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The Bard's Tale series Slight Linux/Mac Delay for GOG(103 posts)(103 posts)
(103 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted September 02, 2019
To save download time, you can reuse old file (which was simply truncated):

I had to rename

the_bard_s_tale_iv_director_s_cut_4_20_1_32050_linux.zip → the_bard_s_tale_iv_director_s_cut_4_20_1_32050_lin.zip

this allowed lgogdownloader to resume from the previous file. The final file is OK!
Post edited September 02, 2019 by shmerl
Posted September 03, 2019
so while installing the beast.... I have obviously unhealthy amount of time due to its size...

So I took a peek on the game files....
... animations as thousands of small jpeg files... .... wow .... I'm really impressed. And truly afraid to even check what was used to write the game itself...

Let's just pretend I haven't seen anything and hope the game works well...

edit:
the animations have also mp4 versions, i.e. seems like some kind of fallback or I don't know .. work files?

Anyway, my notebook technically doesn't meet the min requirements in the gfx department... even more because I have the Intel+nVidia hybrid which I never bothered to find working variant of kernel+nvidia drivers, so I have actually only the onboard Intel gfx card... and if I switch everything to low/off, it seems actually barely playable. It chokes hard (5+s) at beginning of scenes and a bit (1-2s) when going into new part of map (like every 10-20 grid squares), but after such hickups it seems to work, at least the initial two maps, didn't have fight yet. .... not bad, considering the first impression from the files, and how much that intel card is below the min requirements. Still kinda curious how can it choke so hard, mem usage is 10/16, i.e. quite some GB still free, maybe some texture memory vs intel driver.

Ok, back to the game to see, if it will be actually playable, or if it will force me to check the situation around the nvidia drivers again (I read some rumours just lately that there is some buntu kernel+driver which is supposed to handle also the hybrid boards, but I'm so tired of nVidia, that I didn't pay more attention, as everything else I'm doing on the machine works flawlessly (no gaming, or only really good *old* games...).
Post edited September 03, 2019 by ped7g
Posted September 03, 2019
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ped7g: so while installing the beast.... I have obviously unhealthy amount of time due to its size...

So I took a peek on the game files....
... animations as thousands of small jpeg files... .... wow .... I'm really impressed. And truly afraid to even check what was used to write the game itself...

Let's just pretend I haven't seen anything and hope the game works well...
This is gonna be fun
Posted September 03, 2019
Thanks, community, for informing everyone about new versions, hashsums and details like, "this version doesn't work" / "works" :)
I'm pretty disappointed about GOG not communicating anything at all.

However, the game is finally on my linux system, and I finally have started playing it.
My system is pretty dated (16 GB RAM, Intel i7 4770, GTX 760) but I do play Witcher 3 (DXVK) with most settings on ultra (FullHD, no AA, no motion blur).

I was surprised about the poor performance of Bard's Tale IV at first. But I find it very playable once you:

* turn off motion blur
* turn on texture limit (seems very important to me)

Thanks for bringing this game to linux!
Posted September 03, 2019
Just for the refernce, with Navi (RX 5700 XT) and Mesa master (llvm 10) it's causing a GPU hang. Also, there is no Vulkan renderer, only OpenGL one. Something developers should probably fix in the future updates.
Post edited September 03, 2019 by shmerl
Posted September 03, 2019
So as the game starts up quite slowly for me (18.5s after removing initial animations), I kept poking around those jpeg files, and at my machine it's for real. The mp4 file is ignored, and instead the jpegs are replayed. So if you keep just one of them, the animation is super short.. Unfortunately even if I skim all the mp4 files from the whole game, it saves me only about 3.5G, while the jpegs have ~12G ...

But that's a really innovative way how to resolve missing H264 decoder or whatever lead to this technical curiosity.. or maybe some stackoverflow copy pasta spaghetti ...

I mean, if you are a game player and you care about the game itself, then ignore this babble, it's nothing against anything, it's just my heart of SW developer (and ex game dev) bleeding...
Posted September 04, 2019
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ped7g: I mean, if you are a game player and you care about the game itself, then ignore this babble, it's nothing against anything, it's just my heart of SW developer (and ex game dev) bleeding...
At least they used JPEGs and not GIFs ;) But yeah. How hard is it to use some decent codec like VP9?
Posted September 11, 2019
Latest installer (the new one just posted today, September 10th) appears corrupt.

$ unzip ./the_bard_s_tale_iv_director_s_cut_4_20_1_153615_32362.zip
Archive: ./the_bard_s_tale_iv_director_s_cut_4_20_1_153615_32362.zip
End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not
a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive. In the
latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on
the last disk(s) of this archive.
unzip: cannot find zipfile directory in one of ./the_bard_s_tale_iv_director_s_cut_4_20_1_153615_32362.zip or
./the_bard_s_tale_iv_director_s_cut_4_20_1_153615_32362.zip.zip, and cannot find ./the_bard_s_tale_iv_director_s_cut_4_20_1_153615_32362.zip.ZIP, period.
Post edited September 11, 2019 by Aikahu
Posted September 11, 2019
Yeah, what's going on. Seriously, that's a third time GOG releases a broken installer!

Reaction: https://i.imgur.com/S0MnlJe.jpg
Post edited September 11, 2019 by shmerl
Posted September 11, 2019
Also, what's with the fake zip that's not even a zip?
Post edited September 11, 2019 by shmerl
Posted September 11, 2019
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shmerl: Also, what's with the fake zip that's not even a zip?
According to 7z its just your standard zip with a Unexpected end of archive so just the usual GOG failing to fully upload the thing.

The zip is really stupid if GOG are having problems with the size of the file, as seems to be the case, they should switch to a a simple compressed folder and break it in half or more, unless the installer has the ability to handle split files which I would assume not. Hell if they are going to wrap the installer in a container use that step to break it into bits.

I really wish they'd explain what the zip thing was about, part of me thinks someone did it at random after a long day trying to get a working upload they quit to save themselves from working with GOGs infrastructure and the next person that had the misfortune of dealing with it though there had to be reason for it and stuck with it.
Posted September 11, 2019
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Cusith: I really wish they'd explain what the zip thing was about, part of me thinks someone did it at random after a long day trying to get a working upload they quit to save themselves from working with GOGs infrastructure and the next person that had the misfortune of dealing with it though there had to be reason for it and stuck with it.
It stops being random, when done 3 times in a row... wrongly!
Posted September 11, 2019
I wonder if they mean to fix it. The bad version is still up.
Posted September 11, 2019
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Aikahu: I wonder if they mean to fix it. The bad version is still up.
Can you contact support about it please? This is getting completely unprofessional on GOG's part.
Posted September 11, 2019
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Cusith: I really wish they'd explain what the zip thing was about, part of me thinks someone did it at random after a long day trying to get a working upload they quit to save themselves from working with GOGs infrastructure and the next person that had the misfortune of dealing with it though there had to be reason for it and stuck with it.
avatar
shmerl: It stops being random, when done 3 times in a row... wrongly!
I meant that someone put the game in a zip randomly while trying to fix the problem then that person quit and all subsequent uses of the zip was just them doing what the last person did
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This is my favourite topic
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The Bard's Tale series Slight Linux/Mac Delay for GOG(103 posts)(103 posts)
(103 posts)