On Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 06:52:06PM -0500, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote:
> me, I'm not enough of a gamer to do that. I'd buy the Loki games because I'd
> like to try them (without booting M$ software); and want to support The Cause.
> not many people are like me, I think. :)

And then there's me...  I've bought about half a dozen of Loki's ports and
can't play most of them because I haven't been able to get (*^%(& 3D
acceleration to work.  But, every couple months, another one comes out, I buy
it, and spend another day trying to fix it.  Maybe, someday, it'll work and
I'll be able to play them all.  (Loki's support, unfortunately, is less than
helpful.  They can usually point out one obvious mistake that I've made,
which I then fix, but it still doesn't work.  I tell them so, but never get a
response.)

My current set of problems, in case anyone here can provide enlightenment
(other than the window manager):

Heretic 2:

Refuses to run with software acceleration because I run a 32bpp display.
This is broken by design, but I hear they're working on a patch to fix it.
If I use the command-line incantation to force it to use utah-glx, it opens
up an appropriately-sized window on my desktop, then locks up the machine
before it successfully paints anything in the window.

Quake 2 (not Loki, but related anyhow):

Appears to run fine, except everything is squashed into the left half of the
window; the right half remains black.  It seems to run nice and fast using
software 3D, though, which is good because trying to set it to a glx video
mode results in a solid stream of "ref_soft::R_BeginFrame() - could not set
mode" errors.

Quake 3:

When I try to start this one up, it thinks it's running just fine, but I get
a row of 5 grainy, pink versions of the opening animation, all squashed into
the top 64 pixels on my screen.  Continuing from there, I continue to get
rows of 5 squashed copies of everything.  While I can blindly stumble through
the menus to exit the game, glx doesn't let go of the video card.  The only
way to get a functional GUI back is to kill the X server and restart it.

Heavy Gear 2:

This one actually works!  And it even stays pretty fast with all the bells
and whistles turned on!  But I can't see a damn thing - even in missions that
are supposed to be set at noon, there's a nice bright sky, but everything on
the ground is very, very dark, approaching undifferentiated black.  I'm
inclined to suspect that gamma correction would fix this, but there's enough
light stuff (and dark areas around enemies light up quite nicely when there's
a muzzle flash) that I suspect another problem.  Nonetheless, I tried setting
MESA_GAMMA as high as 2.5 before running HG2 and it made no discernable
difference.  I can play this one, which is better than the others, but it's
unplayable when you can't see whether there's a tree 2 feet in front of your
face.  Especially if you like high explosives...

The system in question is an Athlon 750 with a G400-based video card (lspci
identifies it as "VGA compatible controller: Matrox Graphics, Inc. MGA G400
AGP (rev 04)") running debian woody.  Utah-GLX was built from last weekend's
CVS source against the (recommended) Mesa 3.2.1 source.  X is 3.3.6.

-- 
That's not gibberish...  It's Linux. - Byers, The Lone Gunmen
Geek Code 3.1:  GCS d? s+: a- C++ UL++$ P++>+++ L+++>++++ E- W--(++) N+ o+
!K w---$ O M- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t 5++ X+ R++ tv b+ DI++++ D G e* h+ r y+