Right click camera control - Linux

[bobbinhoppin]

I had never used Wine before, nor P99, so it did take me quite some time to get things up a running. Mostly the issue I had was finding 32bit packages to support running WINEARCH=win32 on a 64bit machine. But once I saw the EQ installation screen, everything was pretty smooth. I run the middlemand script to filter the server list.
I was actually running EQ for a couple months before I realized the nvidia driver was not installed at all, by seeing heavy processor usage (Intel i7 4 core). The gameplay was pleasant, but installing the nvidia driver made it beautiful. I think the driver being used was Nouveau, which I think is disabled now through the nvidia configuration.
Still not set up correctly.
The GPU usage during idle, quiet area gameplay is 30-60% (Kunark and Velious are higher) and CPU usage of a single core is 40%-60%. I don't lag at all. In a raid, the GPU usage can stick around 100% (really bad lag when 100+ people are in zone), and the CPU core will be 60-100%. It only ever uses 1 core of CPU.
I'm not familiar with GPU modules...maybe something is disabled/enabled that if switched would help. Or a package is missing. I added d3dx9 dll, went through the solutions on WineHQ and Lutris including fiddling with the xinit configurations.
I want to get EQ to recognize the proper card. Or figure out how Wine is misidentifying it. WinEQ2 may help but I don't know how to set that up, I'll go back and try that some. Maybe update to wine-6.0, that must be pretty new.

edit: i bet I installed EQ with the noveau driver so all the code compiled for that. I need to update wine, reinstall eq with the correct driver. I'll report back

[Naerron]

I have this problem on a windows 10 machine with a 2060rtx and a i-9750, and when i run EQ on my mac with wine, i don't....

this is a real brain bleeder

[Naerron]

I noticed that when i'm running EQ in window mode with multiple monitors, sometimes right click movement will continue to move my mouse (off screen) and when i release the pointer comes back is on a totally different monitor.

Regardless of the OS/use of wine, I think it more has to do with the following:

1. window mode or not
2. dpi settings on mouse
3. multiple or single monitors
4. background processes
5. limiting fps when not in window

[Izmael]

I used to have choppy mouselook with Wine 4 but Wine 5 fixed that for me.

[K-EAVKR]

I've just made a character in Cabalis, seems like an easy graphically intense starting area. I see spikes of 30% GPU utilization here and there but mostly sits under 10%. Also if I sit and spin my camera until I'm sea sick (using right click hold) my CPU utilization sits around 20% all cores. You've said you only see 1 core being used so thats something to look at. There is a line people have added to eqclient.ini to force the use of 1 core 'CPUAffinity#=-1' (where #=each CPU core and -1 means to not use it). There were bugs in older wine versions with multiple cpu cores and directx9, but I feel like those have been fixed since wine4.0 and up.

You have also said your game detects or at least shows a mislabled video card. It is possible it could be you have a rare video card and its picking one that is generally close in family. (I have seen this in laptop video cards) But it is something to raise an eyebrow at.

What video card does everquest detect for you? In the back of my head when I see nouveau I can't help to think you might have onboard video not fully disabled.(the module needs to be blacklisted , usualy nvidia driver install will do that for you)

Also you said really bad lag with 100+ people, I assume you mean low FPS (also how bad is bad? for me anything under 20 is rough for a non shooter game) which further makes me think you still migth be using nouveau drivers.

I know the game is old. But that video card isn't much better performance wise than a GeForce 7900 from 2005. Definitely woulden't expect amazing FPS all the time.

For a point of reference I am using Wine 6.0 64 bit , Linux 5.11 , nvidia 460.56-6

[K-EAVKR]

Originally Posted by Naerron [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

... sometimes right click movement will continue to move my mouse (off screen) and when i release the pointer comes back is on a totally different monitor.
...

I don't know if your using wine, but this very thing can happen with applications using wine.

This wine behavior can be "tamed" with the switch 'automatically capture the mouse in full screen windows' in conjunction with 'emulate a virtual desktop' in the winecfg.

It can also be further tamed by ensuring 'Mouse Warp Overide' is set to Enabled(this is usually default anyways)

Lastly, the version of the file 'dinput8.dll' can affect the mouse behavior as well.

[bobbinhoppin]

EQ thinks I'm using a Geforce FX 5800 in game display options. (I actually have an NVS 3100M)

In trying to get Wine 6 compiled on another partition that's otherwise a duplicate of my EQ functioning partition, I figured maybe my problem is that I compiled Wine myself, instead of their binaries. So I started trying to get Debian up and running on another partition. After I install the Nvidia driver, the screen goes black after the system login screen (after showing Nvidia splash screen). So I had to switch back to the Nov driver and haven't gone past there.
Maybe I'll try Ubuntu.

[K-EAVKR]

The NVS 3100M is a 10 year old chip that is based off the GT218 chip which is even older. It is in the same performance bracket as the 18 year old Geforce FX 5800. I would not be surprised if the NVS 3100M in your laptop is just rebranded FX 5800 chips. Which could explain the game picking it up as that.

Black screen after nvidia driver install might be because that NVS3100M is considered by Nvidia as a 'Legacy Device' and as such needs a legacy driver, not the main branch 'nvidia' driver. So now that makes sense why you were seeing nouveau drivers. The auto installer for your distro probably picked that because the normal nvidia driver would have been incompatible and the installer just wanted you to get a display by the end. Looks like you are going to be stuck with the nouveau drivers.

I would definitely suggest using your distros repository to install a precompiled wine rather than building it from source. But don't let me stop you from doing that! check winehq and look at all Test Results for Everquest(Private Server). 'winetricks' will be another thing to grab to help make installing things like d3dx9 and all of the other various things that Everquest might need run on well on wine. 'Lutris' and 'PlayOnLinux' can also help take the edge off installing games under wine on linux for first time users. They both have an extensive game database like winehq.

Final note, even though it might be a recent-ish laptop, that video chip is going to struggle with most 3D games; even if you used Windows. When you say you get really bad FPS in a huge crowded raid like environment...to me that sounds about par for the course for that type of hardware. Disabling the compositor(all the fancy window effects like dimming, shading wiggling) might buy you a little bit more performance. Try lowering your game resolution and graphics settings as low as you can make them, especially particles.

[bobbinhoppin]

I installed the driver recommended for the card by Nvidia, version 340xx, yes indeed legacy. It worked in my main distro (puppy linux, which does not have a precompiled version of Wine 6) but I haven't gotten it to work in Debian yet.

I am satisfied overall with the performance in EQ - I too do not expect much more in crowded raid-like areas on a budget old laptop, I was just describing that generally the card and graphics seem to be functioning as expected, the only problem is right click camera panning.


How do I disable compositor?

Ty

[pivo]

Off topic, but maybe can be useful for you. I installed P99 on two different Linux Distros, Manjaro and MX Linux. Manjaro (Arch based) install was a little bit easier, per memory I think it ran right away or just little tinkering, for MX Linux (Debian based) I did try few different combinations (Wine, WineHQ...) before I got it working. (Btw, MX has newer Wine & WineHQ versions than most other Debian based distros.)

But even that it took more work, once you figure out all the settings you need, MX Linux has some interesting tool, worth checking it out, when everything works, you only need 3-4 mouse clicks, and your current working install with your game, all the setting and everything, will be converted into ISO file. Which means, if sometime down the road something goes wrong, you just 'burn' your iso on USB stick and you install it again. Or, you can use this USB stick, and install it on another computer, creating exact copy of your system on another hardware. Great stuff. Tool is called: MX Snapshot