Linux gaming woes (2 problems... Quake III Team Arena and Quake IV)

Hi all... I own the Quake series from Quake to Quake IV and enjoy playing all the games on the linux platform. In my experience until now, Ubuntu has been the best choice for gaming. It just seemed to work better. As of date I can run Darkplaces, yamagi-quake2, and ioquake3 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x86_64 with all the missionpacks and add-ons. I have even made proper menu launchers for the games and missionpacks for each of the games. Quake IV does NOT run on Ubuntu so I turned to Slackware... my main OS.

Problem #1: Quake III Team Arena

Currently my favorite Operating System is Slackware 14.1 x86_64 with multilib and I can run ALL the games from Darkplaces to Quake IV from the same custom launchers I have made for Ubuntu with the exception of Quake III Team Arena. I can launch Quake III Arena fine and then start Team Arena from the game itself but cannot launch straight into Quake III Team Arena from the custom launcher I have made. It just loads Quake III and I still have to launch Team Arena from the game itself. My current .desktop launcher's command to launch Team Arena is the following:

Exec=/usr/games/ioquake3 +set fs_game missionpack

EDIT: I figured it out. The proper command to launch Quake III Team Arena is:

Exec=/usr/share/games/quake3/ioquake3.x86_64 +set fs_game missionpack

(tell all your friends)

I guess Slackware wants the full path of the game instead of a script which points to it.

Problem #2 Quake IV

Quake IV will not start in Ubuntu at all...

Quake IV runs in Slackware just fine but there is no sound. Since there is sound in all the other games from Darkplaces to Quake III using the 64bit binaries I am going to assume that this is a compat32 library problem. I am using droplines pulseaudio and have converted and installed the pulseaudio compat32 package but this does not help. I did a little digging from my terminal and when I start the game I get the following:

-------- Initializing Sound System ----------

sound system initialized.

---------------------------------------------

--------------- R_InitOpenGL ----------------

Initializing SDL subsystem

Loading GL driver 'libGL.so.1' through SDL

SDL_ListModes:

1024x768 1024x576 800x600 640x480

SDL_ListModes are currently ignored for resolution filtering. Set r_useSDLModes to 1 if you want it

8/8/8/8 RGBA bits, 24 depth bits, 8 stencil bits

no multisampling

------ Alsa Sound Initialization -----

dlopen(libasound.so.2)

asoundlib version: 1.0.27.2

ALSA lib dlmisc.c:252snd1_dlobj_cache_get) Cannot open shared library /usr/lib/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so

snd_pcm_open SND_PCM_STREAM_PLAYBACK 'default' failed: No such device or address

dlclose

--------------------------------------

----------- Alsa Shutdown ------------

--------------------------------------


When I do a: “locate libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so” from the terminal I find:
“/usr/lib64/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so”
(from my Slackware installation)
and
“/ubuntu/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so”
(from my Ubuntu installation)
I also find the same file in:
“/tmp/SBo/alsa-plugins-1.0.28/pulse/.libs/libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so”
“/tmp/SBo/package-alsa-plugins/usr/lib64/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so”

...so the file is obviously part of the alsa-plugins package.

I already have the alsa-lib compat32 and the alsa-plugins compat32 packages from alienbob's multilib installed but they do not provide the 32bit binaries of the file(s) I need for ALSA emulation in Quake IV to play the game.

How do I get them? Or where do I get them?

Quake IV is by far the best of all four of the series and I would really like to play the game and finish it. I have owned the game for many years (since it first came out) but never have played even half way through. I think I got to the part where I was turned into a Strogg and left the game there and lost my savegame.

I have no internet at home so I am at the library downloading packages and SlackBuilds. I am going to try downloading and converting/installing dropline's alsa-plugins package from their i686 mirror and see what happens next.

So, once again if anyone can help me out with these issues I would be very happy.

You probably mean the alsa-oss package?

Just get the latest copy from the 32-bit version of your distribution and run AlienBOB's package converter tool against it and it will properly repackage the alsa-oss package properly. Details to use the tool are in his multilib readme.

You probably should also see if you need the SDL package from 32-bit as well and if so, convert it and install it too, unless AlienBOB already has a package available.

I might be mistaken, but I think there is an SBo package for Quake 3 available in the SBo repository, might want to give it a look over because it might be 64-bit compatible.

When you run Quake IV, try launching it from the command like this

aoss ./quake4 (or whatever the executable is)

I am not sure if pulseaudio will interfere, you may want to remove it first.

I maintain the ioquake3 build over at SBo.org and yes if you want to launch a mission pack you will have to do it from the command line from the parent directory because most launchers are just a bash script that point to the quake III executable.

Have you tried Quakespasm? It's more for Quake 1 purists than Darkplaces is, and I like it better.

Isn't there a Java version of Quake out also?

next up: quake on an oscilloscope

Now if they put Quake on a Braillewriter...

When I played Quake IV to the end, it was while running whatever Slackware was current at the time of release. I was running the 32 bit version at the time, so I didn't have to deal with multilib.

I don't seem to have the launcher available any more (I run pure 64 bit now), but my ~/.quake4/q4base/Quake4Config.cfg file contains (among other things)...
I know that is not a lot of help (to say the least), but I played QuakeIV to the end under Slackware. I know that it can be done and I did so using the binary available from ID at the time.

I simply installed Quake IV using wine (Slackware -current) and it runs flawlessly.

The other thing that may be happening is that quake4 just looks in the wrong spot for that file and it doesn't actually need to be a 32bit library. Try doing a symlink linking the file from the /lib64 directory to the /lib directory.

If this doesn't work, you'd likely need a compat32 package of alsa-plugins. I don't know of any easy way to do this with any SBo tools, so you might need to follow the instructions on Eric's multilib page (down towards the bottom under "Compiling 32-bit programs"). Just download the relevant files from SBo, and then follow the instructions from Eric prior to executing the slackbuild. After that, make sure you run convertpkg-compat32 to convert it to a compat32 package. If you don't you will likely replace your 64bit package with a 32bit and could cause you problems.

Good luck

convertpkg-compat32 should be able to import any package from Slackware 32-bit just fine. Just make sure to resolve any dependencies using ldd.

Oops, I meant alsa-plugins, not alsa-oss. Post adjusted...

so here's what's going on... I have dropline 3.14 installed and their resulting pulseaudio and alsa-plugins packages so I downloaded the i686 alsa-plugins package that goes along with it and convertpkg-compat32 -i blah.txz but the resulting package did not install the libraries I needed. when I extracted the dropline package afterwards it had all the files I needed (or so I thought) so I just copied the contents of alsa-lib and the resulting folders to their proper directories leaving the compat32 package installed and ran quake4 from a terminal and got the same missing library message. I also tried copying the /usr/lib64/alsa-lib/ *.so (etc) to /usr/lib/alsa-lib and had no such luck either.

so then I did killall pulseaudio and promptly shut down my sound system :P ( I ran alsamixer and got a connection refused error ) what I was trying to do was shut down pulseaudio and fall back to the alsa drivers but I think I can't do that while pulseaudio has been installed, so my first question now is:

can I turn off pulseaudio temporarily and use the alsa drivers for playing games and then turn on pulseaudio again afterwards?

my second question is: is there a way to switch soundcards as well? when I fire up alsamixer it shows the pulseaudio master out and that's it. when I F6 to switch sound cards I get the full alsamixer again. so I am wondering if there is a way to tell Slackware to use that mixer for games and pulseaudio for everything else. can I do this?

(at present quake4 ran just fine with sound on Slackware 14.1 multilib using the 64 bit alsa drivers)... too bad installing dropline's pulseaudio borked my game, especially now that I have had all four of the quake games running without dropline installed. still scratching my head. any other thoughts?