Savage

Overview

Savage is a multiplayer game that resembles a combination of a real-time strategy and first-person shooter, and it's free. This article describes how to install it and correct known problems.

Installation

Savage is a fairly large download (about 380MB). If you aren't comfortable downloading it with emerge, your can get the main Savage_with_sep3t.run file from the Savage website, and put it in the /usr/portage/distfiles directory.

To install Savage, simply emerge it

emerge -av games-strategy/savage-bin

Common Issues

Download reports 404 not found

If you receive a 404 not found error message while emerging you may have run into the problem documented in this bug report

Gentoo Bug 200782 games-strategy/savage-bin-2.00e fails to download

It seems the files on the server were renamed the bug report contains a patch and instructions on how to apply it.

Assertion xlib.lock during startup

If you receive an error message like

xcb_xlib_unlock: Assertion `c->xlib.lock'

You may have run into the problem documented in this bug report

Gentoo Bug 206573 games-strategy/savage-bin-2.00e doesn't start (xcb problem)

The bug report contains a solution. Replace savage's local copy of libSDL with a link to the system libSDL.

Settings aren't saved

There is a bug in the game that causes it to read settings from the /opt/savage/game files even though it makes a ~/.savage directory. An easy workaround is to set all files residing under /opt/savage/game writable by everyone in the "games" group. To do this, run the following command as root:

chmod -R g+w /opt/savage/game

Sound doesn't work

By default Savage uses OSS. If you'd prefer to use a different sound system, open /opt/savage/game/startup.cfg and /opt/savage/game/settings/current.cfg and search for sound_output. Edit that line to read (for ALSA):

setsave sound_output alsa

Now open /opt/savage/game/settings/user_sound_options.cfg and search for sound_output_driver. Edit that line to read (for ALSA):

set sound_output_driver alsa

First-person view keeps spinning

There are two possible ways to solve this. The first is to open (as root) /usr/games/bin/savage and edit the last line to read:

SDL_VIDEO_X11_DGAMOUSE=0 SDL_MOUSE_RELATIVE=0 ./silverback.bin set mod game "$@"

The second solution is to add the xfree-dga extension in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Under the "modules" section, add:

 SubSection "extmod"
  Option "xfree86-dga"
 EndSubSection

Note that this should replace the "Option "extmod"" line if it exists in your xorg.conf file.