Getting Warsow to not suck on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid)

TL;DR: If you're having sound and frame-rate issues, use the OpenAL sound module. You'll need to create a symlink libopenal.so.0 to libopenal.so.1, since Warsow is expecting the former. Noob instructions follow.

So like, I have an ATI Radeon RV516 and a Pentium 4 HT, and I was using Ubuntu Lucid, right? And I wanted to play Warsow but I was having all sorts of issues with stuttering sound and a very low frame rate, right? So then I was like, OK I gotta fix this, right? And so I fixed it and I thought I'd tell everyone on my blog, right?</teenagegirl>

Anyway here's how you fix that shit. I'm using the version of Warsow available from the Warsow website. I haven't tried it with the one in the package repositories, because that's always twenty fucking years out of date. Here goes:

Install OpenAL.

sudo apt-get install libopenal1

Change to your Warsow directory and create a symbolic link from /usr/lib/libopenal.so.1 to libopenal.so.0 .

cd ~/warsow
ln -s /usr/lib/libopenal.so.1 libopenal.so.0

Run Warsow with the current working directory appended to the dynamic linker path. (This is how you will run Warsow from now, by the way.)

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./warsow.i386

Go to Setup -> Sound options and set the sound module to "OpenAL"

You're done! And it works MUCH better under Lucid than it ever did on Jaunty, hooray! :D

Oct 02, 2010

Padster said...

this is the problem i have, the sound stuttering, but i'm on the maverick beta now, and i installed warsow via synaptic, so it's not the unified zip thing. do you know what i could do to fix it?

Lewis Collard said...

I don't run Maverick on either of my computers, so this is all guesswork, but here goes...

First: figure out what the libopenal1 package is called on Maverick and modify the "sudo apt-get install ....." line accordingly. (If it's not in the Maverick repositories yet, then you're SOL, sorry, unless you feel like compiling it from source, which is something I'm way too lazy for these days.)

If that doesn't fix it (it might, might not, depending on whether the Warsow package in the repositories has been patched to check for libopenal.so.1 as well as libopenal.so.0), then you should do this:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libopenal.so.1 /usr/lib/libopenal.so.0

Then switch your sound driver in Warsow's setup to "OpenAL" and you should be fine. I can't help you much if this doesn't fix it.

BTW, I'm very curious about the hardware you have that has caused you to have exactly the same problems as me.

i have libopenal1 installed. i guess it came default, since i don't think i installed it. i made that link, and now i'll see if it works...
as for my hardware... well, this pc is one i made with extra parts. it's got an ati radeon 9550, and an athalon xp 2000, with 1 gb of ram, tho i have another 2 half gig sticks, but only 2 slots on my motherboard :-(. also on my laptop it does that stuttering, but idk what hardware it has. an ati card, too, tho. anyway, i'll see if the link helped, thx.

Ah, maybe it's a problem with the Radeon driver, somehow (even if that doesn't make any sense). Best of luck and let me know how things come along.

hey, thx it works now!

You are very welcome. :)

well, the weird thing is how when i did that link on the laptop it runs really slow. and its gfx card should be a lot better than this one. i have ~50-60 fps in small areas, and overall ~30. the laptop isn't great, but it's better than this old pc. and it's getting under 20 fps. also, in maverick i noticed things run a lot fater, too. openarena can run at 1024x768 at high settings now and before it ran at 800x600 at low settings. but it still shouldn't lag on the laptop.

Hmmmm. :/ I really don't know enough about laptops to know where the problem might lie. Sorry.

okay, well, thanks again :-)

Dec 02, 2010

cibi said...

tq Lewis Collard. it really works! Me running LinuxMint Julia, Nvidia Gforce 9100g. ^^

Back to my crappy blog