Can't save game & some sound problems

[Ebel]

I'm using the Linux version of Gish v1.3. The game does not save my progress. Every time I start playing there is no record of when I played earlier, so I have to start from the start every time.

I have also had a bit of trouble with sound and music. The demo music and sound worked fine. When I first used the full version it segfaulted (SDL Parachute Deployed apparently). So I started it with the -nomusic and -nosound option. GIsh loaded up fine. I did that as root.

As my normal login, I was able to start Gish fine but with no sound initially. I could turn on sound and music in the options menu, but I would have to do that everytime. It wouldn't remember it.

I also have trouble running the game as root. All of the following commands cause  "Fatal signal: Segmentation Fault (SDL Parachute Deployed)":
./gish
./gish -nosound
./gish -nomusic
./gish -nomusic -nosound
./gish -music -nosound
./gish -music -sound
./gish -music
./gish -sound

How can these problems be solved.

[Chronic Logic - Josiah]

Are you running Gish from the directory it is installed in?  You need to make sure you are doing that, and that Gish has write permissions in that directory.  Otherwise it cannot save settings or progress.

[Ebel]

I installed gish in /usr/games/gish, with permissions 755 (owner: root.root), so as my normal login I did not have write priviliges to that folder. I tried copying it to my home folder and giving my self write privilges to it. It is able to save progress and settings now. However this is bad. Does this mean everyone would have to have a copy (160 MB!) in their own folder? Giving everyone write access to the game sounds silly. The way things normally work in Linux/Unix is that the programme is installed somewhere and everyone has read (but not write) priviliges to that folder. The users settings and saved files are kept in their home folder. That makes it easy to move your own settings from one computer to the next. Is there not some way of doing that? That would make a lot of sense... I'll see what I can do.

I have discovered why I got a segmentation fault when I ran it as root. I had logged in as my normal account, and opened a terminal and su'ed to root. When I set the shell environmental variable DISPLAY to :0, I can play it fine.  Normally it's empty. The problem was that the game didn't know where to display the graphics.

[Chronic Logic - Josiah]

Glad you figured out what was causing the segmentation fault.  What was your DISPLAY variable set to before?  

Currently running as root, or copying Gish to your home folder is the only way for it to run correctly http://www.pontifex2.com/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/sad.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':('>, we are pretty much Linux novices and don't have a lot of time to put into changing the Linux version.  Its currently set up as our Windows and OSX version are, but I will look into setting up the Linux versions better.

[Jonathan_NL]

On OS X it's also best to put stuff in home directories (usually ~/Library/Preferences/ and ~/Library/Application Support/, and ~ isn't necessarily /Users/name/), but it looks like nobody has had any problems with it yet.

PS.When I set the shell environmental variable DISPLAY to :0, I can play it fine.  Normally it's empty.

[Ebel]

It must have just been slackware, which I recently changed over to from Fedora Core 2. FC2 must have set the default DISPLAY variable to :0, ie the current screen. Slack must just not set it. I know now.

I have a bit of an idea on a workaround to be able to place the save files in the users home directory without having to copy the whole thing across using a lot of symlinks. Give us a bit to whack something together.