Texture issues, glitched screens, crashes in games
I have an Intel integrated graphics card (HD 530) and I am having issues with different games in my Linux (Fedora 25):
- In Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, the loading screen is glitched and the game crashes a few seconds after loading:
- In Mount & Blade, I have an error after the introduction video:
(Error message: "Unable to open texture file Textures\font.dds", even though the file does exist)
- In The Stanley Parable, the initial game screen is odd and there are several missing textures in the game, and it crashes after a few minutes at best:
In all games, I tried setting textures and settings to minimum, changing video modes, updating graphics driver, etc, but nothing worked.
The only similarities between them are that games 1 and 3 both use the Source engine (albeit with 7 years between them), and games 1 and 2 use Wine.
How can I fix it and play the games?
Solution 1:
The solution turned out to be simpler than I expected: installing libtxc_dxtn.i686 (the 32-bit version, to be exact), a texture-related package, solved all issues in the 3 games:
sudo dnf install libtxc_dxtn.i686
It turns out that the issues were related to compressed textures - S3TC, to be more exact - and, for some reason, that package was never suggested when I installed Wine, neither when I installed Intel's graphics stack recipe.
Looking for the errors in each game in an isolated fashion didn't help me; I spent about a dozen hours trying to find out the cause. I accidentally stumbled upon a page mentioning driconf, and another mentioning libtxc, but they were drowned in other pages with unrelated errors (mostly for Windows players).
In hopes this answer will help others save time (adding the images and game names to this well-indexed site should help)...
Note: the issue seems quite obvious once you know textures are the cause, but it was not obvious at all at the time, especially in isolation (for instance, the Mount & Blade error message seemed more closely related to filepath issues in Linux than with the loading of textures itself; also, texture errors in principle should lead to visual artifacts, but not crashes). I would have immensely appreciated finding an answer on SO. Please take that into account before considering this Q&A off-topic, or trivial.