ok,
I have downloaded and compiled the complete amd64 2.4-dev version.
It worked fine, but slow at first with all settings maxed. Note, the squeeze package mentioned above did not work, missing dependencies as mentioned above.
The following is a brief breakdown of the video settings I used to achieve the best quality graphics with enough speed to be fully playable without any lag or slowdown. I am posting this because some people may get discouraged with the task, as I nearly did, +/- 30hrs of incremental changes noting the affects visibly and through the system monitor.
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Linux ubuntu 11.10 64bit (os)
amd athalon 64x2, 4000+x2, manually overclocked 10% (processor)
450Gb HD w/ Sata bus
Nvidia series 9 video card PCIe1a interface, 512Mb, 285.05.19 Driver
8Gb high speed ram
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X server Settings:
Resolution 1920x1080 (my opinion resolution has the largest impact on picture quality, and the second largest impact on fps, anti-alaising is the highest impact on performance)
sync to Vblank off (2 locations)
cursor shadow off
allow flipping off
open gl slider set to high performance
antialaising set to use application settings
anisotropic filtering overide application settings off
texture sharpening on
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Game settings:
Resolution- 1920x1080
pre cache models-on
resolution cap- extreme (visibly affects image not processor intensive)
filtering- bi/tri/mip (visibly affects image not processor intensive)
compression- off (on destroys image quality, but does slightly increase overall performance. I'd recomend keeping it off and dropping screen resolution or anti-alaising instead to increase performance)
anistropy- off
GLSL Shaders- on (a must for full experience of graphics)
Vertex Buffers- on (seems to have a slight increase in picture quality with no noticable impact on performance)
multisample buffers-3 (cleans the graphics noticably better with each increment, very processor intensive, noticable performance drop with each increase)
swap interval- 0 (no noticable graphics quality increase but significant impact on performance with each increment)
Post processor shading- on (noticable increase in graphics quality)
Realtime lighting- on (noticable increase in graphics quality)
dynamic lights- 1 ( any more than that and the soldiers whose heads move side to side develop what I call chin lights, a beam of light under their chin which lights up their armor on their chest and moves with their head, like a little flashlight, kind of annoying)
Texture normal mapping- off (on causes tiny little flickering white lights on the soldiers, their weapons and the aliens, tried to screenshot but they don't show in a screenshot)
Lightmap block size- High
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notes:
I wouldn't drop the multisample buffers/anti-alaising below 2, even at 2 the actor outlines start to become a point of fixation with the moving/shimmering
In my case I see no issues with the card or the drivers, there are four available drivers and they all function the same with this game. note however that the nvidia functions are largely disabled as illustrated above in the settings. Overiding the game settings with the card settings does produce slightly better graphics when tweaked but is tremendously more cpu intensive.
In my case it appears the cpu is my bottleneck when cranking up the anti-alaising which does impact quality noticably. I'll get a 6400 and install it then update this post accordingly.
manually setting the affinity of the game to both cpu's in my case did appear to balance the helix of cpu load swapping better, however one dedicated core was not capable of running smoothly. prior to manually assigning affinity one cpu would run 110% for roughly 10-15sec with the second at 35-40% before sharing the load, after manually assigning they swap in about 5sec intervals with loads not exceeding 98% on any one core.
on my system the game takes 1.8Gb ram, os +/- 750mb so likely 3Gb ram necessary to avoid bottleneck in ram.
It would be nice if the settings sliders were given editable numerical values, many of the sliders have drastic impacts on quality of graphics and are very difficult to return to original values, there is no reset to default so I recomend not playing with sliders unless you have alot of time on your hands or are willing to re-install game, re-install is likely faster than manually trying to get them all balanced again.
Hope this helps anyone getting frustrated with video settings.
