HOWTO: Solving the "Your card is too old" problem

[onemyndseye]

Ok.. this has been discussed in several places on this forum but I wanted to attempt to centralize some of this info into something possibly usefull for most Linux distros... if anyone has anything to add please feel free.


If your card has DRI support but RO reports "Your video card is too old" or you have corrupted textures in game... this is for you. But be aware it comes at a price.... I'll explain.

If you are here you are probably NOT using proprietary drivers for your video card because they are either not available or not functioning for your adapter... Non-proprietary drivers do not contain the needed texture decompression libs needed for Regnum to run properly: S3TC or libxtc

S3TC can be enabled in driconf but this support is very limited as many of you may have already seen.. slow and buggy textures.


This has been discussed here


This is where this Howto comes in... but as I said there is a price. There are some legal problems regarding the license of these libs and for this reason they cannot be distributed in some places... Read more here

So if you would like these lib's on your system and be able to play RO properly you must compile and install them yourself.

Please note that for Debian users the libxtc package is available on the debian-multimedia.org repositories. This package did not work for me however it may for you... In any case this HOWTO is an attempt at a more broad solution.

Its actually is a quite simple process so lets open your favorite terminal emulator and get started

In a terminal window lets create a directory to work in and use wget to download the source code needed to compile libxtc:

mkdir ~/build-libxtc
cd ~/build-libxtc
wget http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheideg...n070518.tar.gz
tar -xvf libtxc_dxtn070518.tar.gz
cd libtxc_dxtn

Now at this point you will need your system to be setup for compiling software... This means for Debian youll need the build-essentials package. For other systems do alittle research to see what the equivalent package(s).

Users of other systems please fill in the blanks here

Also install the mesa headers (mesa-common-dev on debian and the like)

sudo apt-get install mesa-common-dev

Now its time to compile libxtc

make

You should see ouput similar to the following:

cc -Wall -pedantic -fPIC -O3 -c -o txc_compress_dxtn.o txc_compress_dxtn.c
txc_compress_dxtn.c: In function ‘tx_compress_dxtn’:
txc_compress_dxtn.c:419: warning: ‘alphatest[0]’ may be used uninitialized in this function
txc_compress_dxtn.c:419: note: ‘alphatest[0]’ was declared here
txc_compress_dxtn.c:419: warning: ‘alphatest[1]’ may be used uninitialized in this function
txc_compress_dxtn.c:419: note: ‘alphatest[1]’ was declared here
cc -Wall -pedantic -fPIC -O3 -c -o txc_fetch_dxtn.o txc_fetch_dxtn.c
cc -shared -fPIC -o libtxc_dxtn.so txc_compress_dxtn.o txc_fetch_dxtn.o

If you dont get any errors its time for to install... you can safely ignore any warnings. Install with:

sudo make install

Output should look as follows:

install -d /usr/lib
install -m 755 libtxc_dxtn.so /usr/lib

Now for good measure restart your X session and fire up RO.. and hopefully happy hunting




-onemyndseye
**** Syrtis lvl50 Hunter: Elusis