Hi everyone,
I had a look but I couldn't find any threads here about running Civ in Linux yet so here we go
I'm running v1.52 at 1024*768 in Cedega 5.1 on Gentoo/amd64/gentoo-2.6.15-r7/gcc-3.4.6/glibc-2.3.6-r3/nvidia 8756/KDE 3.4.3 (freshly recompiled everything) with a Winchester 3200@1Ghz (not a typo, my watercooling is broken and I currently replaced it with a fan hanging from some tape from the case... so effective speed bearing in mind the fast memory etc. is probably something like a 2GHz P4 or something), 1GB DDR400, Asus A8N-SLI deluxe and a 6600GT/PCIe with 128 MB and it's still pretty slow
Even right after boot with about 100 MB memory used before starting Cedega it still runs ALOT slower than on a mates WinXP who has identical hardware except that he only has half the RAM. At least installation was simple though, and it's quite stable only crashing about 2 or 3 times on Adv5 which I've almost finished now. On my previous game (epic speed, 8 AIs, large pangea) it crashed quite often though, maybe every 5-10hrs. Okay, not that often
Anyways, there's a few problems I have, is anyone else having them?
1. As noted above, its pretty slow. Playable though, as long as keep memory usage outside Civ within reason (e.g. having OOo, kaffeine, kopete, gkrellm, a couple of shells and nedits open is fine, but if I add my 5 window 50 tab opera it slows). This also implies to me that the underclocking is not in fact the limiting factor, and the felt performance didn't suffer when I did that either. I hope the new patch helps with this but since I haven't finished Adv5 yet I can't try.
2. It sometimes after long play shows an error message that its out of graphics memory, I think it crashes soon after but I restart it if it does that as it fails to display everything... I don't think this actually has anything to do with graphics memory as I'm running on low settings with a 128 MB card.
3. I can't load mods. This is very very very very annoying actually, I really want to play the 20th century mod. I also tried the desert mod or something that came with the game but that didn't work either. Has anyone with Linux tried mods? If not can you please just quickly see if it even loads the mod?
4. It sometimes gets stuck trying to load savegames. I don't think this happened on my Adv5 yet, but it happened quite regularly on my previous game (epic speed, 8 AIs, large pangea). Just killing it and trying again usually fixed the problem, else I loaded an earlier save and once that worked I could always load the save I wanted to. After that the game liked to crash or show the graphics memory error though, so I usually just turned once, saved, and restarted it.
This problem also means that I'm running 3 autosaves which I think is against the rules. I hope that's okay though, it'd be pretty unfair to expect me to risk savegames just because I chose not to run a certain company's operating system, right? I obviously never repeat turns because of this, once I loaded an older save I immediately load the current one as described above.
Well looking forward to hear from your experiences, my first report should go up Monday when Adv5 finishes
I had a look but I couldn't find any threads here about running Civ in Linux yet so here we go
I'm running v1.52 at 1024*768 in Cedega 5.1 on Gentoo/amd64/gentoo-2.6.15-r7/gcc-3.4.6/glibc-2.3.6-r3/nvidia 8756/KDE 3.4.3 (freshly recompiled everything) with a Winchester 3200@1Ghz (not a typo, my watercooling is broken and I currently replaced it with a fan hanging from some tape from the case... so effective speed bearing in mind the fast memory etc. is probably something like a 2GHz P4 or something), 1GB DDR400, Asus A8N-SLI deluxe and a 6600GT/PCIe with 128 MB and it's still pretty slow
Even right after boot with about 100 MB memory used before starting Cedega it still runs ALOT slower than on a mates WinXP who has identical hardware except that he only has half the RAM. At least installation was simple though, and it's quite stable only crashing about 2 or 3 times on Adv5 which I've almost finished now. On my previous game (epic speed, 8 AIs, large pangea) it crashed quite often though, maybe every 5-10hrs. Okay, not that often
Anyways, there's a few problems I have, is anyone else having them?
1. As noted above, its pretty slow. Playable though, as long as keep memory usage outside Civ within reason (e.g. having OOo, kaffeine, kopete, gkrellm, a couple of shells and nedits open is fine, but if I add my 5 window 50 tab opera it slows). This also implies to me that the underclocking is not in fact the limiting factor, and the felt performance didn't suffer when I did that either. I hope the new patch helps with this but since I haven't finished Adv5 yet I can't try.
2. It sometimes after long play shows an error message that its out of graphics memory, I think it crashes soon after but I restart it if it does that as it fails to display everything... I don't think this actually has anything to do with graphics memory as I'm running on low settings with a 128 MB card.
3. I can't load mods. This is very very very very annoying actually, I really want to play the 20th century mod. I also tried the desert mod or something that came with the game but that didn't work either. Has anyone with Linux tried mods? If not can you please just quickly see if it even loads the mod?
4. It sometimes gets stuck trying to load savegames. I don't think this happened on my Adv5 yet, but it happened quite regularly on my previous game (epic speed, 8 AIs, large pangea). Just killing it and trying again usually fixed the problem, else I loaded an earlier save and once that worked I could always load the save I wanted to. After that the game liked to crash or show the graphics memory error though, so I usually just turned once, saved, and restarted it.
This problem also means that I'm running 3 autosaves which I think is against the rules. I hope that's okay though, it'd be pretty unfair to expect me to risk savegames just because I chose not to run a certain company's operating system, right? I obviously never repeat turns because of this, once I loaded an older save I immediately load the current one as described above.
Well looking forward to hear from your experiences, my first report should go up Monday when Adv5 finishes