Revisiting Ubuntu and Trine 2 Audio Issue

I'm still running some tests on a possible solution to the problem.  I edited /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and added the line: options snd-hda-intel model=auto.  We'll see if it works.

Update on PulseAudio v ALSA

So, here I go again, diving into this PulseCrap and so, I've found that Ubuntu does come with the Pulse plugins for ALSA.  It's tucked inside libasound2-plugins but I'm starting to think this is the cause for my audio disappearing.  This reminds me of my OSS/ALSA days where sound contention causes the audio to just disappear.  Time to dive into the Launchpad bugs.

According to the archlinux blog, Trine 2 uses OpenAL, but I'm not certain if Natural Selection 2 uses that.  Still need to keep digging, though here's one interesting link I found.

Losing sound on select games...

I've noticed that on some games, I lose sound not only on the game, but also on the entire desktop. It's an odd issue, but I believe I have finally found a possible cause. I have tried playing Natural Selection 2 and although I am happy that it comes with a Linux client, along with Trine 1 and 2, as well as Red Orchestra, the sound goes away until I reboot.

I decided to run ldd on it to see if there were clues. I noticed that when I compare it with games that don't exhibit this behaviour that NS2 has a link to libasound.so which I think is a sure sign that this is another one of those ALSA vs Pulse Audio conflicts.  I will do more research, but this is a theory that is making a lot of sense at the moment.

The Final Stretch... hopefully

Slowly but surely, I'm starting to settle in on the new Ubuntu install.  I like the Unity desktop generally speaking.  There's a few oddities here and there like the lack of screensaver and how the UVC drivers are broken thereby rendering the web camera completely and utterly useless.

VirtualBox is giving me problems when I transferred my VM images from Ubuntu 9.10.  This has simply forced my hand into installing a new Windows 7 image for my work.  Shame but it had to be done.

Pulse Audio is much better here than in 9.10 but it still suffers from the HDMI issue where the audio cuts for the first few seconds.

Looking forward to the new Steam Linux release and have begun fiddling with Wine and the CrossOver Flock the Vote software.

Next time, I hope that the upgrade path will be smooth.  I'd hate to fight with it like this all over again.

Strange Wine Scratchy Audio Issue

I had a game that I run on Wine that kept exhibiting scratchy audio and after a few relaunches, it didn't seem to go away like I hope.  I then shut off pidgin and suddenly the scratchy audio went away.  Not sure what the correlation is with how both apps are using Pulse Audio, but it certainly is worth posting for possible further investigation.

Thoughts on Witcher 2

I don't know what to think of when it comes to Witcher 2.  Sometimes, it shines as  such a great game and sometimes I just want to bash my head into a wall.  My experience has been a combination of many things that I really take away from the experience, the first major factor being Wine's own glitches.

Witcher and Wine

Long ago, I started playing Witcher.  I haven't finished it yet because it's a darn long game.  When I played with it, I was running the Cross Over Lame Duck edition but I had to use version 7.2.2 because version 8 would just silently crash.  Running that had a few graphical glitches like the trees and the vitality and endurance bar, but other than that, perfect.

I just reinstalled the game and it's running on Wine 1.3.33, but I noticed a few peculiarities in addition to the graphical glitches. 

The first was that Geralt would only walk for a few steps.  Then he would start to glide on the floor.  I believe this has something to do with the keyboard input that is bugged in Ubuntu 9.10.  If you pull out the sword, you will notice Geralt walking a few steps and then perform a roll on the floor, indicating that the game was reading double-tap direction input.

Second was this occasional problem of Geralt not being rendered.  I toggled UseGLSL to disable which seems to help although it does still happen.  Restarting the computer seems to fix things, so I'm not sure what it is.

Third was an issue with the so-called puppeteer lines that are rendered on Geralt.  I noticed this when I ran the game from the launcher but when I ran the game from Witcher.exe it didn't have this problem.  I deduced that this has something to do with the fact that my AppDefaults on Witcher.exe weren't getting picked up when I run Launcher.exe.  Since I have separate Wine bottles for each game I have installed, I decided to push the AppDefaults into the actual Direct3D settings.

Lastly was a lack of sound.  My experience with Wine apps and sound (and PulseAudio) is that the longer my computer runs, the more Wine performance seems to suffer.  My suspicions are that PulseAudio is still not in a good implemented state.  After copying my audio settings from Tomb Raider Underworld, I rebooted the machine and ran the game.  The game gave me a good scare when it still didn't have audio but after checking the game's options, I realized there was a toggle to disable sound.  Bah!

I hope to finish Witcher this time around.  The game is really huge and I really want this to be over in preparation for Witcher 2.

Wine and pasuspender?

I am about fed up with PulseAudio in Ubuntu.  Since day 1, my problems with it just won't end and this is the closest I've gotten to embarking into ripping it out and going back to plain old Alsa.  This has been a real utter pain in the neck so far but I've been reading on pasuspender as some means to get audio working.

How To Temporarily Disable PulseAudio

I hate PulseAudio.  I hate it with a passion.  Unfortunately, I picked Ubuntu when I should have gone Xubuntu.  Now, I hope this can solve some of the woes I'm having with wine and Tomb Raider (as well as other Wine related software).

Tomb Raider Underworld and Wine

Well, I gave the demo for a spin because I did enjoy the game series on the Wii. It does look like Wine can handle the game properly, but the sound is incredibly choppy and it bogs everything down. I suspect this has something to do with the blast pulseaudio that is really giving me quite a headache. Maybe it is time to rip it out and install alsa!

Hmmm... definitely food for thought.

Wine Pulse Audio Regression

This is an awful regression. Wine now has very horrible scratchy sound and it's very annoying. This could not have come at a worse time with the Star Wars beta.

Wine and Pulse Audio Update

Backporting a newer version of wine right now... and I bumped into a problem with mpg123 because of the 32-bit vs 64-bit references on /usr/include/mpg123.h.

I'm using the patch from this thread to get around that and I'm using the packages provided by Rune Svendsen to build this.

UPDATE:

It works! Running a game without having to use the Pulse Audio wrapper is a good thing. Begs to question why Ubuntu did not include the WinePulse patches in their releases.

Fixing Wine and Pulse Audio

Well, I'm pretty much fed up with Pulse Audio. I'm not sure why Ubuntu ever went this route when it has caused so much audio incompatibilities with applications and games. Hacker Evolution: Untold and Trine are just a few games that lose all sound with this audio system and there's pretty much nothing I can do about it. (Side note: Cogs works splendidly well and it's a very good indie game).

After reading about winepulse, I'm about ready to backport some newer Wine versions with WinePulse integrated in it. We'll see how it goes, and hopefully everything works fine.