Dawn of War II has a minor patch to fix a few issues

I assume the launch issues were fixed by sym-linking (or renaming) the libraries to match the names the game binary was using to to look for them (or alternatively by updating the game binary to use the existing library name), as I pointed out in the Steam forum thread. Honestly, I don't know how that was missed by their QA people.

What I'm really interested in is seeing them finally get to the bottom of why the game wants to download an update every single time I launch Steam. It's really annoying!

Also, it seems one of my recent Mesa updates (which I compile myself) broke the game, so I'll need to look into that before I can play it again - and possibly do a regression test.

Give it to me straight, doc. What are the odds of Dawn of War I getting ported?

That's really nice of them fix those issues, that's what I like with these porting companies. So many games just go "port and forget". UT2004, for example.

The multiplayer problems where already present in the win2win match.

I'm playing this game from several years and there were a lot of trouble to play multi, you have to wait for a long time waiting for the matchmaking process to find partners and opposants, and when the party loads finally one or two people get kicked out and the game is screwed, every one quit and you have to start again ... very annoying for a game where i've bought all the extensions and DLC.

Quoting: boltronicsI assume the launch issues were fixed by sym-linking (or renaming) the libraries to match the names the game binary was using to to look for them (or alternatively by updating the game binary to use the existing library name), as I pointed out in the Steam forum thread. Honestly, I don't know how that was missed by their QA people.

These launch issues only existed on unsupported distros that have issues with the Steam runtime which then can impact games in different ways. We constantly tweak our scripts and options to make the game run more reliably and workaround these issues on unsupported systems to help users who don't use the officially supported distros however we can't reasonably test and fully support all distros especially rolling release distros (which are constantly changing).

Quoting: boltronicsWhat I'm really interested in is seeing them finally get to the bottom of why the game wants to download an update every single time I launch Steam. It's really annoying!

We've been looking into it and Valve are investigating the issue but we don't have a solution yet. It seems related to ownership of multiple DoW2 games but we haven't pinpointed the exact cause yet.

Quoting: boltronicsAlso, it seems one of my recent Mesa updates (which I compile myself) broke the game, so I'll need to look into that before I can play it again - and possibly do a regression test.

If you play on the bleeding edge of git you have to expect to get cut every once in a while. :) I'm sure it will get fixed quickly many of the most active Mesa developers have DoW2 keys so they should be able to easily repro issues :)

Quoting: edddeduckferal

Quoting: boltronicsThese launch issues only existed on unsupported distros that have issues with the Steam runtime which then can impact games in different ways. We constantly tweak our scripts and options to make the game run more reliably and workaround these issues on unsupported systems to help users who don't use the officially supported distros however we can't reasonably test and fully support all distros especially rolling release distros (which are constantly changing).

That's fair. However checking the libraries would seem to be something fairly easy to automate for a bunch of different distributions, via chroots/schroot/pbuilder or some such.

Quoting: edddeduckferal

Quoting: boltronicsWhat I'm really interested in is seeing them finally get to the bottom of why the game wants to download an update every single time I launch Steam. It's really annoying!

We've been looking into it and Valve are investigating the issue but we don't have a solution yet. It seems related to ownership of multiple DoW2 games but we haven't pinpointed the exact cause yet.

Ah. That could well be the case. I purchased the Australian retail box of DoW 2 waaaay back when it had Games for Windows Live. The Retribution add-on was purchased much later as a digital purchase.

Oddly, the GNU/Linux version didn't appear for Retribution immediately, but the ancient GFW base game showed the GNU/Linux version immediately.

Quoting: edddeduckferal

Quoting: boltronicsAlso, it seems one of my recent Mesa updates (which I compile myself) broke the game, so I'll need to look into that before I can play it again - and possibly do a regression test.

If you play on the bleeding edge of git you have to expect to get cut every once in a while. :) I'm sure it will get fixed quickly many of the most active Mesa developers have DoW2 keys so they should be able to easily repro issues :)

It's a weird one, and I'm surprised nobody else has seen it since I've been experiencing it for a few weeks now. In fact, just last night I checked out the 13.0.2 git tag, and I still experienced corrupted graphics - built using llvm 3.9, with amdgpu as included in a clean Linux 4.9-rc7 build. This is on a Fury X (Fiji) card. Every time I click past the Feral launcher, all the graphics become garbled - something I don't think I've seen on any of my other games to date. It doesn't seem to be an issue when running the game under Wine, so I'm going to see if I can find time to do a regression test this weekend.

Quoting: boltronicsThat's fair. However checking the libraries would seem to be something fairly easy to automate for a bunch of different distributions, via chroots/schroot/pbuilder or some such.

There is a difference between assumption and reality on this problem, sadly it's not as simple as an automated script. :) The constant flux of a rolling distro combined with the steam runtime compatibility issues usually means a more manual approach is best/quicker, although we do have some automation present.

As we've mentioned our scripts are constantly evolving to work around issues with distros, certain libraries and hardware however when we make a change in the script we need to make sure it works well for all users with those effected by the issue and those that aren't.

Many workarounds posted are very specific to certain setups which means further analysis and tests need to be done you can't just paste them in, this is why you might get a delay between someones workaround for an unsupported distro on reddit and a similar solution built into the game launcher.

Quoting: boltronicsIt's a weird one, and I'm surprised nobody else has seen it since I've been experiencing it for a few weeks now. In fact, just last night I checked out the 13.0.2 git tag, and I still experienced corrupted graphics - built using llvm 3.9, with amdgpu as included in a clean Linux 4.9-rc7 build. This is on a Fury X (Fiji) card. Every time I click past the Feral launcher, all the graphics become garbled - something I don't think I've seen on any of my other games to date. It doesn't seem to be an issue when running the game under Wine, so I'm going to see if I can find time to do a regression test this weekend.

We haven't seen any major reports of issues from AMD GPU users which we would have expected if this was repeatable on multiple machines so I suspect it's related to a library you compiled or linked against. Every game will use OpenGL and other libraries in unique ways so you'll often see issues only on certain software and hardware combinations. If you do track something down that appears to be repeatable then do let our support know and/or log a bug with the Mesa devs so they can revert the change if needed or we can look at making a change in a patch as needed.

Edwin

Quoting: edddeduckferal[If you do track something down that appears to be repeatable then do let our support know and/or log a bug with the Mesa devs so they can revert the change if needed or we can look at making a change in a patch as needed.

Thanks Edwin, will do.

An update:

Quoting: edddeduckferal

Quoting: boltronicsIt's a weird one, and I'm surprised nobody else has seen it since I've been experiencing it for a few weeks now. In fact, just last night I checked out the 13.0.2 git tag, and I still experienced corrupted graphics - built using llvm 3.9, with amdgpu as included in a clean Linux 4.9-rc7 build. This is on a Fury X (Fiji) card. Every time I click past the Feral launcher, all the graphics become garbled - something I don't think I've seen on any of my other games to date. It doesn't seem to be an issue when running the game under Wine, so I'm going to see if I can find time to do a regression test this weekend.

We haven't seen any major reports of issues from AMD GPU users which we would have expected if this was repeatable on multiple machines so I suspect it's related to a library you compiled or linked against.

I'm running an up to date Debian stretch on amd64. I also tested Mesa 13.0.2 that's provided by the distribution, and that has the same problem as the builds I compile myself.

Quoting: edddeduckferalEvery game will use OpenGL and other libraries in unique ways so you'll often see issues only on certain software and hardware combinations. If you do track something down that appears to be repeatable then do let our support know and/or log a bug with the Mesa devs so they can revert the change if needed or we can look at making a change in a patch as needed.

I had a little bit of time to look into this tonight. I didn't get too far since Mesa takes a long time to build (and then launching Steam and launching the game also adds time to each test). However I have identified the last good build was 12.0.5 stable. The next stable release is 13.0.0 which fails in the same way 13.0.2 does on my Fiji-based card. The timing sounds about right - it's probably been 1 to 2 months since the game has worked. Again, the game continues to work perfectly under Wine with 13.0.2 and the Gallium on Nine patches so it's not a big deal, just a bit annoying.

Quoting: boltronicsAn update:
I'm running an up to date Debian stretch on amd64. I also tested Mesa 13.0.2 that's provided by the distribution, and that has the same problem as the builds I compile myself.

I had a little bit of time to look into this tonight. I didn't get too far since Mesa takes a long time to build (and then launching Steam and launching the game also adds time to each test). However I have identified the last good build was 12.0.5 stable. The next stable release is 13.0.0 which fails in the same way 13.0.2 does on my Fiji-based card. The timing sounds about right - it's probably been 1 to 2 months since the game has worked. Again, the game continues to work perfectly under Wine with 13.0.2 and the Gallium on Nine patches so it's not a big deal, just a bit annoying.

We have a Fiji card here (R9 Nano) it's pretty much the same hardware as the Fury X. We retested just now using running Mesa 13.0.2 (using the Padoka stable PPA Paulo Dias created for us the other day) our distro used is Ubuntu 16.10.

Everything runs perfectly with no issues on the latest release, we've also not had other reports. I suspect this might be related to something else linked to your system given stretch is the testing distribution it's completely possible some other related library in your distro is causing side effects. It's one of the reasons why we can't support rolling releases / testing distributions as things are in a state of constant flux.

Hope this helps you debug your issues further. Do let us know if you find anything we should know about.