Deus Ex Forum

The game runs very well.

A common complaint for this game is that it's too fast, even in windows. It adds a bit of challenge, but it's annoying because even the sound is affected. It seems the engine has its own expectations of when the audio should end, and it cuts it short everytime, unless you fix the game's speed.

Out of the many options, hacks, and voodoo tricks recommended for fixing the speed, setting the "Sync to VBlank" option seems to me the safest and most sensible. First make sure your video card's settings allow for Syncing, then make sure the video configuration has UseVSync set to true. In my case, I have to re-set the video card's Sync settings every time I play. YMMV.

Xubuntu 9.10, amd64, nVidia GeForce 9500GT.

Game's video settings are set to Direct3D rendering. Resolution, color depth (16- or 32-bit), and fullscreen/windowed modes could be changed to anything. Sometimes changing the Display options messed up the mouse, so I would not recommend changing those things mid-game.

Hi,

Just wondering here about the speed too fast business...has anyone tried setting the cpu_affinity
of the task to only use 1 cpu core? Also, does setting the "__GL_ExtensionStringVersion" environment
variable back to an earlier version have any affect?

Cheers!

I did try the cpu_affinity thing. It didn't have any effect mid-game, which didn't surprise me. And the next time the game was run, the cpu_affinity had been reset automatically.

I have not tried that env variable, and I'm not familiar with it. Could you be more specific?

Thanks!

Hi,

There is (fuller) documentation on this in the file ;

/usr/share/doc/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0/README.txt

..which should have been installed on your system, however
take a look at this thread ;

http://www.codeweavers.com/support/forums/general/?t=25;mhl=78130;msg=75829

That should give you all you need to know...

Cheers!

Can't figure out how to run a Steam game directly from the command line.

There used to be a way, but the new Steam's shortcuts are now .url files with "steam://blah" URLs as their content. They used to be regular windows .lnk files. And I haven't figured out how to get those .url files to run in CXG.

:(

Ooh!!!...yes yes yes and no no no... 8) ...I was having a chat
about that URL link stuff in a ticket...seems it's actually a
legitimate way (in windows) to make a call to an exe in that
fashion, but it's not supported/implemented in crossover/wine
yet..that one, the codeweavers devs know about - no doubt they
will be looking to fix that sooner rather than later me thinks...

Regarding running steamapps from the CLI what I usually do is
first spawn the Steam exe itself with whatever params and in
theory those env_vars are inherited by all the children of
the parent process...ie; our parent process is actually wine,
and steam.exe is a child of that, and steamapps are child siblings
of that same group..(I think that's how it goes)..so you do this
instead..(or something like it)...;

bash-3.2$ [env_var {opts}] [taskset {opts}] ~/cxgames/bin/wine --bottle <bottlename> --cx-log ~/steamapp_name.log.gz  [--debugmsg {+/-channels}] --cx-app steam

Some permutation of the above is what you should do to 'get dirty'
with a troublesome title. You can do an equivalent thing in the new
GUI now too (which is pretty cool, because previous linux CXG didn't
include this..why I know the above commandline so well 8)...start
cxsetup (bottle manager) and highlight your Steam bottle -> run command
-> browse to steam.exe in that bottle -> open -> debug options. You
will see in that window, the analogous widgets to parts of he command
line above. To add any env_var/taskset opts, prepend the 'Command:'
string there with such [params] -- launch Steam exe like this, with
or without logfile and/or debug, then launch Deus Ex...should work ;
with debug on, the specified logfile would contain not only steam exe
'chatter', but also that of whatever deusex exe was saying...I'm not
sure what debug channels to check out if you want to try better isolate
the cause..uum... +seh,+thread,+x11drv might be a good place to start,
maybe throw in +dsound as well as it's seeming related to sound in one
way or another...

..hope this helps...

Cheers!

Still fast 😥

Here's my terminal command:

__GL_ExtensionStringVersion=17700 "/home/beta/cxgames/bin/wine" --bottle "DeusEx" --check --wait-children --start "C:/users/crossover/Desktop/Steam.lnk" "$@"

A tip in the Tips & Tricks section says that "Emulate virtual desktop" helped with some problems with the Steam version.

In my case, with CXG 9.0.0, it failed miserably. I could not run the game at all.

So I renamed that tip to include "CXG 8.1.4" in its title. I'm merely guessing the version number from the date of the tip (Nov 09).

Okay, now I've found something that seems to work consistently.

Make sure the video card settings have "Sync to VBlank" enabled, like before. And in the DeusEx.ini file, find:

GameSpeed=1.000000

and change it to whatever works for you. In my case, 0.500000 worked well in the sense that the audio ended, and the message window disappeared, at the right time. But I have to be honest, movement was a bit choppy.

It really depends on how will you tolerate the game.

The DeusEx.ini file is in "{path/to}/steamapps/common/deus ex/System/"

Hi,

Yeah, renaming the tip is a good idea...if I ever get mystified
about what version of crossover the tip was based on, I sometimes
use a wildcard string like "8.x.x" to narrow it down to that series...

The title not running under Steam with emulate a virtual desktop ON
doesn't surprise me so much (I've seen it before), but it does pique
my interest...

...your commandline looks about right (although there you're not invoking
taskset)...you possibly want to timeline the deus ex version against the
nvidia driver releases...perhaps 17700 isn't far enough back in time, I
really don't know...and then again, maybe this env_var is having no effect
at all...this problem afflicts 'real' windows boxes as well...in fact, iirc
this happened to my son years ago with this title when I upgraded his kit
from AMD K7 to K8 (or was it K6 to K7..?...I'm too old 8) ...and yes, he's
still got the CD but looks like somebody walked on it and cracked the media
...sigh...I wonder if he backed it up to a .ccd image....have a look here;

http://kentie.net/article/dxguide/

....we are a -long- way from the old days CPU wise -- I'm not sure how much
of that page can be melded into the crossover case, but by the looks of that
info this is very deep down in the workings..."perhaps too deep", he said...

...with the fullscreen verse windowed situation, at a guess it's hardware
check routine is freeking out about the fact it asked the video card about
resolution and refresh information and got answer 'x' but the emulated
desktop of wine said the resolution was the value set in 'desktop size' of
winecfg=>graphics and it would've returned a refresh of 60Hz and it bails...

...sometimes you can get a work-around here in linux/xorg by creating a so
called 'illegal' (at least, according to the nvidia-setup program 8) modeline
setup in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf...mine currently looks like this..;

Option         "metamodes" "CRT-0: 1680x1050 +0+0, CRT-1: 1024x768_87i +1680+0; CRT-0: 1680x1050 +0+0, CRT-1: NULL; CRT-0: 1024x768 +0+0, CRT-1: NULL; CRT-0: 800x600 +0+0, CRT-1: NULL; CRT-0: 640x480 +0+0, CRT-1: NULL"

...looks whacked out with a set of redundant modes, but that seems to help
the nvidia driver realize CRT-1 isn't connected...I must recheck that...but
the critical mode specs are CRT-0: 1024x768 | CRT-0: 800x600 | CRT-0: 640x480
(and just let the refresh rate float on the 'VertRefresh' spec range) because
some apps/games of older ilk go poking for these modes and if the xserver or
nvidia replies "no, can't do that"...everything falls apart...

I guess it also wouldn't hurt to absolutely definitely spell out the video
situation in the registry with the Direct3D keys..;

 REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D]
"DirectDrawRenderer"="gdi"
"OffscreenRenderingMode"="fbo"
"RenderTargetLockMode"="auto"
"UseGLSL"="enable"
"VideoMemorySize"="512"

Of course, be sure to change the "VideoMemorySize" value to suit how much ram
your videocard has....these are the things I do to see if I can get steamapps
to play in emulated desktop mode...worth a shot...

However...if what that page says is true, my guess is the running too fast
business has more to do with the newer CPU's - maybe the video card/drivers
play a part as well. If taskset has absolutely no affect...then the only
other place to look I think, will be with kernel boot params to disable SMP
support and turn off as many CPU features as you can that the Deus Ex code
wouldn't know about...you can read all about kernel (boot) params in the
linux kernel source documentation;

/usr/src/linux-2.6.{version}/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt

Not exactly the nicest of workarounds (having to reboot to a nobbled kernel
to play the game), but it would be one of the things I would try...I'd
even build a custom kernel if I thought it might help 8)

Cheers!

I had to do similar in xorg.conf

    Option         "metamodes" "CRT: 1440x900 +1680+0, DFP: 1680x1050 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 1680x1050 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 1400x1050 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 1280x1024 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 1280x960 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 1152x864 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 1024x768 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 960x720 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 928x696 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 896x672 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 832x624 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 800x600 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 720x400 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 700x525 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 640x512 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 640x480 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 640x400 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 640x350 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 576x432 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 512x384 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 416x312 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 400x300 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 360x200 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 320x240 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 320x200 +0+0; CRT: NULL, DFP: 320x175 +0+0"

For GTA Vice City in Steam, otherwise it simply fell over unless run in a virtual desktop.

Anyway, most of the problems from this game going too fast, are as you imply due to things like SpeedStep/Cool n Quiet simply not existing at the time. The game takes a reading of your CPU speed when you boot it up, so if it changes from that point on, the game speed changes also. The best thing I found to do before I realised VSync would cap it at 60fps no matter what, was to disable Cool'n'quiet with a Linux widget before loading the game so it took a maximum speed reading, and stayed at maximum speed. No idea how you'd do that with a Mac, though.

Crazy! I don't think I'll go that far 😊

But thanks for the info!

Just tried it in 9.1.0. Ran very well, but I already had it running very well in 9.0.0.

I'll try to install it into a new bottle and see how it goes.