Linux is not ready for Steam

[Khudsa]

I don't understand how can I be so lucky man because I have played doom 3, half life 2 series (under wine), nexuiz, openarena etc... with a ubuntu 9.10 out of the box.

I can only say that PA works petry well.

[darkphoenix22]

Your claim does seems pretty isolated. Try a SDL or Allegro game.

[mugginz]

I don't get the part about USE flags, PA enabling/disabling, selecting mixers, configuration files, etc.

How many commercial Linux games have you purchased? I've bought about a dozen (though I'm not much of a gamer at all, just like the odd distraction) and they all worked out of the box, with zero problems.

The only exception were the early Doom3 demos, which demanded OSS + mmap at a very specific frequency (which won't work on PulseAudio either). Later, they added an ALSA backend, and that worked as well.

Of course, the open source games all work without issues too.

Well they must of fixed the Doom3 demo because I just downloaded it and it works perfectly on this box running Ubuntu 10.04 with Intel HDA audio and PulseAudio.

[mugginz]

How does Doom3 work with PA?

Is that commercial grade software enough? Or do only GNOME applets count?

OpenArena is often reported to have all sorts of troubles with PulseAudio.

See my previous post.

[mugginz]

BTW, I was saying that all the commercial games I've purchased worked out of the box on ALSA.

They probably don't work on PulseAudio, because they require mmap like Doom3 and Quake4 or for similar reasons.

See above

Oh, and World of Goo seems fine as well.

[darkphoenix22]

There are still many games based on SDL and Allegro that do not work.

[antenna]

Haven't had any issues with PA either, aside from Quake Wars. Everything else (OpenArena, Osmos, WoG, Nexuiz etc) has worked perfectly. Of course some old stuff may need fiddling with for some time but that's always going to be possible, it's not a reason to drop PA or whatever.

[darkphoenix22]

I have had severe skipping issues with Neverball, LinCity, ZSNES, Snes9x, Gens, and SDLMAME.

Audio did not work period on the Allegro games I tried, such as OpenSonic.

The former group uses SDL for sound.

[darkphoenix22]

Perhaps there's tricks being used by devs with OpenAL sound, but from what Svartalf said before, it sounds like an elabourate dance to make games tolarant of PulseAudio's buffer.

Heh... This I can concur with. This has been my experience with PA- though I've tapdanced around it with the games I've ported over. PA's got "okay" latencies- but unless it's got lower ones going through it's direct API, it's not quite there for use in the context of titles. It causes all sorts of odd issues. No. many of the titles don't use the sound playback as a main timing loop- but the sounds are typically coded such that they're in lock-step with the typically 50-100msec timing atom that is present in many titles. The other game effects are timed against the sound playback to increase immersion (it does no good to pull the trigger on a gun, only to hear the gunshot sound start 110msec after you did it, as it'll start feeling like a bad Kung Fu movie dub over.

Even in games that did work with PulseAudio, I noticed the same major improvement in latency that chperon mentioned when I removed PulseAudio.

Of the few games I play under Linux, Neverball (OpenAL), vDrift and PrBoom had severe drops. And SDLMAME is just unusable (plain SDL sound). All of this is on an unmodified Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10. All these problems just went away with 10.04, but I noticed very high CPU usage and increased latency when using PA (compared to plain ALSA).

[darkphoenix22]

Edit: I guess Neverball used OpenAL.