Sci-fi single-player survival game Planet Nomads is currently pretty broken on Linux

I haven't played it since they reneged on the multiplayer promise, thus limiting it to being yet another lacklustre single-player resource collecting and base-building game. It's a shame, because it could've been a great game to play with friends, competing or collaborating to create communities.

This game has been on my wishlist for a while now. Sadly, only thing I can say after reading this is.. Good thing I didn't buy it.

Which is the last thing I want to say about a game with native Linux version...

Strange. It's working okay here. More or less. There's a weird flickering/glitching on the menu screen that I've been meaning to report for weeks (it looks for all the world like a hardware fault, except I don't have any other problems), but the game runs well enough. As well as it ever does, at least; it could do with some optimization, but everyone's complaining about that, even on Windows.

For now, I would urge you to give it a miss until they give the Linux version the attention it needs.

Despite what I've said, I can't disagree. You won't be able to tell if it's going to work or not until you try it. And it's far from ready to come out of EA anyway.

And this is why the Steam for Linux client should allow Us to choose between run the native version and run the windows version via Proton.

Strange. It's working okay here. More or less. There's a weird flickering/glitching on the menu screen that I've been meaning to report for weeks (it looks for all the world like a hardware fault, except I don't have any other problems), but the game runs well enough. As well as it ever does, at least; it could do with some optimization, but everyone's complaining about that, even on Windows.

Interesting. So you get literally no issues if you load it, quit to menu, start an entirely new world in survival on a new seed. Repeat that twice to see what happens (just to see if we can trigger it).

Since I can reproduce it so often (with reports from others too) it's definitely a bug.

On reading this, I've just given it a go. I have it on my second gaming box, running Mint Linux 17.3 Cinnamon, and it loaded up and played fine during my little test. Noting that this Debian/Ubuntu-based Linux is not as up-to-date (drivers, kernel) as the one Liam would be using. Another thing I noted - It is a game in Early Access, so I'd be expecting problems come with the territory.

On reading this, I've just given it a go. I have it on my second gaming box, running Mint Linux 17.3 Cinnamon, and it loaded up and played fine during my little test. Noting that this Debian/Ubuntu-based Linux is not as up-to-date (drivers, kernel) as the one Liam would be using. Another thing I noted - It is a game in Early Access, so I'd be expecting problems come with the territory.

One single test isn't exactly enough evidence. It's not a 100% bug.

Hey Liam, sorry to hear you can't run the game.

I've been pretty busy myself diving into this really good game lately (already 50 hours in and counting) and I don't have that many problems. It's actually very decent for an early access game.

I think your problem could come from the "ground texture quality" or the "ground display distance" (or whatever these settings are named: my UI is in French, so I'm not sure).
On my computer, anything higher than "low" for these settings rapidly freezes the game (though it does load).

I'm currently running everything on low/off except :

• grass density (very high)


• anisotropic filtering (on)


• shadow quality (medium)


• texture quality (very high)


• camera effects (shining on & sunshaft on)

With these settings, the game runs great most of the time.
I only have two big complaints so far:

• performance slows to a crawl (60fps -> 17fps) sometimes seemingly randomly (tough it happens mostly when traveling in vehicle). It's very strange because reloading the game fixes it... for a while. It seems Windows users are also experiencing this issue.


• In 3rd person view, when loading a game, the camera starts zoomed out even more than the max zoom out. This oftens leads to seeing nothing because the camera is actually inside the groung. Zooming out once and then painfully slowly zooming in fixes it though.

Edit: I recall now having the game freeze during the loading of the map! But it happened just once in so many times. And I'm not sure it was frozen: it may have taken what looked like forever to generate the world.


Last edited by gurv on 1 Oct 2018 at 7:09 pm UTC

Hey Liam, sorry to hear you can't run the game.

I've been pretty busy myself diving into this really good game lately (already 50 hours in and counting) and I don't have that many problems. It's actually very decent for an early access game.

I think your problem could come from the "ground texture quality" or the "ground display distance" (or whatever these settings are named: my UI is in French, so I'm not sure).
On my computer, anything higher than "low" for these settings rapidly freezes the game (though it does load).

I'm currently running everything on low/off except :

• grass density (very high)


• anisotropic filtering (on)


• shadow quality (medium)


• texture quality (very high)


• camera effects (shining on & sunshaft on)

With these settings, the game runs great most of the time.
I only have two big complaints so far:

• performance slows to a crawl (60fps -> 17fps) sometimes seemingly randomly (tough it happens mostly when traveling in vehicle). It's very strange because reloading the game fixes it... for a while. It seems Windows users are also experiencing this issue.


• In 3rd person view, when loading a game, the camera starts zoomed out even more than the max zoom out. This oftens leads to seeing nothing because the camera is actually inside the groung. Zooming out once and then painfully slowly zooming in fixes it though.

Edit: I recall now having the game freeze during the loading of the map! But it happened just once in so many times. And I'm not sure it was frozen: it may have taken what looked like forever to generate the world.

I tried your suggestion, turning terrain texture quality to Low. It crashed to the desktop twice, got me in the third time. Then I tried turning the terrain view distance down to low, first time it froze on the loading screen.

This gets spammed to the log a lot (and I really do mean A LOT):

SQL logic error
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand.ExecuteStatement (IntPtr pStmt, System.Int32& cols, System.IntPtr& pazValue, System.IntPtr& pazColName) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand:ExecuteStatement (intptr,int&,intptr&,intptr&)
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteDataReader.ReadpVm (IntPtr pVm, Int32 version, Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand cmd) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteDataReader..ctor (Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand cmd, IntPtr pVm, Int32 version) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteDataReader:.ctor (Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand,intptr,int)
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand.ExecuteReader (CommandBehavior behavior, Boolean want_results, System.Int32& rows_affected) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand.ExecuteReader (CommandBehavior behavior) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand.ExecuteDbDataReader (CommandBehavior behavior) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at System.Data.Common.DbCommand.ExecuteReader () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at System.Data.Common.DbCommand.System.Data.IDbCommand.ExecuteReader () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Database.SQLite+Command.ExecuteReader () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

Turned the graphical preset to Low, so everything was down. Tried another new survival game - crashed to the desktop. This time, stuff like this was being spammed into the log:

Exception Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteSyntaxException - database disk image is malformed during BulkExecute: INSERT INTO [active_blocks]([id], [type_id], [data], [container_id]) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?)
StackTrace:
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand.GetNextStatement (IntPtr pzStart, System.IntPtr& pzTail, System.IntPtr& pStmt) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand.ExecuteReader (CommandBehavior behavior, Boolean want_results, System.Int32& rows_affected) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand.ExecuteNonQuery () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Database.SQLite+Command.BulkExecute (System.Object[,] parameters) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

(Filename: ./Runtime/Export/Debug.bindings.h Line: 43)

#3 0x007ffea1175e90 in operator new[](unsigned long, std::nothrow_t const&)
#4 0x007ffea1176000 in operator new[](unsigned long, std::nothrow_t const&)
#5 0x007ffea1176170 in operator new[](unsigned long, std::nothrow_t const&)
#6 0x007ffea11761f0 in oc_frag_recon_inter2_c
#7 0x007ffea11767e0 in __libc_start_main
#8 0x007ffea11768a0 in oc_frag_recon_inter2_c

Last edited by Liam Dawe on 1 Oct 2018 at 7:18 pm UTC

And this is why the Steam for Linux client should allow Us to choose between run the native version and run the windows version via Proton.

THIS.
I don't know how you guys think about that, but more and more "native" linux games "reveal" to be broken (proton issue #5638) because they are not handled with the same priorty as the windows ones.
We pay for "native" support and get a bucket of s**t.
I really don't know how I should think about this:(

Update: It seems I've found others also having the same issue: https://forum.planet-nomads.com/threads/2777-EXTREME-PRIORITY-Crash-the-game-when-you-start-a-new-game-or-try-to-start-saving

Seems to happen across Ubuntu, Mint, Arch and possibly others. I found their working database file for saved games, seems to get malformed at somepoint, which seems to be the issue. The root cause though...no idea unless I saw what queries they're doing.


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 1 Oct 2018 at 8:03 pm UTC

Delete wine-mono and mono packages
Game uses system libraries that are incompatible on newer systems
You *COULD* try overriding, but there are simply to many libraries for me to bother

There's a weird flickering/glitching on the menu screen that I've been meaning to report for weeks (it looks for all the world like a hardware fault, except I don't have any other problems), but the game runs well enough.

I saw that too. Only on fullscreen though, when I set it to windowed it went away. Even my "G-SYNC" indicator was flickering, meaning it must be doing something pretty crazy.

Delete wine-mono and mono packages
Game uses system libraries that are incompatible on newer systems
You *COULD* try overriding, but there are simply to many libraries for me to bother

Didn't have wino-mono, did have system mono installed. Removed it and re-tested.

Initially it loaded more often (about 8 successes), then it froze on one attempt and the very next attempt crashed it to the desktop. So I don't think that's the root cause of the issue.

Interesting. So you get literally no issues if you load it, quit to menu, start an entirely new world in survival on a new seed. Repeat that twice to see what happens (just to see if we can trigger it).

Since I can reproduce it so often (with reports from others too) it's definitely a bug.

Nope. Tried it three times, just to be sure.

Like gurv, I have a faint recollection of it possibly crashing during loading once, but only once. And I'm not even sure about that.

If it's corruption of a common database rather than one generated for each save, it's possible I haven't played it enough recently to trigger it. That said, I'd forgotten that I did lose one save to some kind of corruption: whenever I load it, I'm in my base, but the tutorial triggers (which obviously can't be completed, because I'm not in the ship), and there's no planet.


Last edited by Dunc on 1 Oct 2018 at 11:25 pm UTC

The move to single player has kinda put this on the unpopular list for many people.

I bought the game when it said it was multiplayer so kinda got conned. No doubt it will just get a forced broken alpha release at some stage just like starforge did... terrible, wish I could get my money back!


Last edited by TheRiddick on 2 Oct 2018 at 1:10 am UTC

Turned the graphical preset to Low, so everything was down. Tried another new survival game - crashed to the desktop. This time, stuff like this was being spammed into the log:

Exception Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteSyntaxException - database disk image is malformed during BulkExecute: INSERT INTO [active_blocks]([id], [type_id], [data], [container_id]) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?)
StackTrace:

I had the same error in the logs. After repairing the SQLite database, the game worked again. I have repaired the database _working.db with the help of this page: http://www.froebe.net/blog/2015/05/27/error-sqlite-database-is-malformed-solved/

Update: It seems I've found others also having the same issue: https://forum.planet-nomads.com/threads/2777-EXTREME-PRIORITY-Crash-the-game-when-you-start-a-new-game-or-try-to-start-saving

Seems to happen across Ubuntu, Mint, Arch and possibly others. I found their working database file for saved games, seems to get malformed at somepoint, which seems to be the issue. The root cause though...no idea unless I saw what queries they're doing.

The database is probably not corrupted due to queries (sqlite is a very robust engine) but when the game crashes in the middle of a write. So the first crash is not due to sqlite but every one after that is since the first crash corrupts the database.

The database is probably not corrupted due to queries (sqlite is a very robust engine) but when the game crashes in the middle of a write. So the first crash is not due to sqlite but every one after that is since the first crash corrupts the database.

An sqlite database can usually survive even a crash, as all transactions are basically atomic under the hood with automatic recovery from the journal. But of course there are other ways to corrupt the db if you really try, like messing with the file directly, or messing up directory access so that sqlite can't create its journal and then crashing.

Hey Liam, sorry to hear you can't run the game.

I've been pretty busy myself diving into this really good game lately (already 50 hours in and counting) and I don't have that many problems. It's actually very decent for an early access game.

I think your problem could come from the "ground texture quality" or the "ground display distance" (or whatever these settings are named: my UI is in French, so I'm not sure).
On my computer, anything higher than "low" for these settings rapidly freezes the game (though it does load).

I'm currently running everything on low/off except :

• grass density (very high)


• anisotropic filtering (on)


• shadow quality (medium)


• texture quality (very high)


• camera effects (shining on & sunshaft on)

With these settings, the game runs great most of the time.
I only have two big complaints so far:

• performance slows to a crawl (60fps -> 17fps) sometimes seemingly randomly (tough it happens mostly when traveling in vehicle). It's very strange because reloading the game fixes it... for a while. It seems Windows users are also experiencing this issue.


• In 3rd person view, when loading a game, the camera starts zoomed out even more than the max zoom out. This oftens leads to seeing nothing because the camera is actually inside the groung. Zooming out once and then painfully slowly zooming in fixes it though.

Edit: I recall now having the game freeze during the loading of the map! But it happened just once in so many times. And I'm not sure it was frozen: it may have taken what looked like forever to generate the world.

I tried your suggestion, turning terrain texture quality to Low. It crashed to the desktop twice, got me in the third time. Then I tried turning the terrain view distance down to low, first time it froze on the loading screen.

This gets spammed to the log a lot (and I really do mean A LOT):

SQL logic error
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand.ExecuteStatement (IntPtr pStmt, System.Int32& cols, System.IntPtr& pazValue, System.IntPtr& pazColName) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand:ExecuteStatement (intptr,int&,intptr&,intptr&)
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteDataReader.ReadpVm (IntPtr pVm, Int32 version, Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand cmd) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteDataReader..ctor (Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand cmd, IntPtr pVm, Int32 version) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteDataReader:.ctor (Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand,intptr,int)
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand.ExecuteReader (CommandBehavior behavior, Boolean want_results, System.Int32& rows_affected) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand.ExecuteReader (CommandBehavior behavior) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand.ExecuteDbDataReader (CommandBehavior behavior) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at System.Data.Common.DbCommand.ExecuteReader () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at System.Data.Common.DbCommand.System.Data.IDbCommand.ExecuteReader () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Database.SQLite+Command.ExecuteReader () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

Turned the graphical preset to Low, so everything was down. Tried another new survival game - crashed to the desktop. This time, stuff like this was being spammed into the log:

Exception Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteSyntaxException - database disk image is malformed during BulkExecute: INSERT INTO [active_blocks]([id], [type_id], [data], [container_id]) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?)
StackTrace:
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand.GetNextStatement (IntPtr pzStart, System.IntPtr& pzTail, System.IntPtr& pStmt) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand.ExecuteReader (CommandBehavior behavior, Boolean want_results, System.Int32& rows_affected) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteCommand.ExecuteNonQuery () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Database.SQLite+Command.BulkExecute (System.Object[,] parameters) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

(Filename: ./Runtime/Export/Debug.bindings.h Line: 43)

#3 0x007ffea1175e90 in operator new[](unsigned long, std::nothrow_t const&)
#4 0x007ffea1176000 in operator new[](unsigned long, std::nothrow_t const&)
#5 0x007ffea1176170 in operator new[](unsigned long, std::nothrow_t const&)
#6 0x007ffea11761f0 in oc_frag_recon_inter2_c
#7 0x007ffea11767e0 in __libc_start_main
#8 0x007ffea11768a0 in oc_frag_recon_inter2_c

If i dont go back and forth between new worlds I NEVER get a crash with nvidia and every thing looks normal using the closed drivers. If i use ati or nvidia with open source drivers i get some texture issues but it is very playable.

they have also been working on the various bugs that I have verified my self while going through their forum not steam. i believe 9.4 and above are on new version of unity but not sure. since i got it it has been making progress.