Running Ubuntu 9 on a Thinkpad X200, which should certainly be equal to any 2D RPG, the game is painfully slow. The opening cinematic skips frames and the framerate of the menu screen and game itself is so slow that the cursor is barely controllable and everything lags noticeably. Hardware OpenGL is working, at least for other things (e.g. GLXGears gets over 4000 fps). Planning to upgrade to Ubuntu 10 soon so maybe the problem will go away, but thought you should know.

I seem to have at least reduced the problem by turning off Ubuntu's visual effects (thought I already had them disabled)... that may have been the issue; I'll report back.

FYI, glxgears is not useful at all as a measure of whether or not you've got hardware acceleration working properly. Far more useful would be the output of:

Or, of course, if you have other games which clearly do use 3D (any FPSes, etc) and they run fine, then clearly your acceleration is enabled and working. glxgears definitely won't tell you, though.

Yes, other 3D games using OpenGL work fine, and glxinfo indicates DRI is enabled.

I have the same problem.

I am running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx on a T500 with opengl. Inside the settings I get a value around 37 with high detail and sound turned off and around 29 with low detail.
I ran it in wine before I got the linux version and it was a bit faster.

Because of an update to lucid and with that an update of wine I am no longer able to play it through wine.

Is there a way to make it faster?

If you want to play Eschalon, you will have to use the proprietary graphic stack, which means that you won't be using mesa.
So any DRI stuff in glxinfo is bad, as it's means that you're using mesa, which is unable to run Eschalon correctly.

regnak90:

OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R300
on my radeon card works fine thank you.

I wouldn't surprise me that even nouveau would more or less work on some nvidia cards. It is not 2006 anymore....

So you're using Mesa.
We may not be in 2006, but Mesa is
You want to play Eschalon with decent frame rate ? Just use fglrx.
But it won't be that simple of course.
As you may already know, AMD dropped all cards under R600 with fglrx 9.4, so you will have to use an old kernel and xserver in order to use fglrx 9.3 (the last one that support your hardware).

And yeah, i do not doubt that your radeon card is working fine, but it is a fact that mesa is *not fast* with OpenGL. Yeah, some 3D games works fine, but Eschalon with his 2D Engine is slow.

EDIT: If you don't want to use an older distro, you can try using last mesa/libdrm/xf86-video-ati/kernel and try KMS + Gallium3D.
This is supposed to be faster than classic mesa, but it is still realy young and not realy optimized yet.

Well, after the LiveCD test, I finally decided to give Lucid Lynx a whirl on my laptop (dual core Toshiba Satellite Pro).
Everything seemed fine, until I tried to run Book II, the intro ran (with sound), seemed reasonable, although the `comet` seemed rather jerky and slow.
But once the menu came up, everything went as slow as the LiveCD with bugger-all memory on the slower desktop!
Couldn`t get into new game at all, and had a hard time exiting.

Anyway, after a lot of playing around, installing the latest proprietary Nvidia drivers seemed to do the trick, visual effects weren`t on anyway.

Too late to start a game now, need some food, and I`m not even going to try to find where ALSA has gone, but the free option seems to work, so I`ll leave that bit of fun for another time.

I recently installed Eschalon Book II on a new computer, this one with an ATI card instead of the Nvidia I've used in the past. Echoing people above, you must use the proprietary fglrx/Catalyst driver to get acceptable performance. Ubuntu maverick ships with the open source "radeon" driver, which is not up to the job. I even tracked down and installed the latest Gallium3D-based r600g DRI driver, but it wasn't much help.

The instructions here should help Ubuntu users set it up:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI