[Linux] Crashes mid-game and occasional stuttering

rkfg

First of all, brilliant game! Many thanks for the Linux port, hope you won't be disappointed in linux gamers support. So far my only issues were crashes and random stuttering. I'm running Steam from the terminal to see what's going on because some info isn't shown anywhere else, neither in log.txt nor in dmesg. After turning off almost everything except textures (which are on medium) I managed to play mostly without lags and crashes in windowed mode. I'm using Awesome WM so I could turn the window fullscreen by pressing a hotkey.

Here are my paired logs and meaningful parts of the console output (console.txt — log.txt, console2.txt — log2.txt etc.) These were captured when I've been playing with almost everything turned on except Atmospherics and Ambient Occlusion which have the greatest FPS impact making the game almost unplayable. As I see it really leaks until it runs out of memory. Being 32-bit it only has 3.5 Gb of RAM per process so it happens even though I have 16 Gb barely occupied. I guess we, players, can't fix such leaks by ourselves anyway so I'll wait veeeeery patiently until it's resolved.

Stuttering happened yesterday just out of blue, it was heavy and for a long time (about 5 minutes), about 500-1000ms of freeze every 500-1000ms. Profile and r_stats don't show any hiccups, surprisingly. It's like these freezes happen somewhere outside the game but I didn't experience it anywhere else. Was playing Source games, Unity-based games, Serious Sam 3 and some UE3 games on Wine, sure there were rare FPS instabilities like on any OS and configuration but nothing major. These ones were horrible, 0.5 sec of smooth moving and then 0.5 sec of complete freeze. And so on and on and on. Then after some respawn it was gone and everything became quite smooth. Maybe I switched to another tag and then back (similar to Alt+Tab in traditional window managers), can't say for sure.

The other day I was playing as an alien and the game started to stutter again. It quickly got worse up to complete freeze. The mouse worked and I switched to another tag to spawn terminal and watch for memory/CPU of the game. When I switched back it was like this:



Menu didn't work but mouse did, I mean I could move it and saw the cursor but couldn't click anything. The log in the terminal showed game events like players killing each other so it wasn't really hung, just the graphics. I had to kill it and relaunch to proceed.

All in all, it's a great fun. Maybe the greatest since the TF2 launch. Thank you, guys, keep up the good work, have a nice financial reinforcement and please don't drink too much coffee. It's bad for your hearts and you need them to make a lovely game! ;3

rkfg

It looks like turning off compton (standalone composition manager) helped with stuttering on non-low settings. Just crashed because of OOM though:

Compiling 'models/marine/marine.surface_shader'
Compiling 'shaders/PowerNode_emissive.surface_shader'
Compiling 'shaders/ViewModel.surface_shader'
Compiling 'cinematics/vfx_materials/pulse_gre_elec.surface_shader'
Compiling 'materials/infestation/infestation_decal.surface_shader'
Error: (null)(-3) : Out of memory
Segmentation fault
Game removed: AppID 4920 "Natural Selection 2", ProcID 24068 

IronHorse

Thanks for the thread and the debugging info. Passing this along to the developers.
I believe its the same issue that is effecting other users, with fragmented memory.
The devs are on it!