ZenAge.4863

Yes definitely, what I posted earlier was just a slap-together for anyone who want's to test it, however, this is like my second script ever, im total noob here but if I spend some time I can write something up that could work well, but will need to be double checked because I'll probably make errors. Basically, if you don't mind the drop in contrast of the game/taco then it is working 100%. However, I would need someone to test on different hardware to see if performance issues arise because different compositors work differently with different hardware. However compton seems to be very lightweight, lighter than xfwm4. I will also install KDE soon to see if the native compositor has active-opacity then compton is not needed. The script would have to do something like this. 1) install.sh asks user to select their current DE/compositor.2) If supported it either applies a simple patch to their native compositor or installs and configures compton.3) Then extracts the TacO build and sets everything up in its own folder4) configure.sh would give option to adjust opacity levels per user needs, & any other tweaks that are available. Also an option to hook into your user_run if users just want toggle taco to start automatically when they launch gw2 via play.sh4) run.sh would launch TacO manually and activate/deactivate the compositor opacity, as you don't want to have half transparent windows when doing basics like browsing etc. I will start writing up something more solid and provide support for the different compositors, as I have only tested on XFCE by running Compton. Whatever we mount in ram gets purged once unmounted, so rsync creates persistence by dumping the accumulated data from ram back to "shader_cache" on the SSD. I have just been lazy to rewrite the way the ramdrivetick works, but what can be done is that is activates with play.sh in the background to mount the "shader_cache" folder and once GW2 gets an exit code, to unmount "shader_cache" from ram, dumping any new shaders that were cached during playtime. The rsync is quick and takes only 2-3 seconds to mount and unmounting almost instant if no new cache was generated. I have tried mounting just one "shader_cache" folder into ram but it does not maintain persistance on unmount, hence the rsync and other empty folder "shader_mount". I think I understood your idea about the ram-file, but due to the way mounting/unmounting works with a tmpfs(ram), without rsync it looses persistence. The "shader_cache" folder is basically our ram-file that we mount that grows with new caches. I will work on these 2 "addons/modules" to be able to hook in and out of your setup, to provide TacO support & Rammed Shader_caches. :) Good learning curve for me and something fun to work on ^^

On another note... Here is something that I've been meaning to share, that helped me with performance issues even when using ArmordVehicle's package. I required persistency and Armourd's portable package stores the cache elsewhere... so here's a script I use, I initially found it somewhere on the web (so its not my work, I just modified it for GW2, but cant seem to find the original anymore for credit). Copy the following script and save it as ramdrivetick.sh in the portable gw2 package root. #!/bin/bash# ===== Configuration START =====SIZE="128M" #Size of the RAM folder. This obviously can not be more than the RAM available on your system.FOLDER_RAM="$HOME/gw2/shader_mount" # Path to the folder where the ram will be mountedFOLDER_HDD="$HOME/gw2/shader_cache" # Path to our backup hdd folderPERMMODE="0755" # The permission for the folders. Used when creating non-existing folders and when mounting.MARKFILE_INITIATED=".zz_ramdrive_initiated" # This file is used to mark if the initial move of items from hdd to ramdisk yet is doneMARKFILE_RUNNING=".zz_ramdrive_sync_is_running" # Marking that an action is running at the moment.# ===== Configuration END =====# Calculate folderpaths for the markersMARKFILE_INITIATED_FOLDER="${FOLDER_RAM}/${MARKFILE_INITIATED}"MARKFILE_RUNNING_FOLDER="${FOLDER_RAM}/${MARKFILE_RUNNING}"# ===== Function Declarations START =====func_sayhi(){ echo "" echo "====== RamDriveTick START ======"}func_exit(){ echo "====== RamDriveTick END ======" exit 0}func_mark_open(){ # Stop if a sync is running already if [ -e "${MARKFILE_RUNNING_FOLDER}" ]; then echo "A sync is already in progress. Exiting." func_exit fi # Otherwise mark this sync in progress sudo touch "${MARKFILE_RUNNING_FOLDER}"}func_mark_close(){ sudo rm "${MARKFILE_RUNNING_FOLDER}"}func_makefolders(){ # Create the folders if they don't exist :) if [ ! -d "${FOLDER_HDD}" ]; then echo "Creating hdd folder \"${FOLDER_HDD}\"" mkdir -p "${FOLDER_HDD}" chmod ${PERMMODE} "${FOLDER_HDD}" fi if [ ! -d "${FOLDER_RAM}" ]; then echo "Creating ram folder \"${FOLDER_RAM}\"" mkdir -p "${FOLDER_RAM}" chmod ${PERMMODE} "${FOLDER_RAM}" fi}func_mount(){ # Mount the tmpfs if it isn't already mounted if ! mountpoint -q "${FOLDER_RAM}"; then echo "Mounting a tmpfs with size ${SIZE} to the ram mountpoint folder \"${FOLDER_RAM}\"." sudo mount -t tmpfs -o size=${SIZE},mode=${PERMMODE} tmpfs "${FOLDER_RAM}" fi}func_sync(){ # Syncronize if [ -e "${MARKFILE_INITIATED_FOLDER}" ]; then echo "Saving from memory to disk." sudo rsync -av --delete --exclude "${MARKFILE_INITIATED}" --exclude "${MARKFILE_RUNNING}" "${FOLDER_RAM}/" "${FOLDER_HDD}" else echo "INIT! The ram drive content will now be synchronized to look like the hdd content." sudo rsync -av "${FOLDER_HDD}/" "${FOLDER_RAM}" sudo touch "${MARKFILE_INITIATED_FOLDER}" fi}# ===== Function Declarations END =====# ===== Execute START =====func_sayhifunc_makefoldersfunc_mountfunc_mark_openfunc_syncfunc_mark_closefunc_exit# ===== Execute END =====Assuming your portable package is in /home/user/gw2 sed -i 's/\/shader_cache/\/shader_mount/' $HOME/gw2/bin/user_run then use sh ~/gw2/ramdrivetick.sh to activate the mount. If you run it again while it's mounted it will run a "tick" that will sync back to the shader_cache folder for persistency. I do this manually but it can be setup to run automatically in the background when starting/stopping GW2.

UPDATE 4 Ok I'm making really good progress... it's turning out to be quite an easy solution really. I've created a second post because the first one was getting too long and limit setting in. So I started researching about what compositors are and this is a good summary -> https://passthroughpo.st/linux-desktop-compositors-performance-functionality/ Having read that, I started digging into the configurations of xfwm4 which is the compositor for xfce. It looks as if there is no active-opacity only inactive-opacity is provided and it would take me too long to figure out how to code it in (if it's even possible?), so I took the quicker route and searched for another compositor and compton seemed like a good option. sudo apt install compton compton-confthen compton-conf Opacity TabSet inactive-opacity to 1.00 (100%)Set active-opacity to 0.70 (70%)Set GW2 window to Always on Top. Disable "composition" in your native Window Manager.then compton in terminal to activate and Ctrl+C to deactivate. The intended functionality is perfect so far, TacO now works without the mouse issues/workarounds... I just need to tinker about with the opacities to find the right sweet spot & look for other tweaks. There is the issue of darker contrast, and you can play with setting the active-opacity, higher means GW2 is brighter but taco fades, and lower is vice-versa. I will make a proper video on all of this later. There is still room for tweaks & improvements. I will update my posts once everything is in order and make it look neat. If anyone is willing to try out on their setups and give some feedback, would be awesome! :) I can't believe it's actually working and a simple workaround lol, would like to see this working for peeps, taco looks cool ^^

Game has been stable since throttling the CPU. Can't believe I haven't done this earlier... was suffering for so long. Imagine trying to PvP or do Fractals when every 3 mins you get 5fps xD... I played like this for a year loll.. @"ArmoredVehicle.2849"Is there anyway to use Taco with your portable package? I remember I tried running it via wine installed and I would get a black screen because it required the Windows Aero theme. I tried to get it installed but gave up. Is there anyway/some dll's to add to be able to get the aero theme working for Taco? I was only able to get gw2navi to work. EDIT: Sorry, the search function is terrible on this forum so I didn't see that others were asking you this as well. UPDATE: So I was bored... and I really wanted to get TacO to work because I have not touched Windows in over 5 years now so I've never got to experience TacO... so here are the results of some tinkering... TacO uses DX11 so I had use dxvk which is barely supported on my cpu, so for me not really a playable option. There are also a lot of dll's, registries etc I had to play with but didn't have access to so had to find workarounds. I installed wine-5.0 (Debian 5.0-4) and used TacO Build 047.2802r. I tried earlier versions of TacO too but encountered various errors. I also tried wine-staging but something went wrong with my tinkering and TacO would just crashed without writing a log of why it crashed (so will get back to that later). So here are a few things I found out. So initially I tried to install the aero.msstyles theme in wine but it doesn't do anything and it's mostly for xp-non-aero theming. Then I thought well aero is just the styles its not the actual transparency service. There are a few settings that touch upon enabling transparency/aero effects. I tried to add this manually to the wine registry using winetricks. [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM]"Composition"=dword:00000001"CompositionPolicy"=dword:00000002However there are more that I haven't tried yet, because I don't have windows so I was looking at forums of people using windows that have Aero problems and some provide registry tweaks to "force" it on. [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM]"Composition"=dword:00000001"ColorizationOpaqueBlend"=dword:00000001"CompositionPolicy"=dword:00000002"UseMachineCheck"=dword:00000000"Blur"=dword:00000000"Animations"=dword:00000000"EnableAeroPeek"=dword:00000001They also mention restarting a service called Desktop Window Manager Session Manager. Which is what actually runs the show... So I had a look at the library overrides for wine and found two that interested me. dwmapi & uxtheme. Setting them to native gives me errors, so I left it as native, then built in. Running TacO I saw in terminal it references dwmapi so it definitely is using it.... but what is it? After some quick reads, I figured its the Desktop Window Manager API which has functions to do certain things, which I am assuming the dev of TacO used to implement the overlay. I didn't do much with it (might be worth exploring more), but saw it in /windows/system32/dwmapi.dll and by disabling it wine says TacO requires it and stops it from starting. So TacO is already using it and wine technically has it there, so theoretically there could be a way to interact with that. (also read that dwmapi requires vista or something and fails at anything besides vista or windows server 2008, so maybe change the os version in wine?) Have a look at https://source.winehq.org/WineAPI/dwmapi.html. So I moved on to uxtheme which is also generally required/deals with the theme/crashes games if its not working. I had a look at the wine uxtheme override and it looks like Wine is working on adding support for native theming so the apps look like your linux os styles, this led me to gtk3 and the option to use that in wine-staging. I enabled it and yes, now winecfg and a few others looks like my linux styles. So this made me look for transparency settings in my DE (xfce) settings and found something that interested me under Window Manager Tweaks -> Composition. The closest option I could use was "Opacity of inactive windows" which I set to 50%. I ran GW2 and TacO. Now TacO dominates and shows the black screen, if I switch to desktop and back to GW2 it shows me the game and TacO hides itself. I was able to get it back by right clicking the window panel -> Always below other windows. This brings back TacO, and "Always on Top" brings back GW2. Now remember the option we set transparency to was only for inactive windows. So set GW2 "Always below other windows" (this puts TacO on top) and Alt-tab to get it inactive. WOAH!!.... I now see GW2 with TacO overlayed :D ooh this is exciting... it runs a bit darker but we are getting somewhere... now the issue is that by using the mouse, you make the window active which kills the opacity. However... keyboard works fine... I can use skills and run around but cant use the mouse (which is obviously a problem).. But having said all this, understand that my linux knowledge is limited and im not a pro programmer, so I can't code/fix this, but I do see this a potential "hack" to get this working and maybe diving into the subject of dwmapi & uxtheme (gtk3) could yield results. Theoretically this also would improve performance by using linux window management and playing with transparencies etc. Someone recently mentioned that their GW2 game has lower fps running TacO because of the Aero resource hog. So this is my input for now... might dive into this further bit later, but for now just want to play the game lol... UPDATE 2: I somehow managed to get the mouse to work!! :D I need some coffee and some more time on this lol its about 75% usable... the only thing that doesn't work are mouse clicks, everything else works. With Alt-Tabbing you can switch between states and use mouse clicks but screen becomes black for that period. You can also hide TacO completely and go back to "normal mode" with the "Always on Top" frame control. I am SURE someone can come up with a few lines of code & linux tweaks to get it working 100%! UPDATE 3 These are some of the scenarios that I encountered: 1) NoTaco (only GW2 shows) [solution: Set "Always below other windows"]2) BlackTaco [solution: Alt-Tab to enable opacity]3) Taco+NoMouseHover (mouse-hover-over-ingame-items does not show anything) [solution: Enable 2 workspaces and switch between between them once]4) Taco+MouseCamera [solution: Click once and BlackTacO will show, if you right click it should activate mousecamera. Alt+Tab to enable transparency, then Alt+Tab once more time to enable MouseCamera with opacity.]5) Taco+MouseCamera+InvertedMovements (mouse camera works but trying to move character left-right-forward moves you in a different directions) [solution: Repeat 4 or 3 and it should re-align]6) Taco+GameFocusAlternation (the focus of taco or game is in a frenzy sate of 0 & 1 preventing the use of mouse, or skills and random weirdness. Any user input becomes RNG) [solution: Minimize the game then maximize] I guess the next steps are to test with different linux window managers, enable opacity for ACTIVE windows (which would theoretically make Taco 100% usable, because the only reason BlackTaco appears on mouse interaction is because the window becomes active and we have set opacity only on inactive windows). Also would be good to figure out how to increase contrast to compensate for the 50% opacity.

Ok ok the throttling is 100% related to the temperatures... I've been monitoring this closely for a while and it's definitely that. Soo.... I can't override fan controls... but I thought well hey, let me throttle the max_cpu_frequency so that it doesn't get to those throttling temperatures. I might suffer some fps loss but atleast in theory it should prevent the insane fps drops and stabilize it. I have also disabled turbo boost. The throttling works perfectly fine, until the character selection screen loads, then the CPU frequency jumps back to 3.2Ghz. No matter what I do, the game overrides the throttle. How can I throttle the CPU to try and bring down the temps if the game overrides system settings? Is this related to wine? EDIT: Ok so I got it to work by disabling intel_pstate in grub intel_pstate=disable. This forced the scaling driver to be acpi-cpufreq. coretemp-isa-0000Adapter: ISA adapterPackage id 0: +95.0°C (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)Core 0: +96.0°C (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)Core 1: +90.0°C (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)Temps are still high & the scaling policy looks a bit messed up but I have successfully throttled the freq to 2.6Ghz which is the hardware limit without turbo boost. Performance in-game has decreased but not having those fps drops... Will play for a day like this and see how it feels.

Thanks for the ideas, will work on improving ventilation. :) Sooo... it turns out this isn't related to temperatures! I was playing on a cold night and my CPU temps were in the 80s way lower than thresholds and it was still continuously dropping my fps down to 5. The pattern is consistent. Approximately 3-5mins of playable 30-40fps, then sudden drop down to 5-6fps for 40secs, then repeat. It's actually becoming annoying now and difficult to play like this. It doesn't matter where I am in-game or what i'm doing. I could be standing in an empty zone in some instance at 45fps doing nothing and every 3mins get these fps drops... I have no idea whats happening/what the CPU logic is thinking. I dunno, the issue is consistent so there should be a link somewhere to something.. On another note... I finished war eternal the other night... and as soon as I threw the spear at kralkatoriks heart, just before the cinematic, my entire game froze. I could hear the sounds/music, but apart from that was permanently frozen... When I logged back in, I was back to the start of that mission (obviously) and it didn't register that I finished it. So I did it again... and same thing happened.. froze as soon as I pierce the heart. Atm I am unable to finish LWS4 because of this... Just curious if this is a wine issue, is my game corrupt, or is this a gw2 issue others are having too unrelated to wine? I am going to try play the mission again with a party member, see if that helps... UPDATEOn the 3rd playthrough I tried with a party member, they were able to watch the cinematic but mine was frozen. They got kicked shortly after.On the 4th playthrough and 2 game file rechecks, I tried finishing the mission under the dxvk package (not legacy), FPS was terrible but I managed to get through and finally finished the mission.

So I used watch -n 1 sensors to monitor my temps and indeed the temps are running near critical levels... acpitz-acpi-0Adapter: ACPI interfacetemp1: +102.0°C (crit = +127.0°C)coretemp-isa-0000Adapter: ISA adapterPackage id 0: +102.0°C (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)Core 0: +98.0°C (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)Core 1: +100.0°C (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)BAT1-acpi-0Adapter: ACPI interfacein0: 12.01 V This led me down a long and annoying rabbit hole of trying to force my fan to run full speed constantly (I don't mind the noise). did sensors-detect & then pwmconfig which just shows "There are no pwm-capable sensor modules installed". Tried about 10+ forum posts regarding this issue and the workarounds but nothing worked. I have a Lenovo G580 and it has some kind of noise-control feature, which according to an 8 year old unresolved lenovo forum thread, is uncontrollable. The forum was funny to read tho, they have horrible support, won't ever buy another lenovo product lol. It could be some firmware I have to install but I can't be bothered to go any deeper right now.. So not sure what I can do, if I could control the fan speeds I could force it to cool better and prevent it from jumping up and down which seems to cause the FPS drops.

Hey, would appreciate an opinion on this: I am using the legacy Intel/AMD packages and so far it has worked wonders... I get something between a stable 25fps to a whopping 45fps depending on location/activity, However... For some reason I get this constant pattern of ~5mins running smooth, ~1min low fps... then repeats. I have noticed during these fps drops that my fan speed alternates.Now I have already overrided the cpu into max-freq/performance mode, however every time the FPS drops to around 8fps, the cpu runs quiet, and as soon as the FPS restores to about 25fps, it speeds up again. I have a feeling that the system is still throttling the CPU despite the overrides? Maybe it's a heat issue? I would imagine the system would force a cooldown/throttle when it sees the CPU running at max freq/temps. Would appreciate some input/advice as it kinda makes it unplayable for me because every ~5mins I drop back to 8fps... even though I get up to 45fps in the same, region/environment. I tested this running around in circles in heart of the mists, and it just alternates between 8fps and 30fps, with an approximately fixed time-span.

Big Thanks to ArmoredVehicle for this project! It's pathetic that Linux is still undermined to this day, at least valve had some common sense to jump on this wagon ;D Anyways, I would just like to point out a few things. 1) All of the links you posted that are in the google drive are inaccessible (at least to me, from multiple locations) and have been last time (1 year ago) that I tried to download the package. It just says "Unable to connect, can’t establish a connection to the server at drive.google.com." The only packages that are accessible are the ones stored in your FTP server. Nvm, got it to work from another location. Last time it was a problem with the download not starting when I pressed "Download Anyways" in google drive.2) The MD5 Checksums do not match. I have only checked the Intel package from your FTP, FrontPage=dfaaa13b2ea47fe0ad3213fba25dc0d9 MyTerminal=43f75ba60aef6112b3f5199d5ccb98dc Have you forgotten to update those, or should I be worried? :) Oof, nvm, looks like I need some more coffee. The checksum mismatch was due to a corrupt download (twice)... Intel one is looking good.3) I can traverse your FTP directories, including the SSH folder containing strange, distorted IMG files. :)4) If possible can you please update the legacy packages, and also host them on your FTP server - for people like me stuck on old hardware... really keen to play :)5) The GitHub installer maintained by liberodark shows last update to the packages was 16 months ago, sitting at v1.9.1. Your FTP shows v2.0.0. Thanks again for the amazing work you have done, and to everyone for providing their tweaks and tests! <3