Linux Corner

[A Nonny Moose]

There are at least two players using Linux, so I felt an entry would be useful here.

I am using Ubuntu 15.04 currently with wine-1.7.50.  A 32-bit prefix in Windows 7 decor.  I use a single prefix for all programs I run and develop scripts to run them.

I am not necessarily a model for users because I am an old sweat UNIX user among other things and really prefer command line operations to GUI for things like this.

[Pangaea]

Taking it over here then (won't there be fewer eyes  though?)

I'm using LInux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon, which is based on Ubuntu 14.04. Playing the game via PlayOnLinux, and installed using the script provided by them (or rather some user). Everything appeared fine to begin with, but after playing for a few hours, with some mods, the game started crashing. I think it occurs during autosaving, but am not 100% sure. Naturally I have a crash dump file, but unless your name is Luke (the coder) I guess it's of little value.

Don't know what is wrong, but would really like to fix it so I can play this game in Linux. I do have dual boot with Win 7, but haven't booted up that vile thing in months, practically since I made the (hopefully final!) switch to Linux.

Not sure if connected, but I noticed that if I ESC to the menu during play, the music will stop playing, and never seems to get started again. This happened on Windows too I recall, but the music would start playing again there, after a little time.

I'm not very proficient with terminal and scripts, but what can I do to get a log of events so it can be easier to trace down what causes these crashes?

[Pangaea]

Gotta run off to vote now, there's a local election here in Norway, but I hope this will work.

Noticed the install only had the Application file, not the x32 or x64 versions. So I copied them over from a zip from the latest patch, plus all other files. Perhaps the GOG version is totally updated by their internal magic, but in any case, the patch0 and patch1.pkgs were really small, so I copied over the other ones. Then deleted the DX11 files. Will play when I get home, and hope it's possible to play longer than 5-10 mins without a crash.

:please:


edit:
Very quick test, which went straight to hell Loaded the game, saved and tried to quit. Crash. FFS

[A Nonny Moose]

I was under the impression that mods turned off the autosave.  Or maybe the word was that it must be turned off if you run with mods.

Anyway, I have it turned off, and the game runs for hours.  I have only half a dozen mods since I am not interested in turning this into some other game.

[Pangaea]

I don't get it. Was finally able to play for hours upon hours yesterday without any hickups (missing music aside). Suddenly the game crashes (not when autosaving) and after that I couldn't even load the save. Gave up and turned off the computer. Today the game crash before being able to select a save game to load. I hit the "Load" button, and BAM.

I'm not playing with a zillion mods either, at least mods that make significant changes. I quite like the game the way it was made. In total there are a fair few (around 10), but most of them make very small changes, like muting the livestock, muting the wind, making orchards live longer, etc. However, this time I  included the root cellar, grain silo, monastery and college. Have built two root cellars, but none of the others.

[A Nonny Moose]

Hmmm.  How often do you save?  I try to do it once an hour.

Some games do a general garbage collect during the save process, and I am wondering if you somehow didn't get properly garbage collected.  Did you try to open an earlier save?  I don't overwrite saves having absolutely tons of disk space, I don't worry about it.

However, if I abandon a game (I only work one village at a time), I have a script that deletes everything in the save directory.  Here it is, if it will help you.

john@john-12-10:~$ cat bin/wipeBanished
#!/bin/bash
rm ~/Banished/Save/*.sav
echo Banished wiped

[Pangaea]

I make manual saves now and then, and happen to have one about half an hour prior to the last autosave. Same result there, though, the game crashes while loading it. Very frustrating if that save is lost entirely, after spending hours on it and playing almost 20 years (I play at 2x).

Here are the mods I used. Don't think they should mess things up, but maybe you guys will know better. I've been away from the game for almost a year after all.

Betterfields (I had 3 small cropfields and a few pastures as the merchant dropped by with livestock)
Bobbi doctor house (not yet built a hospital)
College (not built)
Grain silo (not built)
Irrelevant tweak crops (3 cropfields, I started with pepper and pumpkin)
LongerLivingOrchards (my own, they live ~20 years)
Monastery (not built, do books actually do anything?)
MuteLivestock (active as I have some livestock now)
NoWind (my own, it simply turns off the annoying wind effect)
Rootcellar (I have built two root cellars)
Season2Year (changes a text field, hardly intrusive stuff)
Warehouse (not built)


Suppose I should back up the saves and try to reinstall and hope that goes better, considering loading earlier saves doesn't work either.

I really hope Luke hasn't abandoned this game, and that he'll eventually make a Linux (and Mac) version of the game. Last blog update almost 6 months ago


-----
Tried to load a very old savegame, but with the same crashing result. After a few seconds, the guy 'mining' in the loading screen stops moving, and at that point everything has crashed, and there is an error message in the same workspace as the game is in ('behind' the game, in fullscreen). The game doesn't CTD, so I manually need to exit it.

[Pangaea]

Finally found a save that works, at least it loaded without crashing, but it's so far back I may as well not bother, particularly as I don't know what is causing these issues, and whether it will occur again.

Just when things were finally starting to get interesting

Don't want to get into such a rut again, so probably best to just let this game be, and hope Luke hasn't moved on to other things.

[A Nonny Moose]

I really think you need to turn autosave off.  If you have to, get yourself a minute minder that rings after the set interval, and no matter what's going on in the game, do a save then.

I've been playing this since it came out, and haven't had any crashes.  I've been applying updates as they come out to the O/S and to wine.  Currently I am on Ubuntu 15.04 with a 32-bit wine prefix running wine-1.7.50.  Runs very slowly, but it does run.  I do not run any other tasks or apps when running this program.

Luke will have a lot of trouble getting this program off of Visual Studio.  There is one heck of a learning curve getting to GDK 3 and the GNU programming environment with the gcc compiler.  The devhelp index is both baffling and opaque.  If he is lucky he should be able to get to a development suite that pretty much hides all this.  The recommended one is Eclipse.  There are several other IDEs, but this one seems to be the most comprehensive.  It defaults to Java, but can be made to use C++.

I've been following another developer who is making a new city simulation (citybound: http://community.simtropolis.com/forums/forum/265-citybound/ and after a really hot start, real life is getting in his way.  He got married and has moved a couple of times.

[Pangaea]

I really think you need to turn autosave off.

I tried that now. Still crashed. This time while trying to make a manual save.

Had started from scratch again on this map seed. Not built a single mod object yet, not even a betterfields farmcrop. Don't want to waste more time with this game if if just keeps crashing.

[Pangaea]

I'm stupidly persistent, so am trying once again. This time a clean install after wiping everything. Using wine 1.7.50. Installed DX9, xact, gdiplus, vcrun2010 (not sure if all are needed). Unlike before, there is a crackling sound. Anything I can do about that?

No idea if it's any more stable. Before it's been possible to play for hours, sometimes, and then it's like flicking a switch and nothing works.

Haven't replaced any files from patch zips or the ModKit, hoping that will help. May have done that the first time though, and it still crashed then. *gulp*

Only renamed the DX11 file. Does anything look wrong?

[A Nonny Moose]

I haven't been able to get the game to recognize DX11 even running with W 7 decor.  And that reminds me that I have set the 64-bit prefix when I ran something else, so I will now reset that ... done.

If you are running with a 64-bit prefix you might consider changing to 32-bit. See http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#32_bit_wineprefix

This means that you would have to load Banished in its 32-bit decor on this prefix, but I haven't had a problem with it.

BTW, how about a description of your machine?

[Pangaea]

I'm not running with DX11, I just had that file highlighted because it's the only file I did anything to: I renamed it so that it won't be recognised (.bak).

The game crashed again anyway. This is pointless. Was during saving again, a manual save with autosaves turned off.

I'm fed up now. Bye guys. Hope Luke makes a Linux build at some point, if he is able and hasn't moved on.


Btw: my specs are
Intel i5 4670K CPU
8GB RAM (expensive when I bought a new computer not too long ago)
Nvidia GTX770 GPU.

Code: [Select]

pangaea@thunderstruck ~ $ inxi -Fxz
System:    Host: thunderstruck Kernel: 3.13.0-37-generic x86_64 (64 bit, gcc: 4.8.2)
           Desktop: Gnome Distro: Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca
Machine:   Mobo: MSI model: Z87-G43 (MS-7816) version: 1.0 Bios: American Megatrends version: V1.6 date: 11/27/2013
CPU:       Quad core Intel Core i5-4670K CPU (-MCP-) cache: 6144 KB flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx) bmips: 27198.8
           Clock Speeds: 1: 800.00 MHz 2: 800.00 MHz 3: 800.00 MHz 4: 800.00 MHz
Graphics:  Card: NVIDIA GK104 [GeForce GTX 770] bus-ID: 01:00.0
           X.Org: 1.15.1 drivers: nvidia (unloaded: fbdev,vesa,nouveau) Resolution: 1920x1080@60.0hz
           GLX Renderer: GeForce GTX 770/PCIe/SSE2 GLX Version: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 346.82 Direct Rendering: Yes
Audio:     Card-1: Intel 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset High Definition Audio Controller driver: snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 00:1b.0
           Card-2: NVIDIA GK104 HDMI Audio Controller driver: snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 01:00.1
           Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture ver: k3.13.0-37-generic
Network:   Card: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
           driver: r8169 ver: 2.3LK-NAPI port: d000 bus-ID: 03:00.0
           IF: eth0 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: <filter>
Drives:    HDD Total Size: 2560.5GB (54.9% used) 1: id: /dev/sda model: ST2000VX000 size: 2000.4GB
           2: id: /dev/sdb model: KINGSTON_SH103S3 size: 240.1GB 3: id: /dev/sdc model: ST3320620AS size: 320.1GB
Partition: ID: / size: 30G used: 7.9G (29%) fs: ext4 ID: /home size: 141G used: 119G (90%) fs: ext4
           ID: swap-1 size: 1.08GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap
RAID:      No RAID devices detected - /proc/mdstat and md_mod kernel raid module present
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 29.8C mobo: 27.8C gpu: 0.0:35C
           Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/A
Info:      Processes: 175 Uptime: 9:36 Memory: 1642.1/7929.6MB Runlevel: 2 Gcc sys: 4.8.4 Client: Shell inxi: 1.8.4

[A Nonny Moose]

About the only thing left to suggest is that you try it on a 32-bit prefix (with the 32-bit version) with no plugins on a clean install.

The fact that you can run sometimes and sometimes just crash is saying something that I hate to think of on a Linux distro:  Malware.  Have you installed CLAM-AV?

[Pangaea]

About the only thing left to suggest is that you try it on a 32-bit prefix (with the 32-bit version) with no plugins on a clean install.

The fact that you can run sometimes and sometimes just crash is saying something that I hate to think of on a Linux distro:  Malware.  Have you installed CLAM-AV?

Unless I have misunderstood something, I'm already running it in 32-bit. Playonlinux have both 32-bit versions and 64-bit versions (of wine), but I'm only using 32-bit versions.

Not tried ClamAV, but I can see if I find it and see. I don't get why this should be such a big problem, while many others, like you, can run it without any hickups. I've seen a few step by step guides too, and I've tried them, but it still crashes (usually when trying to save manually). No matter what I try, I get the same end result: crashes

Could try the Linux Mint forum too I suppose, but I suspect they'll just point me in the direction of Banished or POL support places. I simply don't get it. Everything seems to run perfectly, the missing music aside (the sound crackling disappeared, possibly due to installing mono210 component?). I can do everything, the game runs smooth, but suddenly it just crashes out of the blue. Horribly frustrating.