GearHead 2 under Linux and seeing blue screen instead of normal game

[michalis]

Hi

To everyone who uses GearHead under Linux and experienced the strange effect that looks like the game doesn't draw on the screen (typically, you will see (almost) only pure blue screen when the game started, instead of the menu):

1. The first cause of this was found long time ago, and can be fixed by using USE_SOFTWARE_SURFACE (and eventually WINDOW) in gearhead.cfg, as explained on http://michalis.ii.uni.wroc.pl/~michalis/gearhead_ unix/

2. Recently, I found another possible cause of similar problem. To cut the long story short, it seems there's a bug in Radeon OpenGL fglrx drivers (that is, the closed-source (and known to be less reliable, but also faster) Radeon drivers under Linux). I made a workaround for this, and it seems to work fine on my Radeon in MacBookPro.

But I think we need more people to confirm this, and to eventually place this workaround (with Joseph's blessing) in the next GH2. Also, it would be good to confirm that this workaround is needed precisely on Radeon fglrx under Linux --- then it can be automatically activated when fglrx/Linux is detected (no need to add another option to gearhead.cfg, and things will work magically just right).

So if you
- run Linux (on i386),
- and you experience the blue-screen problem,
- and placing USE_SOFTWARE_SURFACE and WINDOW in gearhead.cfg doesn't help...

then please test the following two GH2 versions, and report the results (whether the problem is fixed or not). Along with your graphic card / OpenGL information (if you don't know what it is, just run glxinfo in the console, and paste the contents of three lines "OpenGL vendor string", "OpenGL renderer string", "OpenGL version string").

Two binaries:

gh2trunk-svn321-sdl-linux-i386-NO_FIX.tar.gz

gh2trunk-svn321-sdl-linux-i386-WITH_FIX.tar.gz

If all my suspicions are correct, the one with NO_FIX will fail to work (same blue-screen problem) and the one with WITH_FIX will work Ok. On Radeon fglrx, that is. On other graphic cards both should work Ok.

If anyone wonders: these versions are compiled from current GH2 sources in SVN (revision 321). WITH_FIX has this patch applied: glgfx.patch, NO_FIX has the same patch but with constant Revert_Safer_Slower set to false (which essentially brings back normal GH2 drawing method).

[Joseph Hewitt]

I'll include this patch in the next release. I hope to make a new release soon, then get to work on the graphics changes we discussed in email. Its always best to make a fairly stable release before starting on something big like that.