[Ubuntu 15.04 beta] Game crashes(?) X server

Hi

 

I’ve recently upgraded to Ubuntu 15.04 from Ubuntu 14.10.

 

My system, software side:

Ubuntu 15.04 (beta), 64bit

Xorg: 1.17.1

Mesa/radeon driver from Ubuntu’s repositories

Kernel 3.19.0-10

 

Hardware:

RAM: 8GB

GPU: AMD Radeon HD 5870

CPU: AMD FX-6350

 

Problem is that upon entering a match I hear the launching sound but instead of seeing space/my ship, I keep seeing the loading screen.

 

All informations can be found in this bugreport: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-ati/+bug/1438303

 

I only found interesting stuff in the /var/log/kern.log logfile, nowhere else.

 

Since any other game I own seems to work, I’ve no clue who is ‘at fault’ here, which is why I’m filing a bug report at both ends.

 

Also since I do not seem to be able to get any more informations out of my system (gdb over SSH isn’t responding either), I’m kind of ‘lost’.

I remember there was a problem with AMD’s Dynamic power management… Just to exclude this please try radeon.dpm=0 Kernel Boot Parameter…

sorry for the delay. radeon.dpm=0 didn’t have an effect on the specified behaviour.

I added some more informations on the bugreport on launchpad.

 

After a recent update there is a slight change in the behaviour. Also I found a way to obtain some more informations.

new version of the game didn’t fix it.

The problem doesn’t appear with the AMD reference driver?

 

Well as far as i know xserver-xorg-video-ati for vivid is just available as unstable and its development is freezed currently.

 

After having a look on the informations you have provided, i think that the problem is related to a lower abstraction level than a Game is developed on.

 

The problem maybe doesn’t appear on other games, because they simply didn’t use render-technologies SC does?

 

Trying to lower Graphic-Quality settings will possibly be a workaround if this prevents usage of them…

Sorry, we can’t help now

uhm, not so fast here :wink:

 

I found a way to get a more detailed error log from the graphic driver. If you are curious, look here -> http://www.mesa3d.org/envvars.html

 

I did the following:

export LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose
export MESA_DEBUG=1
export MESA_LOG_FILE=/home/tuxator/mesa_errs.log
steam &>/home/tuxator/steam_errs.log

That resulted in some interesting errors that look like something in your game could be wrong:

Mesa: User error: GL_INVALID_VALUE in glViewport(0, 0, -1, -1)
Mesa: User error: GL_INVALID_ENUM in glMatrixMode(mode)
Mesa: User error: GL_INVALID_ENUM in glMatrixMode(mode)
Mesa: User error: GL_INVALID_VALUE in glViewport(0, 0, -1, -1)
Mesa: User error: GL_INVALID_ENUM in glMatrixMode(mode)
Mesa: User error: GL_INVALID_ENUM in glMatrixMode(mode)

 

uhm, not so fast here :wink:

 

I found a way to get a more detailed error log from the graphic driver. If you are curious, look here -> http://www.mesa3d.org/envvars.html

 

I did the following:

export LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose
export MESA_DEBUG=1
export MESA_LOG_FILE=/home/tuxator/mesa_errs.log
steam &>/home/tuxator/steam_errs.log

That resulted in some interesting errors that look like something in your game could be wrong:

Mesa: User error: GL_INVALID_VALUE in glViewport(0, 0, -1, -1)
Mesa: User error: GL_INVALID_ENUM in glMatrixMode(mode)
Mesa: User error: GL_INVALID_ENUM in glMatrixMode(mode)
Mesa: User error: GL_INVALID_VALUE in glViewport(0, 0, -1, -1)
Mesa: User error: GL_INVALID_ENUM in glMatrixMode(mode)
Mesa: User error: GL_INVALID_ENUM in glMatrixMode(mode)

 

What the guys are saying is that they can’t give you a definite answer and fix it for you, since you’re using an unstable release Ubuntu Linux. When they (Star Gems, Inc.) fix something now for your platform, it is no guarantee it will work later as the final public version is released, which can have significant differences in X11’s server, OpenGL stacks via mesa and of course the kernel may have code that is deemed incompatible with the current build of Star Conflict.

 

What they’re getting at is they don’t want to chase their own tails for a beta release, which makes sense. With that being said, I am a Linux and BSD developer and I work on the bleeding edge X11 server, Open GL stacks and other areas. I tell people that want to play this game, stay in 12.04.5, 14.04.2 or 14.10.1, don’t upgrade to 15.04 and expect things to work because more than likely it won’t.

 

My question to you is. Why did you download 15.04 and attempt to play Steam based games on the unstable beta platform? The thing about it is, the X11 server is not 100% complete on 15.04, no is the support in mesa 3-D drivers. The only people that should be downloading and installing 15.04 are developers and people that know enough about Ubuntu and have the balls to figure out the problems on their own, since there is no official support as of yet.

 

Besides, Ubuntu is trying to kill off the X11 server in favor of their Mir compositor, they wanted to introduce a meta version of that in 15.04 and be the beginning point for it, however, it’s not going well for them. They’re divided into three camps; pure X11, pure Mir and hybrid Mir interfacing to X11 to get business done. This is one of the reasons why 15.04 development is taking so long, they’re weighing all their options.

 

If you’re going to upgrade,the next non beta version of the LTS is 16.04 but wait for the next patched release, 16.04.1, where the majority of the bugs and security fixes have been made, then download and install it. Just something to think about.

 

The best version of Ubuntu that supports the restricted drivers of ATI and Nvidia is going to be 14.10. Ubuntu goofed on 12.04.5 and 14.04.2 because there is a bunch of .deb package dependency errors. The best is 14.10 because all you have to do is build to the X server version instead of the distribution, not all the time building .debs is the best option, especially when the package managers and associated dependencies are at odds with each other.

okay, I don’t have much time, so I’ll kep this short.

 

  1. if you really are a ‘Linux and BSD developer’ you’d know that

 * Ubuntu 15.04 is in it’s final freeze and I only upgraded after it entered it’s Beta

 * Ubuntu 15.04 only has already released packages in their system (meaning the X server is a finished release as is mesa/radeon and so on)

 * Ubuntu 12.04 is old. Advising anyone on using that is…not really good advise. Especially since the mesa drivers only took off during the recent two years. And at least for the Radeon HD series up until the 6000er cards, the radeon driver is far superior to the fglrx driver.

 * Ubuntu may try to replace X11 with Mir but that’s not going to happen during this year and they’ll likely drop it in favor of Wayland anyway. Also this point has nothing to do with my problem. Like, at all.

 * also instead of shitting all over this, you could’ve told me how to get more informations out of my system. Graphic stuff is not really my department.

 

 2. ‘Why did you download 15.04 and attempt to play Steam based games on the unstable beta platform?’

 * you do realize that Ubuntu pulls in most packages from Debian, right? So much for ‘unstable’…

 * I did not ‘attempt’ to play Steam based games. I am playing Steam based games since ~two weeks on this platform.

 

Also, did it EVER occure to you that I may have upgraded my system to a beta version so that I could do some testing and find errors? Which I did and reported at both affected ends as good as I could. When Ubuntu 15.04 releases most Ubuntu 14.10 users will upgrade immediately. If my problem isn’t limited to my system I’m not the only one who will complain. So I thought that maybe I should give someone a heads-up about a problem  that could be very easy to fix. But as it seems instead of fixing things or telling me how to get more informations on this bug/crash, I get blamed for reporting a bug. That’s a new one…

 

Confirming this bug would be ~1 hour of work. Maximum. Get a PC with a something older AMD graphic card, install Ubuntu 15.04 64 bit, copy the game files, start it, launch a game with bots and see if it crashes.

Please stay on Topic.

 

 

I can’t help you, and since this error doesn’t occurs with the AMD reference drivers, I still think its a driver problem.

 

And I cant reproduce because I have NVIDIA graphic card and I’m using its NVIDIA reference drivers.

I’m sorry for ranting above.

 

The problem is the propiertary AMD driver sucks. Everything 2D related will cause that driver to come to a sudden stop. Alt-tab takes ages. To sum it up: It makes 0 sense to use that driver or even use it as a ‘reference’.

 

On the other hand, you’ve the radeon/mesa driver. Most games run with it (SC is the only one I’ve that does not work with it) and they run fine.

 

I don’t have the knowledge to figure out what exactly is happening here and the radeon driver may be partially at fault here (it shouldn’t crash X) but the root cause must come from SC, or else I’d get hit with crashes left and right.

 

Is there any way to get a more detailed logging of the game maybe? I mean that glViewport thing seems to point towards a bug in the game, since it shouldn’t be called with -1 values. (spec here: https://www.khronos.org/opengles/sdk/docs/man/xhtml/glViewport.xml). So at least, SC should check wether those parameters are > 0, regardless of how those values are obtained.

It seems that opengl calls with invalid values cames from steam, not from our game. I have run StarConflict without steam and there is not error messages(almost, but it is not critical), after I have run StarConflict under steam and I got error messages like you describe: invalid values in glViewport and glMatrixMode. I will check it in more detail

How do you run SC under linux without steam? Are there information about it?

How do you run SC under linux without steam? Are there information about it?

Open Console, cd to “~/.steam/steam/SteamApps/common/star conflict” and running ./StarConflict should work.

Tried it, and true, the matrix thing disappeared, leaving nothing.

 

I took another look at your logfiles and found something in the game.log file

 

21:31:10.349         | ====== level started:  ‘levels/area1/s1338_pandora_anomaly’ success ======
21:31:38.198  WARNING| frame 9355 GPU wait time is too large (0.764393)
21:31:38.341  WARNING| frame 9356 gameGlobals.frameTimeReal is too large (0.770507)
21:31:38.357  WARNING| frame 9357 gameGlobals.frameTimeReal is too large (0.142485)
21:31:39.248  WARNING| frame 9394 gameGlobals.frameTimeReal is too large (0.309695)

 

not sure if that’s normal or why I missed it previously.

 

As a heads-up for people trying to run this game outside of Steam on a 64 bit system. You need to install some i386 packages: libsdl2-2.0-0:i386 and libcurl3:i386

WARNING| frame 9356 gameGlobals.frameTimeReal is too large (0.770507)

this means that some frame tooks 770.507ms, aka freezes, this is abnormal, it should be about 8-30ms

after finding a specific option for the fglrx driver (adding Option “AllowGLXWithComposite” “true” to the device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf) the 2D performance of the fglrx driver is tolerable now) I switched to it. I checked the game.log file after a testgame with the fglrx driver and I’ve the same warnings in there.

 

Since I’m, apparently, still the only one having this problem this thread can be closed, I guess.

 

Thanks for your help.