I like games like eschalon, so I was thrilled when I saw there was linux version and bought the download. The problem is that the game crashes hard and a cold boot is needed every time. This crash appears at the exact same place every time, so the question is; is this a bug with the game code or with my save game? It is really rather frustrating not being able to play more than five minutes in to the game.

The crash appears in the first dungeon right arter turning the corner here:



I'm using a bare Arch linux 32 bit install with no compositing enabled and with functioning DRI. My graphics card is a intel GMA945.

Can you post a link to your saved game, or email your saved game from that screenshot?

After thousands of downloads of the demo and the full version, it is unlikely that there is a "game bug" there or else hundreds of other people would have experienced it. We'll need to look at what is happening in that area and why your particular computer doesn't like it.

Yes, it would be strange if the problem is not local somehow.

Should I mail the savegame + 'lshw > hardware.log' to info_at_basiliskgames_dot_com ?

Thanks

Yes, that would be perfect.

I'm an Arch user too and have not encountered any problems in that particular dungeon. Assuming you launch the game from a terminal, does it have an error message once it crashes?

The crash appears on both Arch and Mint at the exact same place. The crash is so severe that the magic Sysrq does not appear to even work.

OT: Interestingly after trying to get out of the crash on mint with Sysrq, Mint lost my country specific keyboard settings and video is now acting wierd and is leaving artifacts on screen, problems did not resolve themselves after power off and video problem seems permanent on Mint.

It crashes elsewhere in the game as well with a new character. Seemingly random. Only solution is to reboot.

It seems that Lenovo T61 and Eschalon: Book 1 are incompatible.

Or perhaps it's the current intel driver that is causing all the trouble.

The driver I'm currently using is: xf86-video-intel 2.3.1-1

Or it could be the current Opengl driver, or the version of Xorg. Or the ...

I prefer linux, but it is sometimes very hard to pin point what causes problems.

If you start your game from the command line, ashren, does the crash take the terminal with it? If not, you should get some useful error messages there.

I always start the game from the command line, the problem is that the crash takes the whole system with it. Perhaps I could log whatever output with a tool of some kind, or perhaps it is already logged somewhere within /var/log.

Edit:
Ran the game within gdb. No output of interest. It only logged that sound was the default setting and when I press the power off key. SIGHUP

Would strace be of any value here?

Could my specific download be corrupted in some way? I guess the tar file would not unpack if that was the case.

I'm not sure if this will be of any help, but just in case.
I was having a very similar problem when I bought the game. Crashes in certain areas that took the whole system down. After a lot of research and consulting the ever helpful BW and linux guys here in the support forum, I found out it was my overheating graphics card that caused the problem. As it turned out, it was causing various glitches in other games and applications, but, for some mysterious reason, Eschalon was the only one to put enough 'pressure' on it to take the system down completely. I fixed the cooling and the game ran without a single issue ever since.

Thanks for the reply micks.

Did you adjust the cooling settings in the bios? Because I do not know of any tool to adjust settings for the Intel GMA 945 card in Linux.

You currently can't gdb a direct rendering OpenGL application from the X Server that it's displaying to. That'll be fixed with DRI2, but the usual symptom until then is that you lock up the server, because gdb catches the signal while the driver's holding the hardware lock and the server can't take the lock to display gdb's output or handle your input.

For now, gdbing DRI apps requires a second machine to ssh in and run it that way.