S3TC compression library conflicts and Steam

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nonbeing
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Joined: 14 Jun 2017, 03:02

S3TC compression library conflicts and Steam

Post by nonbeing »

I just installed Morrowind (GOG version) onto a partition, then installed OpenMW launcher from the official Ubuntu repositories. I am running Zenial and my GPU is an RX 480 running on the free driver in the kernel. I have selected the correct esm, imported the ini, etc. Game runs on windows without openmw.

Anyway, the loading screen and intro credit work fine, but when the game reaches the actual menu I see a pink screen. I searched the forums for the problem, and found this, which sounds like my problem, since it would make sense for the credits to be fmv and the menu itself a texture. So I open synaptic and find the suggested package (libtxc-dxtn-s2tc), then try to install it. But there's a problem. It conflicts with a similar package, libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0:i386, and that package is a dependency for steam, meaning that it would be a pain to uninstall it.

So a couple of questions here. The description for libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0:i386 says that it "is a patent-free S3TC compatible implementation and provides
texture compression to Mesa", which is more or less the same description as for the recommended package, so why doesn't it work? Do I have a different problem from S3TC support after all? If I do need libtxc-dxtn-s2tc specifically, then how do I install it while still being able to use Steam?

Thanks in advance for any help. I can provide more info if necessary.
K0kt409P
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Joined: 06 Aug 2013, 09:14

Re: S3TC compression library conflicts and Steam

Post by K0kt409P »

libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0 was renamed to libtxc-dxtn-s2tc in Ubuntu 17.04, following the release of version 1.0. They refer to different versions of the same piece of software, so if you already have one of them installed, you don't need the other. libtxc-dxtn-s2tc does not exist in Xenial's repos, which means that, if your package manager can find it, it comes from a third-party repo, likely some ppa or another. This will, naturally, cause a conflict.

Lack of S3TC support would not result in pink textures, so you may have a different problem. Are you using any mods?
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psi29a
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Re: S3TC compression library conflicts and Steam

Post by psi29a »

K0kt409P wrote: 14 Jun 2017, 09:20Lack of S3TC support would not result in pink textures, so you may have a different problem. Are you using any mods?
Are you sure about that? All my hardware without S3TC available display pink as a result when running Morrowind with OpenMW. This goes away the moment you decompress S3TC textures to uncompressed DDS.

https://openmw.org/faq/#morrowind_on_al ... _platforms
Chris
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Re: S3TC compression library conflicts and Steam

Post by Chris »

K0kt409P wrote: 14 Jun 2017, 09:20 Lack of S3TC support would not result in pink textures
It will when the texture in question is DXT (S3TC) format, which a number of Morrowind's textures are. Such textures can't load without S3TC support and will instead appear pink.

Unfortunately I use the nVidia binary driver which has full proper support for S3TC, so I can't help with getting the right packages. But I do know that there's an environment variable you can set for Mesa drivers that forces S3TC support regardless. It's not technically enough to be compliant with the spec (it basically just lets the hardware handle it as a texture format in pass-through uses, and doesn't do any client-side encoding or decoding), but it might be enough for some games like OpenMW.

https://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/S3TC/
"There is also an option in the S3TC-supporting DRI drivers called force_s3tc_enable. If the library is unavailable, setting this option to true will expose the extension even though it cannot be fully implemented."

So you can try running:

Code: Select all

force_s3tc_enable=true openmw-launcher
from the command line.
K0kt409P
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Joined: 06 Aug 2013, 09:14

Re: S3TC compression library conflicts and Steam

Post by K0kt409P »

I was going off the wiki information, which says missing S3TC results in white textures. Perhaps that is the problem after all, then.

Are you using the i386 or amd64 version of openmw? You mentioned that when you try to install libtxc-dxtn-s2tc, it is said to conflict with libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0:i386. If you are using the amd64 version of openmw, but only have a i386 version of libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0 installed, that would explain the problem.

It seems odd that packages from different architectures would conflict with each other, but I have seen it happen before.

Edit: I just checked, and I have both i386 and amd64 version of libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0 installed in parallel (on Debian 8). If you are using openmw:amd64 and do not have libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0:amd64 installed, try installing libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0 (with the trailing zero) instead of libtxc-dxtn-s2tc.
nonbeing
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Re: S3TC compression library conflicts and Steam

Post by nonbeing »

So, I've been playing around with it a little here. I uninstalled steam and reinstalled the default version of libtxc-dxtn-s2tc. Game started fine. Then I reinstalled steam from the ubuntu repository in the terminal. Now I have both the amd64 and i386 versions of libtxc-dxtn-s2tc, which I was for some reason unable to do in synaptic. The game runs. I have no idea why it worked now but not before, but I'm just glad it did. Thanks for all the replies to this thread. I will post again if the problem pops up again, but for now it seems to be resolved.
Chris
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Re: S3TC compression library conflicts and Steam

Post by Chris »

nonbeing wrote: 15 Jun 2017, 02:01 Then I reinstalled steam from the ubuntu repository in the terminal. Now I have both the amd64 and i386 versions of libtxc-dxtn-s2tc, which I was for some reason unable to do in synaptic. The game runs. I have no idea why it worked now but not before, but I'm just glad it did.
Probably because you had libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0:i386 installed before, which can't be installed with libtxc-dxtn-s2tc:amd64. Installing libtxc-dxtn-s2tc:i386 instead of libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0:i386 still satisfies Steam, and can be installed with libtxc-dxtn-s2tc:amd64.
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psi29a
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Re: S3TC compression library conflicts and Steam

Post by psi29a »

Another 60 days before patent expires...
http://www.patentcountdown.org/
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raevol
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Re: S3TC compression library conflicts and Steam

Post by raevol »

psi29a wrote: 02 Aug 2017, 14:22 Another 60 days before patent expires...
http://www.patentcountdown.org/
Can we have a party? :D
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Thunderforge
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Re: S3TC compression library conflicts and Steam

Post by Thunderforge »

raevol wrote: 03 Aug 2017, 01:51 Can we have a party? :D
Only if you bring patent-free food and drinks, preferably ones that are open source too.
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