Game technical cuestions on GNU/Linux

[JMO707]

Hi there.

Is anyone using the Planetary Pack from Loki Games?

I got 2 questions:

1- Is there anything similar to the AlphaCentauri.ini (if my memory is right) to configure the game on Linux?

Ive searched among the .txt files in the "data" directory, but I found nothing.

2- Is there anyway to listen music in the game without losing the voices and fx's?

I have seen on the Loki FAQ that the game music wasnt implemented at that time, and were never implemented after his closing. Therefore, Ive tryed to use Amarok to put something of my collection, but any other program that uses the sound card just make come mute anything from the game.

That isnt nice

[Darrell01]

As to the Lunix stuff, I don't know.

The audio stuff, perhaps this will help.

In the audio/visual preferences near the bottom right side of the preferences window, there is individual volumes for the Main, Voice, SFX, and Music. My guess is that yours is turned off on Music or turned all the way down. Click it till it says Music On or slide the volume bar to the right.

[Zeggpold]

Re: Game technical questions on GNU/Linux

Originally posted by JMO707
Hi there.

Is anyone using the Planetary Pack from Loki Games?

Yes!

I got 2 questions:

1- Is there anything similar to the AlphaCentauri.ini (if my memory is right) to configure the game on Linux?

Ive searched among the .txt files in the "data" directory, but I found nothing.

You should have a file call Alpha_Centauri.ini in the directory .loki/smac in your home directory.

2- Is there anyway to listen music in the game without losing the voices and fx's?

I have seen on the Loki FAQ that the game music wasnt implemented at that time, and were never implemented after his closing. Therefore, Ive tryed to use Amarok to put something of my collection, but any other program that uses the sound card just make come mute anything from the game.

That isnt nice

Yeah, I don't get the music either, so I think that FAQ is correct. (I don't think the loki version even shipped the music files.) As for playing music with another program, at one time, I think I was able to get something like that working with esd (aka the esound daemon), but it no longer works. (For some reason, smac no longer will talk to esd.)

In theory, alsa (the standard linux sound system) ought to be able to do software mixing, but I've never managed to get it working with smac (or many other programs); I think smac might just be too old.

[JMO707]

Thanks!, the Alpha_Centauri.ini result to be useful.

If I know somthing about the music, Ill post it.

Off-topic: Are you interested in a game? =p

Ive tried to play with other persons, but apparently the Loki port only works with other games in Linux =/

[Ari Rahikkala]

Wow. I think I've spent an hour here trying to compose a post to explain the technical background of what's going on, and have always ended up in murky esoterica like LD_PRELOAD or POSIX shm or the too-many-to-count sound servers floating around... this time I'll just tell what's going on, whether you have the knowledge to understand it or not, and hope that's enough .

You are probably using the ALSA drivers and their OSS emulation feature. ALSA can mix sound streams in software (dmix) but only if you're using the ALSA libraries. ALSA also has a tricksy way to make OSS-only software use the ALSA libraries, called alsa-oss (or by the name of the wrapper program itself, aoss). Thing is, while SMAC speaks OSS, the release version is also statically linked, meaning that alsa-oss, which works by hooking calls to open() and the like, won't work. This leaves you with a a difficult solution, and an easy solution that requires some money:

The difficult solution is to patch the game with the update that you can hopefully find at http://updates.lokigames.com/ , which includes some new executables - smac.dynamic and smacx.dynamic which *can* be wrapped by alsa-oss and which therefore can use dmix. However, since you're now working with dynamically linked executables you have to actually have the libraries that they need, in versions that are ABI- and bug-compatible with the ones used for developing the game. Good luck with that, I hope you like trawling archives. On my system, smacx.dynamic simply segfaults immediately on startup.

The easy solution is to just forget software mixing forever and get a soundcard that does mixing in hardware. I took this way years ago, and the one time I looked back I saw nothing but horror and misery. My sound card is an SB Live! 5.1, and pretty much anything using emu10k[12] should work perfectly with the ALSA drivers out of the box. Use the ALSA Soundcard matrix to direct your buying, note (3) stands for hardware mixing support.