Floris and Linux

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I thought I would start a new topic for this as I haven't found one yet. Seeing as the Linux release of Warband is still in alpha(edit:beta) and that the change of operating system would naturally cause problems, I also thought it would be obnoxious to spam the regular bug reports topic with problems that may well be coming from other sources. I think that handling it this way is a good fit with the board rules, though, if the mods disagree or I have missed something, I will of course bow to their greater wisdom.

In any case, I plan to push through as much of the modded game as I can right now, see what is and isn't translating and make a few reports... though, I am by no means an expert in either this mod nor Linux. (edit: I'm using Floris 2.54 BTW other system info available upon request)

The most obvious problem at the moment (as discussed in the steam forum for MBWB OSX/Linux support http://steamcommunity.com/app/48700/discussions/0/45350791459137130/) are getting the steam config menu to work and displaying modded textures and shaders.
So far most of the in game GUIs still work.
Entering a tournament crashes the game in Basic and Expanded (haven't found a tournament in Gameplay yet)
(edit:simply unticking "Enable Tournament Enhancements" in the Mod Options menu at camp fixes this)
...
 
All options directly under the Town menu seem to work.
Most of the modded options under the marketplace seem to be working properly
The Reports tab from the Main Map screen is solid black, though mousing over reveals the GUI options
Once clicked, the submenus that completely replace the screen like Troop Trees and Companion Overview still display properly
Recruiting Heroes works as do their Talk menus
Most of the options under the Party menu seem to work
Normal combat works
Hiring mod specific troops like the Monk works
Fog of War option seems to work ok, not sure if the villages etc flickering once found is related to FoW or just the map being buggy

(edit 1
Intro quest works all the way through.
A graphics glitch where the nighttime sky has a giant, bright red copy of the player's shadow is still present, though this is present while playing Native in -Linux as well.
Most of the items and horses seem to be rendering ok. About half of the added banners don't, one or two pieces of armor as well.
Tested a lot of these via the Cheat Menu BTW, so that particular function also works.
Aside from the faces (and in the case of one or two of the factions, the faces too) all unequipted character skins are solid black.

I haven't encountered any of the mod specific heroes in taverns yet, but they are appearing in the debug readouts, so I'll go hunt some down tomorrow, along with toggling some of the Mod Options. Trying to play with the missing ground textures and messed up shaders gives me a bit of a headache after a while...
Anyway, end of edit 1)

(edit 2
From Mod Options, battlefield health bars and minimap both work fine
Found Sigmund, hired a freelance mercenary, edited his loadout, promoted him... all works fine
Found a few modded Companions, hired them. No problems so far.
*Keep forgetting to let myself get killed in battle to test the battle continuation content.
*May spend an hour or so trying different workarounds for the textures & shaders problem. Will post results later
end edit 2)

(edit 3
Just a quick update. After doing some ham fisted tinkering in the module.ini and shifting what I could get at easily into and out of Textures folders and the like, I have made little progress with the missing map textures. At a guess, this all has to do with a folder called GLSshaders installed with the base game, and a bunch of real work beyond any hacking I can muster at the moment.
Best of luck to the mod authors if and when they get around to this. And I'll be happy to answer any questions about the fussing I have managed to do. I know my reports are somewhat less than professional.
end edit 3)

(edit 4
Last edit before I start a new reply. Changing from Expanded 2.54 to Expanded 2.55
Just tested battlefield continuation. Works fine. The fight keeps going till you run out of reinforcements and the camera controls work as expected
end edit 4)
 
I have made this topic a sticky as it will likely solve some frequently asked questions until the standard FAQ is updated.  Thanks for sharing your findings.
 
Expanded 2.55 Testing

I've been doing more or less the same working through menus and tracking down features as my previous reports. So far I haven't noticed any differences from 2.54, so I won't post every little thing I try or think of. If it's posted above, just assume I've tried it again and got the same results. If I do run into any new bugs, fixes, or previously untested features, I'll add them in an edit to this post as long as it's the most recent one.

(edit 1
*****Big News******
It seems that Hanakoganei and Kleiner have made a lot of progress on a workaround for the textures bug. I'll be testing it out today, but here is a link http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,306814.0.html to the thread containing Hanakoganei's  tutorial on how to do it and a link to the files edited by Kleiner. Tremendous thanks to both of them.
end edit 1)

(edit 2
The afore mentioned texture workaround seems to do a pretty solid job for what it does cover. There are still some missing textures, but then, fixing every little thing is always way more work than getting the one or two big things. I'd say the mod is comfortably playable at this point. And I think I've confirmed that everything from my previous reports is as true for 2.55 as for 2.54
I've got other things coming up though... so I may not be adding anything else to this for a while. I'll check in every now and then and test things out if asked though. Please, if you check this thread out and see something I left out that needs mentioning, go ahead and pitch in. The more info and interest we show in getting things working smoothly on Linux, the more likely it is to happen. And so much the happier we'll all be, yeah?
end edit 2)
 
Glad to help. I'm happy that we got more Warbandbros playing Floris on a whole new OS lol. Even with all the early bugs and stuff it's still nice to know that more people are able to enjoy one of my favorite games and mods of all time.

Also it's probably a sign that they plan to make Bannerlord work on Linux (and maybe Mac too) right from the get-go, which is cool.
 
When I run the game (with Ubuntu 14.04 and v2.55 expanded)  there are a couple graphical glitches in the first battle (the ambush). The ground is completely black and the arrows seem incredibly thin and are hard to see at certain angles. Additionally, there is alot of lag. In vanilla, lag only occurs in large battles with mostly cavalry, and I never get graphical glitches. I tried turning all the settings way down, and nothing changes.
 
When using florian expanded 2.55, the ground, skybox, some people's faces, and the main map textures are black. I've heard that this is due to insufficient ram, but I have 8GB of ram and an nvidia 640gt with 2GB of vram, and this doesn't happen in native. It happens in both windowed and fullscreen, both with video options set to highest and lowest. I've tried setting use_ondemand_textures to 0 instead of 1 in rgl_config.txt, but that doesn't work either.
 
People who have black grounds problem check out this topic :

"World Map HD v1.1" is ruining floris for me
http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,306814.0.html
 
Additionally, there is alot of lag. In vanilla, lag only occurs in large battles with mostly cavalry, and I never get graphical glitches. I tried turning all the settings way down, and nothing changes.
What kind of lag? If it's stuttery/short-pause-every-few-seconds (as opposed to FPS lag or hard-disk-churning lag) then it's definitely script processing lag. Floris has a heck of a lot of scripts running in battle (and in general). One of the most script processes per second among all mods for Warband.

Most systems (Windows I mean, since you Linuxdudes came a little late to the party) have proven to be unable to handle large scale battles even with high end gaming rigs. It isn't really a hardware issue in this case but some script processing inefficiency (engine limitation).

Unfortunately there's no way around this kind of lag except for a few short fixes.

1. You probably already tried this, but make sure no unnecessary background programs are running. This doesn't help much IMO because I have but it may improve it a little.
2. Reduce your battle size. It's the biggest factor for processing lag really.

Floris has one of the highest RAM and VRAM requirements among all Warband mods. If I'm not mistaken, Warband itself is not capable of using all the available system memory (32-bit program). However, I used to play Floris on my old machine with 4GB RAM and it was doing just fine.

This is likely a Linux-specific issue, either with file system handling or memory management or something like that. Hopefully an official Warband patch will fix this, because I'm sure it isn't happening just to Floris. It's likely to be happening to any large scale Warband module that adds a lot of new things and/or requires a lot of RAM.
 
I found a thread where a M&B:WB developer says that the textures were imported improperly, but can't link to it because of forum rules.

Who is the developer of this mod? Is there a way to contact that person to see if it would be possible to get a fix for this, or atleast an option or a way to turn off the new textures?
 
I already posted how to turn off the new textures in that thread linked just above. There's some more info here.

monnikje, the guy who started this mod, doesn't seem to be active anymore, and the rest of the dev team of this mod have also moved on to other projects. In any case you Linux guys (and maybe the Mac guys too) are going to have to try it out figure out how to fix this on your own since the rest of us don't have Linux (or Mac) and can't test to see if any fixes are working.
 
Hanakoganei said:
I already posted how to turn off the new textures in that thread linked just above. There's some more info here.

I saw that, but I was hoping for an easier way. OpenBRF seems to be windows only. If the main dev is gone, are there others that would know how to convert the textures? If not, then are there people who have website privileges that would be willing to post a "linux or mac version" whose files have been pre-modified via the steps you mentioned, so that it uses native textures? It seems like an easier way for linux or mac users to be able to use the mod without having to bother with modifying files.
 
autodidacticphd said:
Zolstarym, I believe I have a solution to your problem... try reading an entire thread before commenting. :smile:

I did read the thread, and I still have no clue as to what you are referring to. Is it the posted BRF files? Those ones still don't revert all of the textures that appear black to native.
 
Sorry, zolstraym, I was perhaps more snarky than called for. I just assumed that the following would be obvious...

Floris is a modpack. It has many authors and coordinators, including (I believe) Windyplains, who stickied this topic and so presumably they know about the issues.

It's also an old mod pack. Many of the devs may well have moved on to other projects. Just because the studio that actually makes money on the game decided to expand, doesn't mean the modders have any reason to drop their new projects and come back to bughunting these.

Since it is a collection, getting everything fixed is going to be a big task, possibly involving many people. It will at least take time, but ultimately the original authors don't really have much reason to do the work unless they happen to be big supporters of OpenGL gaming.

The above posts already included links to discussions of why the graphics bugs exist and the best efforts to work around them in the form of a fairly detailed tutorial and someone's hard work using that tut. And those efforts are only a few weeks old. Presumably further progress or fixes will either appear here or in one of the other main threads, assuming anyone is motivated enough to do all the work.

This is fan made content; when it comes to support pick two (at best) of fast (usually do it yourself), easy (wait for the devs to find the time), effective (just go vanilla and preferably on a system that is factory spec)... If I had the time and was familiar with MBWB modding I'd have already taken a weekend to fully edit all the textures and submitted it as a sub-mod. But to me, the mod w/Kleiner's files is playable enough that I'd rather play for twelve hours than script and code. Or just wait and see if someone else has the time and motivation.

And of course, there's always WINE. I've set MBWB with Floris up on WINE before and it works ok and isn't that hard. I just started this little endeavour because I believe in getting away from DirectX and wanted to give this game's move to OpenGL a little more exposure. I honestly don't know if this mod will ever be adapted. It would be neat if it was, but honestly, I'm grateful for what effort and interest has already been shown.
 
autodidacticphd said:
But to me, the mod w/Kleiner's files is playable enough that I'd rather play for twelve hours than script and code. Or just wait and see if someone else has the time and motivation.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but those files are just floris' textures rendered for use in directx, with some native textures patched in to make it use some original native opengl rendered textures in linux? Would there be some way to mass re-render them from the source to make them not black when using opengl? If not that, then would reply #4 from here:http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?topic=217598.0  simply make floris use the native textures on linux?

 
Yes that would work. That's actually a simpler (and dirtier) way of doing what I did in the other thread. The main issue with it would be that you might miss some files because they aren't all named that way (for example, not all textures have bump maps, so you might accidentally overwrite or leave in some files if you do it without being able to preview).

And that only covers the ground textures as well. If you guys are having texture issues with weapons and armor, horses and other things, there is no way to use any method to fix it because Floris uses completely new textures for the new items. The new items have no Native counterpart, and didn't use Native textures to begin with.
 
Weird, I could swear I did some of that when I was mucking around on my own. Must have missed something, pulled textures from the wrong file, or tried two things at once that messed it up.

Hanakoganei, oddly enough, most of the the new items (and all but one of the new menu screens if I recall correctly) don't have this texture bug. It's mostly stuff that replaces vanilla textures and about half of the added banners. Not quite sure why, presumably the mods that added new content just set up the textures so they would look right next to the vanilla textures, whereas the modder that concentrated on making vanilla snazzier changed those textures to include some element that is not translating well, neh?

...it also occurs to me that I never checked the castles/villages that were completely new, like Tevarin/Belani to the West of Praven. At a guess, either the ground textures there should work without edit, or the village/castle buildings should be broken too, as all of it is new content within a single mod, unlike the ground textures mod which left the buildings and armours alone. Checking might provide some interesting info... alas, I have to be somewhere soon. Maybe later this weekend.
 
Not really sure. I have no experience playing games originally for Windows on any other OS. The only time I ever touched a Linux machine was when in school, and obviously they didn't have any games. :sad:

Might have something to do with certain texture formats being difficult to render with the Linux drivers or something. A lot of textures from mods are not optimized properly. I ran a texture optimizer on Floris textures, for example, because a few textures had bad sizes and other errors as far as game loading is concerned. It could be that.
 
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