Spec Ops: The Line is one title I have been eagerly awaiting, and now that it’s available on Linux I took a look for you.
About the game (Official)
Spec Ops: The Line is a new original title from 2K Games that features provocative and gripping Third-Person modern military Shooter gameplay designed to challenge players' morality by putting them in the middle of unspeakable situations where unimaginable choices affecting human life must be made. Features include, a gripping, storyline reminiscent of Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness but set in a ruined Dubai, tactical squad-based Delta Force gameplay throughout a horizontally and vertically oriented world, devastating sandstorms which can be used in combat, a variety of multiplayer modes and maps, and deep support featuring two factions.
The Linux port is from Virtual Programming, who gave us The Witcher 2, Stronghold 3 Gold and Bioshock Infinite. Their porting tech has come a long way, so it’s time to check out another game ported with their proprietary eON technology.
Linux gameplay video
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Direct Link
Direct Link
Port report with initial thoughts
Specs: Nvidia 970, Intel i5 4670K, 16GB RAM.
Performance
It did start with lowest everything, and a resolution of 640x480, but it was painless to crank up up. The settings change was instant too, so no reloading needed.
So far performance seems to be mostly good, I've seen it bounce between 60FPS to well over 140FPS. This is with the highest possible settings that I'm able to set. That's pretty on-par with most other big releases that we have had, so they did a pretty good job as far as framerate goes.
During the first battle on foot the performance seemed great, and I was still getting well over 100FPS, but I have noticed some micro stuttering here and there, and it seems like it’s when it’s loading an area much like Bioshock Infinite does. One of them lasted for 2 seconds, and that’s the most I’ve seen. It is a little bit distracting when it does it.
It also stutters when something big happens, like an explosion.
It seems to be much more stable than Bioshock for reference, Bioshock I could crash quite easily, but Spec Ops: The Line has been open the whole time, with a lot of alt+tabbing, and it worked fine while recording a video and rendering the video in the background. That's pretty great news for me!
Gameplay, initial look only
It seems like a pretty standard story-based third person shooter, with some reasonably pretty visuals. I say reasonably as it's quite bright, seems like it has a lot of bloom going on.
The intro scene seems pretty on-par with what you find in most Call of Duty games, and that makes me a happy gamer. Nothing like a good Hollywood style showdown. I don't care how others feel about such scenes, I think they're good old fashioned fun. I like helicopters, I like big machine guns, and I flipping love blowing stuff up.
There’s plenty of banter between characters, and it has already given me a few chuckles as you comment about the stupid remarks one of your soldiers makes. This seems like a repeating thing too, goodie. I like games that have chatty characters, as it enables me to get a little more engrossed in the story and the characters themselves.
The controls aren't bad, but it's pretty simple. You can simply tap space and your character ducks and runs, or press space against an object to get cover. The cover system is pretty easy to use too, and is very much like the one used in Gears of War and Mass Effect
The stuttering I mentioned before is a repeating issue though, and it doesn't make the game a perfect experience for me.
Other issues
I have the same issue as with Bioshock, my Logitech F310’s look is inverted even though it’s turned off, setting it to “on” in Bioshock fixed it, but I am unable to change that setting in Spec Ops: The Line, it’s quite annoying. If I try, it flickers extremely fast to on and off again.
Final Verdict: Honestly, it seems like a reasonable port and an interesting game, but the stuttering is really quite annoying. If they fixed the stuttering, then it would be gold.
You can find Spec Ops: The Line on Steam and Humble Store, it’s also dirt cheap right now. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
Quoting: GuestJust while it comes to me, the stuttering issue is possibly derived from this being a console game originally. So there's likely to be a lot of data streaming as you move into new areas (Unreal Engine 3 was really built around this idea). For consoles this isn't a real problem, and for anything able to handle multithread graphics, it's again not much of an issue...but OpenGL wasn't designed that way.Whatever they did is working very well (at least on my system).
There are workarounds, but they're often problematic and unstable, and I think VP discovered this when working on The Witcher 2. So they move all OpenGL commands to a single thread now (TW2 had massive performance and stability improvements after they did that), which is likely where the stutter comes from. New data needs setting up, textures need transferring about, possibly new shaders need compiling - all that needs doing in one frame, and stalls the rendering for a few moments.
Which is a long winded way of saying: it's doubtful the stutter will go away entirely. VP might be able to tweak eON slightly to reduce it, but I suspect it won't disappear entirely if I'm right about the cause, and there's not a whole lot they can do about that right now.
I really need to look hard to notice any stutter even while recording at 60 FPS.
View video on youtube.com
The same for their other ports:
View video on youtube.com
View video on youtube.com
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Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: martinoj2009I downloaded it, but there seems to be a problem with the Xbox One controller. I tried two of my Xbox One controllers and for some reason it keeps detecting input from the controller and scrolling through the menus, and the camera keeps turning. It only happens with this game, and I haven't tried my 360 controller, don't know where I put it. I can use a keyboard and mouse, but that defeats the purpose of my Steambox being a replacement for a console, if I want to use a keyboard and mouse I'll use my desktop. I'll report to the devs, but I also wanted to share what I'm experiencing.
Sounds related to my issue of not being able to change the inverted option.
I had this issue on two Xbox 360 controllers (Wired&Wireless) but like leillo1975 said above, after rotating the thumbs full circles they worked OK.
I had no problems inverting the up/down view (from gamepad options) but is also possible to set it from: ".local/share/yager/specops/GameDocuments/My Games/SpecOps-TheLine/SRGame/Config/SRInput.ini"
section [SRGame.YPlayerInput3], line "LookUpScale=155" (remove the "-" ).
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Runs pretty well for me except for the occasional stutter. For some reason, the default resolution when I started the game was 480p, and everything was set to low.
I also tried using a DS4, and it works fine, just had to invert the up/down.
I also tried using a DS4, and it works fine, just had to invert the up/down.
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Holy smokes, it actually recognizes my extra mouse buttons (I have a 5 button trackball)! It's pretty sad that I get pleasantly surprised when a game recognizes beyond 3 buttons even though mice with more than 3 buttons have existed for decades. Still, that's definitely a nice plus for this game. Runs really well except for those occasional stutters.
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Quoting: LinasIt does have the same floaty laggy mouse input like Witcher 2 and Bioshock Infinite. Not severe, but definitely noticeable, especially after doing a few rounds of Counter-Strike: GO.
So I'm not the only one to notice it. I tried to get into The Witcher 2 and play it in Linux when it was finally running well and I had a horrific time doing battle in general and died A LOT, even on "normal difficulty"(don't remember what it was called) I think I died 20+ times trying to get past the dragon at the castle in the beginning and also fighting that one guy at the top of that tower at the castle in the beginning. Heck I even had trouble with the arena style tutorial! I ended up making it to the first town after many deaths and ended up getting frustrated with it and quit playing.
Fast forward to a little over a week ago, TW3 is coming soon and wondered if I should get it (I"M DEFINITELY GOING TO). I decided I wanted to see how it played in windows (yep, filthy dual booter) where I could actually make use of all of my GPU's and play it in surround @ 5760x1080. Guess what.... I had NO problems with combat at the same difficulty level and I didn't die a single time in the entire "castle intro". It was then that I realized there had to be some crazy input lag. After "beating" it in windows, and obviously being proficient at TW combat now, I fired it back up in Linux and I struggled a bit again. I suppose some people might get use to it, but it gets a "no thank you" from me.
As for Spec Ops. It crashed 3 times on me in maybe 15 minutes.... so I didn't really get to see if the input lag was an issue. I'll probably wait for a patch or two before trying again. @ 1080p it ran @ 60fps no problems other than the "loading stutter" others mentioned, even with it running from an SSD and having pretty fast DDR4 RAM. Oh well, glad it was on sale.
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Quoting: EKRboiQuoting: LinasIt does have the same floaty laggy mouse input like Witcher 2 and Bioshock Infinite. Not severe, but definitely noticeable, especially after doing a few rounds of Counter-Strike: GO.
So I'm not the only one to notice it. I tried to get into The Witcher 2 and play it in Linux when it was finally running well and I had a horrific time doing battle in general and died A LOT [...] after many deaths and ended up getting frustrated with it and quit playing.
I gave up on Witcher 2, because I had trouble pointing even to the general direction of where I was aiming at. I have not tried it in a while, so it might be better now...
Quoting: EKRboiAs for Spec Ops. It crashed 3 times on me in maybe 15 minutes.... so I didn't really get to see if the input lag was an issue. I'll probably wait for a patch or two before trying again. @ 1080p it ran @ 60fps no problems other than the "loading stutter" others mentioned, even with it running from an SSD and having pretty fast DDR4 RAM. Oh well, glad it was on sale.
From my experience, 60 FPS is the lower limit for when the input lag starts getting annoying. I never had a top-end gaming machine, so I am quite used to playing at 30 FPS, and it generally does not bother me unless it goes down to 20. When this happens in native games, things become choppy, but input generally remains accurate. Whereas in eON games, when the FPS drop, it still looks smooth on screen, but feels laggy as if it was streaming. This variable lag really messes with my senses.
That and the fact that eON provides 1/2 of the native performance at best is not a good combination. But what annoys me the most is that VP keep doing action games where stuff like this is so noticeable.
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In less than 5 minutes the game crashed back to the desktop for me. I submitted the bug report form it popped up. Hopefully they fix it. I have Axiom Verge and many others to play while they iron out their wrapper again.
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Maybe it's just me, but I've experienced some stuttering even on native games with the Unreal Engine 3 (Borderlands 2, Xcom: Enemy Unknown, etc). I doubt it's my hardware, since I also dual boot into Windows and don't experience the same problem.
The one thing that has helped me some is disabling my second monitor completely when I play. That reduces but does not completely eliminate the stuttering. For Spec Ops, however, it didn't really help much. Disabling ambient occlusion did help a little, though. It's now limited to checkpoint saving / new area loading.
The one thing that has helped me some is disabling my second monitor completely when I play. That reduces but does not completely eliminate the stuttering. For Spec Ops, however, it didn't really help much. Disabling ambient occlusion did help a little, though. It's now limited to checkpoint saving / new area loading.
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