Is OpenGL required ?

B0rsuk · #1 October 11th, 2006, 04:32 AM

Hey.

It was possible to play Dominions2 without hardware acceleration. You just missed some animations and couldn't view battle replays.
Recently, my video card (Geforce2 MX 400) started suffering from old age afflictions. With OpenGL enabled, it occasionally freezes my linux box.Once that happens, it freezes over and over, until I turn my machine off for a couple of minutes and let it cool down.
So I switched the driver from 'nvidia' back to 'nv.

Can I still play Dom3demo without OpenGL ? I thought I could, but it segfaults with OpenGLish message.
I searched dominions folders for any kind of documentation, but there's no info about this kind of stuff.

I'm not going to buy a placeholder AGP video card just to play Dominions. I wait for Enemy Territory:Quake Wars, you see. And there are other heavy weight games coming to Linux, too, like Penumbra. So I really need the money for big hardware.

If there's no way to play Dom3 till ET:QW, I'll probably buy the 2 games at the same time. I'd be stuck with Linley's Dungeon Crawl for several months.

Alneyan · #2 October 10th, 2006, 04:46 PM

It can work. Kind of. Battles aren't too bad, but the map is *slow*, in my experience. Of course, you'd want to turn off all details, play fullscreen, and so on.

I suspect you would need *some* sort of GLX libraries, so that would be the mesa ones in your case; you need to be able to *start* glxgears, though you won't see the wheels spinning, of course. I'm not sure if that part is really necessary, though...

Once it's done, fire up Dominions with the relevant switches; in my case, just using -xxx was enough, but you might have to turn off OpenGL extensions as well. In any case, I did manage to play the demo a couple days ago, just using the nv drivers and a thrall CPU.

Gandalf Parker · #3 October 10th, 2006, 08:10 PM

I had to install Xwindows for some libraries even though I dont use xwindows and I run Dom3 in text mode only.

B0rsuk · #4 October 11th, 2006, 04:21 AM

Hmm. But the problem is my video card might heat up. It doesn't seem to heat up with opengl disabled. I wonder if 'quasi-enabling' opengl is risky. I'm not so much afraid of crash (althrough it's fairly annoying if you use Linux), but that my video card may permanently break.
I guess there's only one way to check.

Where can I find the commandline switches ? Demo doesn't come with manual.

Ygorl · #5 October 11th, 2006, 05:32 AM

I suspect "quasi-enabling" won't be any worse than using the card with OpenGL totally disabled. I of course can't make any promises, but using e.g. Mesa I think you should be doing all the OpenGL rendering stuff (which is what makes your card hot) in the CPU and then sending the finished product to the video card to put up on the screen. So, as far as the card is concerned, it should be no different than other non-3D-accelerated graphics.

Maybe someone with a stronger background in hardware can confirm? But if it were my card, I would feel comfortable using it with Mesa.

DominionsFan · #6 October 11th, 2006, 06:54 AM

Quote:

B0rsuk said:
Hmm. But the problem is my video card might heat up. It doesn't seem to heat up with opengl disabled.

wow this is pretty odd. I guess you have some old video card?

Jack_Trowell · #7 October 11th, 2006, 07:45 AM

From one of the hints during turn hosting, there was mention (if i recall correctly) of a "-x" switch to use when playing dominions 3 with old graphic cards, it might be what you need.

Someone with the manual (i'm still playing only the demo while waiting the game to ship) might be more precise.