Planetside

What works

Following these steps

http://forums.station.sony.com/ps/posts/list.m?topic_id=88000010429

The installer provided in the post works just fine. It simplifies the installation.

The game works and performs just fine, with some very minor graphical glitches. *turning off particle effects gets rid of the glitches*

What does not

Character textures on login. It just shows a white shadow rather than the character.

Workarounds

What was not tested

The beta server AKA the dev test server.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

I would give it a platinum if not for the graphical glitches. But then these issues are occasionally present in windows. The performance is better than Windows with SLI and no Saitek keyboard bug (which I happen to have) 8800s work just like any other nVidia card here. On windows there are a number of issues with them including crashes as a result of the game and the drivers. All in all with a little more work this game could run better and less buggy than on windows. In fact it already is on alot of levels.

On Gentoo systems, PlanetSide will not work out of the box due to a missing Mesa library (note: if you are using proprietary AMD or NVIDIA graphics drivers, you probably won't need to worry about this) . Here are the steps and triage I used to debug the issues I was having.

Upon start, the PlanetSide window would launch, sound would be heard, but nothing would get drawn. The console was being spammed with messages similar to:

err:d3d_surface:surface_upload_data >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> GL_INVALID_ENUM (0x500) from glTexSubImage2D @ surface.c / 2369

This search led me to this bug which says that libtxc_dxtn.so is required for PlanetSide to load textures. To verify that this was in fact the missing library, I ran: MESA_DEBUG=1 wine LaunchPad.exe and looked for the error: Mesa warning: couldn't open libtxc_dxtn.so, software DXTn compression/decompression unavailable. This appeared and I resolved the problem by running emerge -va media-libs/libtxc_dxtn (for Debian/Ubuntu run apt-get install libtxc-dxtn-s2tc). I hope this resolves most people's problems with this specific issue.