Linux (and some noin-linux) issues.

[Atsuj]

Hello,

I just purchased Defcon (and darwinia... while I was at it) recently when I saw the Linux RC (1.42) was out for Defcon.

So far, it's been perfectly stable; no segfaults or other crashes reported so far; i've been able to spectate on games from demo-users and non-demo users; no problems there, either.

The issues I witnessed fall apart in two directions:

BUG:
- In the communication/chat window, using "/me" ( like in /me watches fascinatedly) will result in the text and the player-name overlapping eachother; it seems that both the player's name AND the text after /me are aligned on the utter left side of the frame.

Playability issues on Dual Screen setups

- The toolbars "in game" are all nicely positionable , and stay nicely put in place so that you can prevent them from being split across two screens. The popup menus (the "esc" menu) and the menu at the start of the game allow themselves to be moved... but typically always place themselves right smack in the middle of the screen (right in the split of the two monitors). It'd be nice if they'd remember 'where you put them last time' or something; OR , alternatively, query the Xinerama attribute on the display and simply position themselves to the right or left of any 'split' by default.

- Dual-head (and , perhaps also.. ultra-widescreen) suffers from the problem of not being able to see the entire globe... , an issue already reported in some other threads. The "solution" would be to allow the world to "wrap" just a bit.. (creating duplicate parts on left and right of the screen).. but I can imagine that being a rather nasty piece of re-programming.
Alternatively, 'cheap' solutions would be to:
- Allow 'zooming out' just a bit (reducing the "width" of what you can see so that it doesnt 'wrap' on either side) and then scroll up/down to view the cropped areas.
- OR ... make it so that the maximum viewport-width is calculated based on the ratio-aspect of the map (which is fixed) and the height of the physical screen. That way, you'd end up with some 'empty bars' on either side of the viewport , but it'd allow viewing of the entire map, at least.

The dual-head issue is increasingly "nasty" because of the fact that dropping to 'windowed mode' won't actually solve anything. The "screen resolutions" offered in the Options->Screen config only list resolutions that have similar wide-aspect ratios... so in my case, 3200x1200, etc.. no options for , say, 1600x1200 are offered... Editing the preferences.txt file by hand will allow you to play with "everything visibule" in windowed-mode.. I might be able to cook up some correct Xorg/twinview 'metamodes' for some less-wide resolution and actually make it work "with black bars".. but i havent gone that road.. yet.

BUGS: on some hardware (we're talking fast Core 2 Duo 2.6Ghz machines here) the sound starts to 'tick'.. it starts out okay, but then slowly, a ticking starts to creep in which gets increasingly worse until it's suddenly gone again; only to start creeping in a little later again.. coming and going in cycles. Some cyclic ringbuffer that isnt filled in time... dunno ?
I've run Defcon on two boxes; one without dualhead; running Ubuntu 7.04 feisty.. Another machine, different ac97 chipset but WITH dualhead , also running Feisty .

Chipsets in both accounts were default ac97 things with Alsa-dmix drivers handling them.. One machine had it 'all the time'... the other only _very_ sporadically (when left on for loooong periods of time... which is the more interesting since that is the machine with the two 1600x1200 displays on it; handling a much greater graphical load on the system).

Documentation/sanity-issues: It'd be good to get the "Mods , under linux, go in the <defconhome>/libs directory" thing in some documentation somewhere.. I've had to look long and hard through the forums... Alternatively (_greatly_ preferred) would be to have them work when installed in ~/.defcon/mods which is "Teh unox way, zomg!!!1!"... like the OSX client seems to do, too.

Ah, the 'get mods' button in the mods-dialog spawns a webbrowser but the URL is something like "HTTP://<webhandler>/" or somesuch.. I think somebody left a stub there.

Oh.. and .. err.. I know i'm being really demanding here... but I'm a bit of an electronics-nut and I'm greatly interested in Led-lighting and dimming applications, etc.. I've been building some dedicated hardware to that effect (for computer-controlled appartment-lighting based on the NXP (philips) PCA96xx series, which I guess to be at the heart of a lot of the AmBx stuff aswell).... Any info on how portable the AmBx api is that Philips provides ? Or.. any chance of you guys writing some AmBX messages to a Unix socket that I could make my hardware listen to ? (building the groundworks of a AmBX driver for Linux... in effect.. adding the Philips hardware would be trivial if specs/sample 'd be available.).

All in all, however.. THANK you for building a TERRIFIC game!
--
Atsuj

[Jouu]

Long post, but great.








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toybomber