Linux crashes after character creation

[h3st]

Oh, so this is where I was supposed to post now. B-)

 

I'm not even sure how to get relevant debug info out of Pillars. Using the Steam version, on Arch 64 bit. Whole computer goes down. I've had this happen before with Wasteland 2 and XCOM, intermittently. Wasteland 2 apparently figured out what the problem was because it stopped doing it after a while. Pillars consistently crashes a bit after the screen starts moving at the beginning, after character creation.

 

Also game looked … interesting in 2560x1440:

 

 

 

Running it in a lower resolution (i.e. 720p or 1080p) makes it look like it's supposed to. It still crashes after character creation though.

 

(I've got a six-core athlon can't-remember-exactly, ati radeon hd mumble (radeonsi iirc), six gigs of ram. The specs are OK.)

[Dr. Snuggles]

(insert bad advice with /dev/null here)

[dscharrer]

The low-res textures you see are there because the game fails to detect the VRAM size and than just goes with a low default (512). The Unity version they are using does not support the required OpenGL/GLX extension to query this information (GLX_MESA_query_renderer) but only the NVIDIA and AMD equivalents. Support for GLX_MESA_query_renderer has been added very recently to Unity (afaik it's in 5.0 and maybe also backported to some older branches).

 

I've created a hack for myself to provide the GL_ATI_meminfo extension to the game. Use at your own risk:

sh ./glamdmeminfo.c ./PillarsOfEternity

Alternatively you can save and exit to the main menu whenever this happens. After loading, the textures should be fine again - until the next character creation / after the next level up. That works with 1920×1200, might not at higher resolutions.

 

I haven't seen any crashes yet on Mesa/radeonsi, but i build my video driver stack from git.

Edited March 27, 2015 by dscharrer

[h3st]

Nice, I'll try it out when I get home! And probably build a git version of the driver, looks like the last release was about six months ago. Maybe the git version is horribly buggy, maybe it's fixed the problem.

[h3st]

It's a driver issue alright. Fixed it by switching to catalyst (more specifically, a beta catalyst (aur link) since plain catalyst requires I downgrade xorg.)

 

I remember when arch dropped support for catalyst because it was such a POS … guess it's got something on the open source driver now.

[soulsource]

@dscharrer: Thank you very much! Your wrapper seems to solve the issue for me. You, sir, are a true code wizard.

 

@h3st: I don't think we should blame it on the driver, as clearly Unity fails to use a function that would be available. Imho, it's a Unity bug.

[soulsource]

Oops, I misunderstood you. The low resolution issue is fixed by the wrapper from dscharrer, but the crashes still happen.

I think I'll get mesa from git, just to see if the crashes occur there as well. Currently I'm running 10.5.1 with llvm-3.6.0.

Edited March 28, 2015 by soulsource

[StubbinMyToe]

@dscharrer: Thank you very much! Your wrapper seems to solve the issue for me. You, sir, are a true code wizard.

 

@h3st: I don't think we should blame it on the driver, as clearly Unity fails to use a function that would be available. Imho, it's a Unity bug.

 

It's not a Unity bug, the version they have does not contain the support.

[soulsource]

Regarding the crashes with the open source drivers: There's a bug report on freedesktop.

[soulsource]

I can now confirm that the crash issue seems to be resolved with the current development version of llvm (don't ask me how long it took me to get a working ebuild for that thing...).

 

I heard rumours of a planned release date of llvm-3.6.1, something about May 13, and about a release candidate on Star Wars day. Let's hope that the fix (whichever patch it was) ends up being part of it. It would be a pity if users of the stable version of the open source drivers would have to wait for another 5 months to get it with llvm-3.7...

 

For Ubuntu users Pillars of Eternity seems to work when using the drivers from  ~oibaf PPA. If one is adventurous enough to use this PPA, it might serve as a workaround until fixed drivers will (hopefully) be part of Ubuntu 15.10...

[varangy]

Also running the game on a desktop with Arch 64 bit and an AMD 6950 with open source driver. However, I experience no issues, and the game runs fine.

[soulsource]

Also running the game on a desktop with Arch 64 bit and an AMD 6950 with open source driver. However, I experience no issues, and the game runs fine.

If I'm not mistaken the llvm r600 shader compiler (which was causing the bug) is only used by default with cards of the Southern Islands generation or newer. The Northern Islands drivers can use it, but only when one specifically asks for it during driver compilation (afair).

[dscharrer]

I've created a bug report for the VRAM issue in the unoffical bug tracker:

https://github.com/PoE-unofficial/Pillars-of-Eternity-bugtracker/issues/2

[smallming]

Does anyone know if 1.0.5 fix this issue? Several UI items related to high-resolution were mentioned.