linux
https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/board/98/
It's give additional chances for bugs to get fixed.

The planet generator works well on OSX too, oddly enough. The 100 radius planet takes a while to load, but it does load

Most people are still using fglrx either because they need OpenCL (mesa's OpenCL library isn't even close to complete yet) or their distro of choice refuses to ship up to date versions of everything (usable radeonsi support should be done by Linux 3.12 and Mesa 10.1, and OpenCL support probably wont be done until Mesa 11).

As for Intel 4000, I ran Portal 2 in OSX on it at full 2560x1600 with graphics, models, and shaders at the highest quality setting, trilinear texture filtering, and no AA, and I got 30-45 FPS, which is actually a lot more than I was expecting. Intel used to be a LOT worse.

From my experience most people doesn't even know what OpenCL is, and even most of Linux users never use OpenCL.
But I understand you, open source drivers lack of functionality and performance.

To be fair I just was too lazy and want to play with PA more, then do proper bugreport to AMD. Actually game worked for me with Catalyst 13.1 with many texture corruptions, any never version of drivers just have VSync problems from black screen to some lags. I tried tons of different solutions with no success.

Every time I met proprietary drivers bug I feel like I'm using Windows because there is no way to determine why it's happen, no debug tools, no logs and usually only you can do it's rollback to older version. And there is no bugtracker so I can't even see who else have same problem and how they fixed it. And when you try to find some solution around internet there is usually tons of outdated 4-years old topic.

So I just feel like "F*** it!" and use Mesa instead and it's just works! But i think today or tomorrow I'll try to test latest beta drivers and then make proper bugreport.

It's because Valve spend years on their renderer optimizations and actually any of their games it's usually have 10 times less effects and might be 100 times less geometry than current alpha of PA.

are the proprietary drivers ubuntu has as good as the windows version? they're the same one right?