This problem stems from having an DELL Inspiron 1501 - I had trouble with this sort of things already with QUAKE 4 and UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2004 - the problem being the sound card causing problems with everything. I'll explain:
Using the ALSA driver means you get lovely sound with UFO:AI (some other games are compromised with flickering screen and bad sound) and with UFO:AI this is mostly ok for everything else too, though when in the turn-based part of the game the frame rate plummets to around 3-4FPS max. The sound is still fine.
How do I know it is the sound driver? Well, if I start playing with the configuration a bit I can make it so the sound fails to initiate (which isn't really that good, though...) this meaning that the game has amazing frame rates all the time (ten fold improvement - very playable). I would like to be able to listen to the effects and music whilst playing, however. In other games, by changing the sound driver to OSS the game runs perfectly! Now, how is this done with UFO:AI, this is what I would like to ask!
I have a AMD64 Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), on a Dell Inspiron 1501. I have to type ./ufoai to get the game to run (I have modified the script file to use the ufo.x86_64 as the game binary:
# The game binary
GAME_BINARY="ufo.x86_64" )
I notice there is a line in the ./ufoai script which has the sound configuration set - if I try anything except "alsa" it fails to load any sound processes. I have tried "oss", "native", "dma", "sdl" & "arts" in this field; the field being:
# Set the sdl audio driver (default: oss)
# More at http://icculus.org/lgfaq/#setthatdriver
SDL_AUDIODRIVER="alsa"Does anyone know what I can do? Should I just play without sound? (I could make my own sounds! -pew pew! -urgh! etc.)
Thanks for reading, hopfully you can help!
R
PS. What is the difference between using ./ufoai and ./ufo - doesn't the former simply run the latter after executing it own pre-script?
