Oolite Bulletins

Hello to all.
My name is Tim and I live in southern Ontario, Canada.
A big kudos to the creators and maintainers of Oolite. A fantastic job for what I have seen so far. Many good memories brought back from the commodore days.

My problems/questions:
1st: When I first installed Oolite (oolite-1.72.2.x86.v2.package) it ran fine. Unfortunately it was unplayable due to lag time. i.e. ship control response very slow to the point of unable to dock. Note this computer is a P4 1.4 Ghz with 512 ram and onboard graphics so I assume Oolite is beyond what this computer can handle? Opinions? Would a graphics card make it playable? Opinions on what to buy?

2nd: The next day when I fired up Oolite I received this error message in terminal:

.:3: validity error : Validation failed: no DTD found !
<plist version="1.0">
^
Segmentation fault

Erk. It looks like Oolite died with an error. When making an error
report, please copy + paste the log above into the report.


Don't even know where to begin hunting down the problem.....Help?
I am running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and it is up to date.
Thanks for feedback.
Tim

Hello Tim,

welcome to your good memories :-)

tnc wrote:

Unfortunately it was unplayable due to lag time. i.e. ship control response very slow to the point of unable to dock. Note this computer is a P4 1.4 Ghz with 512 ram and onboard graphics so I assume Oolite is beyond what this computer can handle? Opinions?

There are several options to make it a bit faster for slower computers (see -> http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Hidden ... _in_Oolite ). And in the Game Options (F2 - Game Options) you can additionally set 'Reduced Details' to ON.

2nd: The next day when I fired up Oolite I received this error message in terminal: validity error : Validation failed: no DTD found !

Do you have any oxps (AddOns) installed? Please post the first 50 lines of your logfile (Latest.log).

Hello Svengali.

I'll try the F2 options next time out; thanks.

But get this, there does not appear to be a logfile.... or am I searching for the wrong thing? I searched literally for Latest.log

Tim

tnc wrote:

But get this, there does not appear to be a logfile.... or am I searching for the wrong thing? I searched literally for Latest.log

You're right. With a segfault error there's probably no Latest.log and no stderr.txt. Does it always happen or is it a sporadic thingie?

Does it always happen or is it a sporadic thingie?

It is happening consistently.

Did some poking around... seems it may be a gnustep bug? Dang, now where did I put that webpage.....

edit.....

So, just for kicks, I got an old P2 400mhz 128meg box running; installed ubuntu and oolite. (boy, did that take a while!) Upon starting oolite I got the same first part of the error message about the plist and not finding the DTD thingy.
The difference was the segmentation error.
So, then did some poking around and found out that my video card (a nvidia riva tnt) was not being recognized properly. Tried installing the lastest driver but the screen was terrible. Reverted back to Ubuntu driver.

So what to do next......?
Tim

Hmm. Have you tried to reinstall Oolite (I'd bet you have done it already, maybe even a few times .-))?
GNUStep thingies are a bit beyond my skills and additionally I'm still on M$, but reported DTD errors smells like a GNUStep thing.

You have to enable extra repos and things for nVidia to work well under Ubuntu, if I remember correctly, did you do all of that? (My PC with an nVidia card has now been demoted to headless and is in a cupboard )

The envy drivers were the best for me I think... have a look around Phoronix for more clues maybe...

Hello and Good Morning.

I should clarify the result of the install on the other computer: It put up the same DTD error but it did run. The box was shut down a few times and restarted and oolite ran each time with the same DTD complaint. The difference was the segmentation fault. It appears the segmentation fault is in my main box and is related to OpenGL/GLX not working correctly. As I understand it, the OpenGL/GLX is a function of the video driver.

So, on my main box then, Oolite doesn't start at all, and as such no Oolite log file to post up. Figured out the OpenGL/GLX from the Xorg.Log file in my computer.

No OXPs installed of course.

Fairly confident we have all the repos enabled and then some maybe (e.g. medibuntu)

Gonna look into the envy thing a bit more. What is Phoronix? I will check it out.

Thanks
Tim

Guess the most important one is jaunty-updates. On my system I've got the following version available (but not installed, because I'm on Intel )

nvidia-glx-180 185.18.14-0ubuntu1

or nvidia-glx-190 nightly builds from a testing PPA, but might be an idea to try the -180 first!

WHat version of nvidia-glx-??? do you have installed?

And - I guess your nVidia card is quite old in that box, so you might have to use nvidia-glx-96 anyway, support for some cards (like the Geforce 400 I had) is dropped in the newest drivers.

And quite a bit of the graphics stack is in the kernel, so make sure that's up to date as well. 2.6.30 is better in many ways than the kernel in Ubuntu, but unfortunately Ubuntu couldn't be persuaded to wait for it.

Have a look at http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18204 and search around on there generally, I'm sure there are several nVidia howtos.

Hello again. Sorry for taking so long with feedback.....

So after many failed attempts at installing various drivers, I'm back to the Xorg NV driver. However, !!!, the segmentation fault has been dealt with. GLX had failed; heck, may have been that way for a dogs age and I wouldn't have known probably. It failed due to a lack of linux-restricted-modules package. The repository has always been enabled so go figure?

As it turns out, I do have a video card: It is a Nvidia Riva TNT 64 pro. As in oooold. Nvidia says the 71 driver but when I install it, it breaks GLX again. The "legacy" driver with GLX does the same thing. The 180, 190 etc. drivers refuse to install with this old a card. So, gonna have to do some more homework there.

Next I ran glxgears, a framerate/openGL/GLX tester. Turning out 230fps. Coming to the conclusion that the video card is not being used to full potential.

Tried Oolite, got music and black screen. Couldn't do anything else and had to do a hard shutdown. I will check post those log files as soon as find them? Ha ha.

Anyway, all in all, a fun challenge to take on.
Take care.
Tim

Hello Tim & welcome to the friendliest board this side of Riedquat(TM)!

Seems like you've got you work cut out.
To play at its best (and to show the amazing new ships by Griff, Simon B & others in their full glory), Oolite needs openGL 2, but you can still get a pretty decent game speed with openGL 1.5 which, hopefully, you should be able to get for your card. Just.

About the DTD error message, it's a 'feature' of the GNUstep plist parser under linux. Even though it doesn't recognise the DTD schema, Oolite itself knows what to look for, and parses the plist properly. Unfortunately we haven't figured out yet how to stop GNUstep from reporting that non existent 'error'.

Cheers,

Kaks.

Well, hello again.

With the computer I was using (referenced above) oolite was simply not gonna happen. The video card simply couldn't do it and I am a cheapo.

Now a Dell 2600 has been dropped in my lap. It has a 128 meg GeForce4 video card. Oolite runs quite well on this new-to-me box.

As such here is my feedback on Oolite:

Wow. Very good! Thank-you so much to all those who endeavored to create this modern rendition. Top notch work!

Thanks.
Tim

Welcome back!
In the meantime the DTD thingy, feature... whatever...
is gone, kaputt, erased from existence... whatever...

...in the trunk... of course...

Thanks Getafix.

(is your handle from Asterix and Obelix?)

Noticed the DTD thingy was gone. I did the auto package install and it went smooth as glass; runs perfectly. This box can just nicely run Oolite. Probably will not be able to do effects or oxps but ah well....

Incidentally, with the "new" box I have installed Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. Works very well. My first non LTS install.

Tim