spambot

I can confirm the water is fixed in 3.02 beta - thanks @BMac! I'm not seeing the map screen bug anymore, either - though since it hasn't been officially announced as a fix by the devs I'd cautiously say it needs testing on more systems/drivers before we can check it off the list. Anti-aliasing is still broken - so for that we'll have to continue to use this hack for now.

Senpai has entered the thread! :bow:

Unfortunately this hack is still needed even with the new game patch 3.0. Weren't Obsidian planning to fix these bugs properly?

You can save her life if you use careful sneaking to approach the assassins from the right direction, and use disables like Prone to prevent them from getting to Serel...

Never!

Also, contrary to what I wrote in the opening post, the hack may actually work for Catalyst as well - provided that you install the correct OpenGL development headers. Untested though.

A note for testers: "Black noise on water surfaces" affects... newer AMD graphics cards (those released since 2011 or so) the Mesa drivers and the proprietary Catalyst driver "Anti-aliasing not working" affects... not sure which cards, exactly - at least newer AMD cards though the Mesa drivers (untested on Catalyst) "Flickering black splotches on the map screen" affects... all AMD cards, apparently Mesa 11 drivers (not older Mesa versions, and not Catalyst)

Apparently it only happens with Mesa 11 and not with earlier driver versions. (And only with AMD cards.) Until now the only people who had Mesa 11 installed were users of small bleeding-edge Linux distros, which is why not many people complained about it. But a new big Ubuntu release just came out this month, and it includes Mesa 11, so expect this to become more of a mass problem if Obsidian devs don't hurry to fix it on the PoE side! While a Mesa bug-report has been opened, the take-away from it is that this is not actually a Mesa bug. Just a performance optimization that was added to Mesa which should not affect any standard-compliant OpenGL program - but exposes a bug in PoE's minimap fog-of-war rendering code. So the Obsidian devs can't wait this one out - it has to be fixed on the PoE side.

"with the backers"? Are there still outstanding backer rewards from the PE Kickstarter, or does this refer to something else? Love it. I turned off helmet visibility for most of my characters with the cheat console, but for this I think I'll have to turn it on again...

This hack fixes it for the open-source drivers on Linux.

This hack fixes it for the open-source drivers on Linux.

I had a similar problem once; wish I'd known about the console commands then. The page says there's also a StartQuest command, maybe it lets you start Never Far from the Queen manually?

The Linux version of Pillars of Eternity has had some annoying rendering issues ever since it was first released, and although people have submitted bug reports for them, Obsidian hasn't done anything about them and they're still present in the latest patch. Luckily, a programming-savvy fan who goes by the name of dscharrer has now created an unofficial hack which fixes several of those issues! Since the hack hasn't been publicized in many places yet, I'm creating this thread to help other Linux gamers (and Obsidian) become aware of it. Instructions for installing the hack are at the end of this post. The rendering issues in question, are: Black noise on water surfaces The picture is self-descriptive I think. Anti-aliasing not working Without the hack, many Linux users get no anti-aliasing at all in Pillars of Eternity, no matter what graphics quality they choose in the settings. The hack enforces anti-aliasing of character/weapon outlines and selection circles. Textures on the characters are still not anti-aliased even with the hack (look at the stripes on her head in the screenshot), so it's not perfect, but at least an improvement. Flickering black splotches on the map screen This is actually a problem that has only surfaced recently, because it only happens with the newest version of the open-source (Mesa) graphics drivers for Intel/AMD/Nvidia cards. A performance improvement that was added in the latest version of the drivers, causes the driver to no longer perform some redundant function calls which it did in earlier version. A standard-compliant OpenGL application should not be affected by this change at all, but unfortunately it seems that Pillars of Eternity (and maybe other Unity games?) incorrectly relied on the earlier redundant behavior of the drivers. In this case, it horribly messes up the drawing of the fog-of-war on the map screen. The hack fixes that. Bonus: Disabling map overlays As a bonus, the hack also gives you the option of disabling map screen overlays altogether. If you enable said option, the following things will simply not be rendered on map screen... (Note: the main viewport is not affected - only the map screen!) Fog of war Map markers Selection circles Viewport rectangle Inset shadow around the map's border Of course there is no good reason to enable this option for normal game play, but it's great in case you want to take map screenshots for walk-throughs and the like. Still without fix: Capes not being rendered In the Linux version of Pillars of Eternity, capes are simply not rendered at all. This hack does not fix that; I just mention it here for the sake of completeness, since AFAIK that's the last remaining graphics rendering problem with the game on Linux. Instructions The hack only works for the open-source (Mesa) graphics-drivers - which are available for Intel / AMD / Nvidia cards. (AMD and Nvidia also offer a proprietary driver as an alternative - this hack will not work for those. So switch to the open-source drivers if you want this hack.) This is how you enable the hack for your game: 1. Make sure you have the necessary dependencies installed: GCC Mesa development files pkg-config On Ubuntu, this command should install those dependencies for you: sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib libgl1-mesa-dev libgl1-mesa-dev:i386 pkg-config 2. Open the Pillars of Eternity installation directory in a terminal. (If you use the GOG version, it's the directory which contains the start.sh.) 3. Download the pillarsfix.c hack into that directory, for example by running: wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dscharrer/void/master/hacks/pillarsfix.c 4. OPTIONAL: Edit pillarsfix.c in a text editor if you want to customize it. For example if you want to disable map overlays (see above), you need to find the line that says #define PILLARS_PLAIN_MAP 0 and change the 0 to 1. 5. Start the game by running: sh pillarsfix.c ./start.sh (Or if you don't use the GOG version, replace ./start.sh with whatever command you would normally use to start the game in your version.) You will always have to run the game like that from now on if you want to keep using the hack. Note that the hack does not modify the game's executable or data files on disk; it does all it's magic "live" for the currently running game instance when you run it as shown it step 5. Have fun! And let's hope that Obsidian takes this as an inspiration to fix these issues properly now.