Is OpenGL required ?

[Alneyan]

It can work. Kind of. Battles aren't too bad, but the map is *slow*, in my experience. Of course, you'd want to turn off all details, play fullscreen, and so on.

I suspect you would need *some* sort of GLX libraries, so that would be the mesa ones in your case; you need to be able to *start* glxgears, though you won't see the wheels spinning, of course. I'm not sure if that part is really necessary, though...

Once it's done, fire up Dominions with the relevant switches; in my case, just using -xxx was enough, but you might have to turn off OpenGL extensions as well. In any case, I did manage to play the demo a couple days ago, just using the nv drivers and a thrall CPU.

[Gandalf Parker]

I had to install Xwindows for some libraries even though I dont use xwindows and I run Dom3 in text mode only.

[B0rsuk]

Hmm. But the problem is my video card might heat up. It doesn't seem to heat up with opengl disabled. I wonder if 'quasi-enabling' opengl is risky. I'm not so much afraid of crash (althrough it's fairly annoying if you use Linux), but that my video card may permanently break.
I guess there's only one way to check.

Where can I find the commandline switches ? Demo doesn't come with manual.

[B0rsuk]

Hey.

It was possible to play Dominions2 without hardware acceleration. You just missed some animations and couldn't view battle replays.
Recently, my video card (Geforce2 MX 400) started suffering from old age afflictions. With OpenGL enabled, it occasionally freezes my linux box.Once that happens, it freezes over and over, until I turn my machine off for a couple of minutes and let it cool down.
So I switched the driver from 'nvidia' back to 'nv.

Can I still play Dom3demo without OpenGL ? I thought I could, but it segfaults with OpenGLish message.
I searched dominions folders for any kind of documentation, but there's no info about this kind of stuff.

I'm not going to buy a placeholder AGP video card just to play Dominions. I wait for Enemy Territory:Quake Wars, you see. And there are other heavy weight games coming to Linux, too, like Penumbra. So I really need the money for big hardware.

If there's no way to play Dom3 till ET:QW, I'll probably buy the 2 games at the same time. I'd be stuck with Linley's Dungeon Crawl for several months.

[Ygorl]

I suspect "quasi-enabling" won't be any worse than using the card with OpenGL totally disabled. I of course can't make any promises, but using e.g. Mesa I think you should be doing all the OpenGL rendering stuff (which is what makes your card hot) in the CPU and then sending the finished product to the video card to put up on the screen. So, as far as the card is concerned, it should be no different than other non-3D-accelerated graphics.

Maybe someone with a stronger background in hardware can confirm? But if it were my card, I would feel comfortable using it with Mesa.

[DominionsFan]

B0rsuk said:
Hmm. But the problem is my video card might heat up. It doesn't seem to heat up with opengl disabled.

wow this is pretty odd. I guess you have some old video card?

[Jack_Trowell]

From one of the hints during turn hosting, there was mention (if i recall correctly) of a "-x" switch to use when playing dominions 3 with old graphic cards, it might be what you need.

Someone with the manual (i'm still playing only the demo while waiting the game to ship) might be more precise.

[Arralen]

Code:

---

******* Video Options *******

-w  --window        Run Dominions 3 in a window

-u  --fullscreen    Use the entire screen

    --bitplanes X   Try to use a color depth of X bits per pixel

    --zbuffer X     Try to use a depth buffer of X bits per pixel (default=16)

-T  --textonly      Use this with --tcpserver to get graphicless server

    --gamma X       Set gamma function (brightness) 0.1 - 5.0 (default=1.0)

    --opacity X     Set gui opacity 0 - 100

-r  --res X Y       Set screen resolution / window size (default=800 600)

    --animback      Use animated backgrounds

-a  --noanimback    Don't use animated backgrounds

    --fade          Use fade effects

-f  --nofade        No fade effects

    --nopopups      No helpful popups

    --fps X         Aim for this nbr of frames per second (default=20)

    --maxfps X      Maximum nbr of frames per second (default=50)

    --filtering X   Quality of OpenGL filtering 0-3 (default=2)

    --maxtexsize X  Max texture size in pixels 32-4096 (default=unlimited)

    --treequal X    Tree quality 1-5 (default=3)

    --texqual X     Texture quality 1-5 (default=3)

    --nolightfx     No light effects in battles

    --partamount X  Max nbr of particles 0-8 (0=none, 4=default, 8=max)

    --nograss       Don't draw the grass

    --noarcade      Don't draw floating damage numbers

    --noglext       Don't use any OpenGL extensions

    --vsync         Enable vsync

-V  --novsync       Disable vsync

    --renderpath X  Use different optimizations 0-1 (0=good for low mem cards)

-x  --fastgrx       Faster graphics (use 3 times for best performance (-xxx))

-p  --perftest      Run a performance test and exit

---

[B0rsuk]

Arrrgh, I can't get Mesa to work. How did you do it ? The trouble is I can't find any sensible documentation, not to mention an example.
It would appear that I already had several 'mesa' packages installed, but I can't figure out how to use it instead of nv or nvidia. You know, the Driver "nv" section in xorg.conf . What do I put into xorg.conf (if anything ?)
In any case, glxgears doesn't run because;
Code:

---

b0rsuk@dziupla:~$ glxgears

Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".

Error: couldn't get an RGB, Double-buffered visual

---

I use (K)Ubuntu 6.06. I can't find anything except several dozen "ATI drivers suck and how to get rid of mesa" type of threads. Please help, I finally found a way to pay for Dominions3, and it would utterly suck to fail so close to my goal.

[Leif_-]

B0rsuk said:
Arrrgh, I can't get Mesa to work. How did you do it ? The trouble is I can't find any sensible documentation, not to mention an example.

Basically, all calls to 3D graphics eventually end up in the glx library. Mesa's libglx will do the low-level calculations itself, while the libglx that comes with NVidia drivers or similar basically acts as a front end to your graphic card.

You need to replace the installed libglx files on your system with Mesa's variant, or set your loadpath (LD_LIBRARY_PATH, I think, but not sure) so that Mesa's libglx library is loaded instead of your video driver's libglx.