Fire effect in wolfenstein crashes game
 

Anytime I'm fighting one of those flaming mummies and the screen gets full of the fire effects the game locks up and I have to press ctrl+alt+backspace to close the game. The frame will basically freeze and the sound effects will repeat themselves until I reset X. I can only assume that everything is working fine in the background.

I have driver version 195.36.24

It also seems to me that I cannot get the compiz effect that explodes the window in flames when you close it either.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.

Try disabling compiz while playing RTCW and see if the problem goes away. You can easily enable and disable compiz by installing the compiz fusion icon. Compiz is known to not play well with many games so it's convenient to have a method to easily enable and disable compiz like the compiz fusion icon if you are a gamer.

Hmm... Maybe I'm getting compiz confused with something else. I don't see it in system monitor or ps aux | grep -i compiz. I go to system settings > desktop > desktop effects > general > untick "enable desktop effects" and then start wolfenstein, but it still locks up at the fire mummy. I also tried loading up fluxbox where I don't have much of anything configured and the same issue.

You are using the KDE4 desktop effects, which are separate from compiz. kwin has its own opengl compositor and, as far as I know, the 'burn' animation you are looking for is not available with the KDE4 desktop effects.

As for X locking up when playing RTCW, you may wan to consider reporting that to nvidia.

Adam

It is possible, but not advisable to run compiz under kde4, but that does not appear to be the case here judging from the ps aux output. You could try changing the settings on RTCW to something less graphically intensive.

It's been a while since I've played RTCW but I vaguely recall some problems with the fire mummies locking up the screen when you were engulfed in flames. I think I used a cheat code to give me unlimited bazooka ammo and blasted them all to kingdom come before they could get their flames going.

Why is it not advisable?

Adam

Because kwin has its own compositing effects specifically designed for kde4. Using compiz instead of kwin for compositing effects just leads to instability.

Heh... That's quite a stretch if you ask me. compiz has more effects, is more configurable, and more stable.

Adam

EDIT: Not to mention faster.

Adam

Well, according to HERE the problem only occurs when you have an Nvidia card and a sound card that is not on THIS list. ATM, I'm not really sure why this is. I only found that because I had been searching using the keyword mummies, when people preferred to use the term flame zombie.

lol... I had just assumed that compiz was the only 3D effects program as it's the only one I'd heard of.

hedron: did you ever solve your issue with RTCW and the flaming zombie? I'm having it with two computers (one fedora 12, the other fedora 13) and RTCW always locks. Also, did you have this issue also with older nvidia drivers?

Regards.

OK, just to let you know: it seems the flaming zombie problem is related to the OS architecture. I had this issue under fedora 12 64 bits. I just formatted the PC, installed fedora 12 32 bits and RTCW no longer crashes with the flaming zombie. Not sure if the bug is in RTCW, the nvidia driver or linux kernel, but it seems to be triggered by running RTCW un der 64 bits. Strange thing is that I've run more complex games (Doom 3 and Quake 4) under 64 bits and they do not crash. This points (to me at least) to the bug being in RTCW.

Regards.