Linux issues and user solutions

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Linux issues and user solutions

LE17: GOG.com have updated toochosen to release The Witcher 2 for Linux on their store. Unfortunately, they did not have the latest version before publishing. As they have packaged the game as one huge download, VP decided that as well as sending them the latest build, they would make the new files available for public download. You can download them here: http://developer.vpltd.com/public/witcher2-gog-20140905125243.tgz http://developer.vpltd.com/public/witcher2-gog-20140905125243.tgz

LE16: If you have problems with missing speech in dialogs, it's because of misconfiguration in User.ini. For example for the English version, change Speech=EN to Speech=en

LE15: Maybe second time hits the charm, some sort of new AMD driver ( 14.201.1008 ) : http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/desktop-apu-catalyst-software.aspx
Users of kernel >3.14 should see this patch: http://is.gd/ZrNxFQ

LE14: New silent release for AMD Linux driver 14.8: http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/embedded?os=Linux+x86&rev=13.151only embedded :(

LE13: Plenty of updates in the Beta branch of the Steam build, go update that first:
14 Aug 2014 15:59 BST
Public Beta 4 - buildID 355503

This contains the following:
OpenGL worker thread now goes to sleep when it can, freeing up a cpu core for other things. This really helps speed up level loads especially.
Optimised our use of memory barriers and using coherent buffers where appropriate
Optimised handling of fences
Use ARB_texture_storage for texture uploads. Again, should improve level loading times.
Optimised our OpenGL state cache

Most of these performance optimisations are best seen on nVidia hardware at the moment. Major performance improvements are expected in the near future through the work of AMD and Intel driver developer teams.

We're aware of two potential crash on exit bugs.. one appears to be nvidia driver related. We're still chasing the other one.

12 Aug 2014
buildID 353083

Only some minor things changed - there were a few debug calls left in that may have slowed things down a little. The biggest change was to the configuration tool - I removed the now unused "Audio" option, and added screen coordinates to the monitor selection dropdown so that identifying monitors is a bit easier.

11 Aug 2014 14:34 BST
Public Beta 3 - buildID 352258

This contains the following:
Optimised shader compilation to link OpenGL programs in waves, instead of one by one, which makes it possible to speed it up using threaded shader compilation on some cards.
Drawing of fullscreen quads optimised
Optimized out some memory barrier commands from OpenGL command queue
OpenGL rendering never lags more than one frame behind commands given by D3D, which should reduce mouse lag.
Added better reporting of missing extensions in game log, to make it more visible when the game is slow due to OpenGL not supporting various features.
Undid the regression of fullscreen monitor selection support - this should now work correctly again

Also added is a new sound backend - using openal-soft instead of SDL's audio. We've had better performance out of this with FMOD, so we added it here to see if it improves the sound situation. Note that this now means the "Audio" option in the configuration options no longer functions, and openal-soft will use an .alsoftrc if you have one. If you have any audio problems, and have a custom .alsoftrc, please attach it to any bug reports.

We're still finding out what's going on with the game and AMD cards being a lot slower than it should be.. please bear with us!

30 Jul 2014 15:33 BST
Public Beta 2 - buildID 341339

We have just updated our public beta with the first beta of our new D3D9 engine. This now employs a technique where all OpenGL work is now done by a single worker thread, which the D3D9 engine submits commands to. This means that there is only a single GL context, and this makes management a lot easier for the driver.

So far we've seen quite significant performance gains on nVidia hardware. AMD, with fglrx 14.4 rev 2 is not quite so dramatic -we're working with AMD on that.

We'd also like feedback about the MESA radeonsi driver - we've heard that this is getting good enough to run the game, and we'd like some wider news on it.

09 Jul 2014 17:46 BST
We have just set up a beta on Steam, called "linux_public_beta". This is where we're going to be posting our betas of work-in-progress so far. This first beta contains the following:
Multimonitor support
Improved support for gamepads, and workarounds for problems in xpad
Improved stability.. the game should crash a lot less now. We still see the occasional crash on exit, inside the nvidia driver. We're working on finding out if this is an issue with the 331.38 driver or with our code.

Note that this doesn't yet include any of our DX9 multithread rework, as that's still in progress. We thought we'd put this out here so that we can get some feedback from you guys on what we have done so far, and also show that we really are working on making this port better :)

LE12: Peter Mulholland of Virtual Programming started tackling github issues: https://github.com/vpltd-peterm?tab=activity

LE11: Linux version just got an update: @Vinthir writes:
Changelog for today's patch:
* The "Summer Solstice" content is now available for Linux
* Linux: configuration issues on certain locales have been fixed
* Linux: library support for various Linux distributions improved
(Source)

LE10: Too many savegames might slow down the game:
CDP tech support says: "Collecting too many saves may lead to crashes. Delete the unneeded saves. You can do it with the Delete option in Load Game menu or straight in the folder where the saves are by default stored in home/username/.local/share/cdprojektred/witcher2/GameDocuments/Witcher 2/gamesaves unless you enabled Steam cloud which makes it impossible to remove the saves from the folder unless you disable Steam cloud then you can do it in this location: home/.steam/steam/userdata/[user id]/20920/remote .Our saves and their thumbnails are unfortunately quite large and the higher the graphics settings the more space they'll take. This unfortunately happens across all non-console platforms (on xbox there's a save number limit). Removing unneeded saves may also help with the graphics issue in the cutscene.

Also, there is a known crash happening sometimes on some graphics drivers upon quitting The Witcher 2 on Linux. The crash is related to Steam overlay. Valve are aware of it and looking at a solution."
(Source)

LE9: Another Steam workarounds thread: http://steamcommunity.com/app/20920/discussions/0/522728268811804386/

LE8: New AMD drivers, 14.6 beta: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/latest-linux-beta-driver.aspx

LE7: How to use your Witcher 1 end-game savegames for Import on a New Game? Put them in:
Code:
$HOME/.local/cdprojektred/witcher2/GameDocuments/The Witcher/saves
(Source)
One can get ready made end-game saves here.

LE6: Keyboard issue happens because the Configurator writes values using comma as a decimal separator (detects locale and adapts it's output?!).
Wrong with comma:
IK_0=(Gamekey=GI_Holster,Value=1,000000)
Right with period:
IK_0=(Gamekey=GI_Holster,Value=1.000000)
This can be fixed, open a terminal in ~/.local/cdprojektred/witcher2/GameDocuments/Witcher 2/config/ and run
Code:
sed -e 's/\,Value\=1\,000000)/\,Value\=1\.000000)/g' User.ini | sed -e 's/\,Value\=-1\,000000)/\,Value\=-1\.000000)/g' > User.ini-fix && rm -f User.ini && mv User.ini-fix User.ini
And remember to do this EVERY TIME you use the Configurator or Launch->Options, or avoid using it after the first setup and use the Tweaker ( info below ) instead.

LE5: Blue shiny skin people apparently at least on nVidia binary blob get's fixed by updating to driver 331.xx or later (source)

LE4: If voices don't work, it's actually not related to audio channels, it's due to case-sensitive filenames :) Here is the command for english voices, go to your Steam folder for The Witcher 2, enter cookedpc:
Code:
ln -s en0.w2speech EN0.w2speech
(found here)

LE3: Apparently CDP should make some sort of announcement soon, monday maybe?
"Paul Lesurf, May 24 18:31:
Hi,
We appreciate your help and sensible approach. Rest assured we are paying attention and working with Valve, the video driver team and CDP to address as many issues a possible. CDP have asked us to allow them to respond officially, so we will not be responding to threads directly. But do please continue, we are totally committed to addressing the current issues.

We will continue to monitor the thread!

Best regards."
@Link

LE2: Github issues repo: https://github.com/KillaW0lf04/The-Witcher-2-Issues/issues

LE1: See the performance comparison post #6

Let's try to get them collected here, in some sort of standard format, do include specs, distro, drivers, kernel, windows manager, effects active or not, compositor active or not, pastebin of your ~/.local/cdprojektred/witcher2/GameDocuments/Witcher 2/config/User.ini and anything you have special or think might (not) help.

Specs: i5-4570/GTX660Ti/8GbRAM/Debian Sid 64bit/kernel 3.14/nvidia 337.19/i3wm/no effects or composition

Issues and commentary walking in chapter 1 village so far:
*even though Steam is started you can't run witcher2 directly as
Code:
[S_API FAIL] SteamAPI_Init() failed; Sys_LoadModule failed to load: /home/name/.steam/bin32/steamclient.so
[S_API FAIL] SteamAPI_Init() failed; unable to locate a running instance of Steam, or a local steamclient.dll.

*mouse lag in menu although my settings got tweaked in the Mouse section: MouseSmoothness=0 and Smoothness=0 and UseMouseDamp=falseIt looks like WINE/Windows has this too, forgot about it, it's worse in eON by a bit though

*copied keyboard settings from Windows version since keys did not worked as set up by the configurator, well ESC and F9 worked but not CTRL/W/A/S/D, not to mention I use a Dvorak layout that's not properly detected but yeah

*everyone with keyboard issues, try to get my config (they're the defaults afaik) and edit it your way with an editor, don't use the configurator anymore. Or if you need the configurator, you need to replace de keyboard settings again. Some users reported that adding these launch options to the game in Steam might help when using a non-US locale:
Code:
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 %command%

*walked a bit and there is a place near the lady that makes stew where the textures go black for 1 split-second, I could repro it at will; Steam did not screenshot it but that's another issue as it did not do any screenshot at all; game crashed walking a bit more; on a third run It did not happen.

*droped framerate to 0.3fps and had to kill the game on the second run; walking in the same section where on my first run it worked ok

*the bug reporter errors out with "JSON parse error or Base64 decode error on the server!" sometimes

*the bug reporter needs to include 'cat ~/.local/cdprojektred/witcher2/GameDocuments/Witcher 2/config/User.ini' too, I'll provide mine here: http://pastebin.com/4WZ6nt3W ( yes it has more stuff copied from my Windows one, that might work or not on this wrapped version )

*you can use, through WINE, the Tweaker: http://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/181/ to import, it can't use hidden folders like .local so linking the settings folder to your home, run in a terminal
Code:
ln -s ~/.local/cdprojektred/witcher2/GameDocuments/Witcher\ 2 ~/
will make it detect your current settings), configure, edit resolution by hand if needed, Accept to save those settings back, so you can bypass the somewhat broken configurator, just like we usually did it on Windows anyway. My settings above are set up like this: http://i.imgur.com/3aH1ML2.png

*compositors will hit performance as eON does not do proper fullscreen (which the compositors will detect and not affect) but they do some sort of borderless window scaled to desktop size, iirc. So using a lighter WM + disabling composition should help. phoronix has plenty of WM/DE performance tests ( http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_mint17_desktops&num=1 ) try to choose a lighter suite maybe it can help.

*game crashes in about 3 minutes or less sometimes

60 seconds voglperf plot, non-human district near the river, chapter 1: http://i.imgur.com/RPqQRw5.png
 
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Hello guys,

first of all: Many thanks for porting this to my favorite OS! I am very happy that one of my favorite games has been ported. =)

Sadly I am not able to even start the game. When I launch it, I get the Witcher 2-Launcher but after clicking the Launch-Button I get an error window with following text in it:

We're sorry but Witcher 2 has crashed.

This is the generated error report:


Now to my system specs:
Linux Mint 16 x64 Cinnamon
Intel Core i5
4 GB RAM
GeForce GT 640M LE 1 GB RAM

I am using Bumblebee because I have an Optimus setup with integrated Intel Graphics chipset and dedicated Nvidia GeForce. Nvidia driver 331.67 is installed.

All other games are working just fine with this setup and the bumblebee solution. I tried the primusrun %command% and the optirun %command% option to start
the game but had no luck with that.

When I start the game without bumblebee on the Intel chipset, it starts but I have no textures and it is choppy as hell.

Please help me. I would love to play this great game on Linux! =)
 
All other games are working just fine with this setup and the bumblebee solution. I tried the primusrun %command% and the optirun %command% option to start
the game but had no luck with that.
" glCheckFramebufferStatus() for buffer returned GL_FRAMEBUFFER_INCOMPLETE_MISSING_ATTACHMENT" looks like although nVidia binary is detected it might be something it does not like on this whole Optimus situation.
 
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/xxxx/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.
This appears quite often. Try disabling the In-Game Overlay before running.

Is there a place to file an obvious bug report?
vpfs_CreateFileA returns ERROR_INVALID_NAME for file 'IMG://GLOBALS/GUI/ICONS/QUEST/ICON_G_AKS_16X16.DDS'
This pops up in my logs (eon.txt) and I couldn't say what effect it has on the game but usually it's a good idea to fix bad file requests.


Also for the sake of posterity here's my big post from the other thread:
Yeah, it's frustrating... Licaon and I have been hoping for this forever!

To get this out of the way:
Ubuntu 13.10
8GB RAM
Core i7 4770K
GTX 560Ti Superclocked

Using WINE with CSMT I easily get 40+fps @ 1920x1200 with settings on Ultra (Ubersampling and Vsync disabled).
The same settings give me about 5fps (sometimes as high as ten) on even just the Arena holding area.
I can bump it up by a few FPS by lowering settings, but it never gets to a really playable framerate even when changing resolution settings.

---------
Edit: More testing!

To get similar performance to WINE I had to lower the resolution waaay down to 1440x900 (or lower). However there will be frequent hitching. To eliminate this I had to lower settings to High. I also noticed that if I forced 16:9 ratio there was often artifacting near the bottom of the rendered view (generally in the form of a red line).

Other issues:
The game will crash when selecting Arena if Game Overlay is disabled. When enabled selecting Arena will crash the game if you do not wait for the "steam overlay enabled press..." popup to disappear.

--------
Edit 2: And more!

Swapped the Display Manager from GNOME Shell to Metacity and FPS had a sudden jump way up to a playable level with High settings on 1920x1200. I'm guessing the application isn't properly telling the DE to not composite its window, exacerbating any performance issues.
 
How many "Poor performance" bugs they need anyway? :)

And let's look at that page a bit in depth,
Linux
Create a specs.html report. To do it in Terminal on Ubuntu type: sudo lshw -html > specs.html. You will have to confirm the action.
Attach the resulting specs.html report to an email addressed to tw2support {at} cdprojektred.com (replace {at} with @)
Include the following information:
*the product your ticket concerns (The Witcher 2),
*the platform you are using (Steam OS or Ubuntu),
*the country where you bought the game on Steam
*a brief description of the issue
Let me make 2 bets:
1. You don't use Linux or ever used it.
2. CDP supports ONLY Steam OS and Ubuntu so our logs from Debian, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Slackware, Mint ( in no particular order) will kinda stop being answered, because, you know, they kinda said that out loud "The system requirements for the game are: OS: Ubuntu 12.04 and SteamOS (other distributions of Linux might run the game, but are not supported)"

:(

Next, static performance testing, yeah if it's bad here it's worse moving and even worse fighting, let's see.

How does one test this?

Windows: get MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision or even the free demo FRAPS

WINE:
*Standalone version - go to the game folder and start the game from a terminal with
Code:
WINEDEBUG=-all,+fps wine ./witcher2.exe 2>&1
*Steam version - go to the Steam folder, open a terminal, run
Code:
WINEDEBUG=-all,+fps ./Steam.exe -applaunch 20920 2>&1

eON (Steam version only for now): get voglperf, start it, run: game start 20920 click ok to that Steam prompt to permit it to run and after the game starts run: fpsprint on and/or fpsshow on to get the OSD

Results using this config: http://pastebin.com/LMXVv4p1 in this album: http://imgur.com/a/NuTrl

TL; DR: It's bad :(

WINE Tip: To get an OSD type display get aosd_cat (from your distros package manager) and run as
Code:
WINEDEBUG=-all,+fps wine ./witcher2.exe 2>&1 | tee /dev/stderr | grep --line-buffered "^trace:fps:" | aosd_cat
 
The cut in performance from Wine is somewhat expected since we're hitting the CPU a lot more than on Windows due to the translation calls. There's a few patches that help this out (obviously CSMT is the big one).

The eON version however should be getting at least that performance if not higher since it should be specially tuned to The Witcher 2's needs (but obviously no one's having that experience). Were those the lowest framerates or average?

Also what was your initial preset that you tweaked from?

I should probably check my exact fps with voglperf on the eON version.
 
I think VP developers need to rewrite the port using proper fullscreen mode and tell anyone who uses it to disable compositing while using it.
 
Static test, I just let the PC char stay there, the fps reading on the left is made every second. Some plots might help but the hard reality is this:12/50/100

LE: Github issues repo: https://github.com/KillaW0lf04/The-Witcher-2-Issues/issues

I think VP developers need to rewrite the port using proper fullscreen mode and tell anyone who uses it to disable compositing while using it.

Disabling compositing won't be the full fix honestly. Further testing pretty much solidifies Licaon's results.

Using voglperf I was able to see how performance faired with hard numbers under the eON release. 30-45fps in undemanding areas, 18-25fps in slightly more demanding sections, and in very demanding sections performance varied anywhere from 15-21fps, with certain viewpoints/scenes causing the framerate to drop down to 13.

The framerate additionally would jump around quite a bit if an actual battle took place.

Wine with CSMT consistently gives me 20fps higher than eON even when compositing is enabled and using GLSL shaders (to work around a display bug).
 
Since eON doesn't use proper fullscreen mode, performance is expected to be lower anyway I think even without compositing. They wrote somewhere that they are looking into enabling proper fullscreen.
 
Some people report a glowing bug, which makes the characters look spooky ;D

 
If voices don't work, it's actually not related to audio channels, it's due to case-sensitive filenames :) Here is the command for english voices, go to your Steam folder for The Witcher 2, enter cookedpc:
Code:
ln -s en0.w2speech EN0.w2speech
(found here)
 
Hi guys! First of all, many thanks CDP for the great games and Linux supporting! :)
Now about my issue. In the video settings i don't have other resolution options except 1920*1080. My laptop is not a really game machine, so game runs laggy enough to playing uncomfortably. I added these lines in the User.ini:
[Viewport]
Width=1360
Height=768
but it didn't help. The game is still runs in 1920px mode.
My system configuration is:
Processor : 4x Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4200U CPU @ 1.60GHz
Memory : 8058MB (3174MB used)
Operating System : Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
-Display-
GeForce GT 750M (nvidia-331 proprietary, tested driver)
Resolution : 1920x1080 pixels
Can somebody suggest any solution how can i change (decrease) game' screen resolution?
 
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/xxxx/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.
This appears quite often. Try disabling the In-Game Overlay before running.

disable the In-Game Overlay no function, it message remains and game no run. any idea of workarround?

ED: with update of last drivers of AMD the issue was fixed..
 
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By the way, how can one import saves from TW1 in the Linux version? In the Windows one, they had to be placed in certain path, so I guess something similar should be with this one. Did anyone test it?

Looking at the path I used with Wine, I'd guess it can to be:

Code:
$HOME/.local/cdprojektred/witcher2/GameDocuments/The Witcher/saves
 
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I think you need to set up Aspect Ratio from the Configurator first (16:9) and try to use one of those resolutions listed there, since 136x is not, maybe that's the problem, try 1280x720

LE: Keyboard issue happens because the Configurator writes values using comma as a decimal separator (detects locale and adapts it's output?!).
Wrong with comma:
IK_0=(Gamekey=GI_Holster,Value=1,000000)
Right with period:
IK_0=(Gamekey=GI_Holster,Value=1.000000)
This can be fixed, open a terminal in ~/.local/cdprojektred/witcher2/GameDocuments/Witcher 2/config/ and run
Code:
sed -e 's/\,Value\=1\,000000)/\,Value\=1\.000000)/g' User.ini | sed -e 's/\,Value\=-1\,000000)/\,Value\=-1\.000000)/g' > User.ini-fix && rm -f User.ini && mv User.ini-fix User.ini

LE2:
By the way, how can one import saves from TW1 in the Linux version? In the Windows one, they had to be placed in certain path, so I guess something similar should be with this one. Did anyone test it?
$HOME/.local/cdprojektred/witcher2/GameDocuments/The Witcher/saves[/code]
Tested, it works.
 
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I think you need to set up Aspect Ratio from the Configurator first (16:9) and try to use one of those resolutions listed there, since 136x is not, maybe that's the problem, try 1280x720
Sorry i didn't mention it. I already have 16:9 aspect ration and more over - it doesn't matter which AR i choose in all cases i have 1920px option only.
 
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