X4 Foundations - No Sound on Linux POP

[Fezz76]

HI,
I installed X4 from GOG on my Linux.
I have sound on computer with every app etc.
However, when I open X4 there is no sound. I tried moving all setting in X4 and no luck,
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Alex

[CBJ]

No ideas at all I'm afraid, because you've not given us any information to work with. You can't provide a DXDiag on Linux, of course, but you could at least tell us what flavour of Linux you're running and provide the other information requested in the very first thread at the top of the forum, in the thread entitled "Technical Support Requests - Please read this before posting!".

[Fezz76]

Damn so sorry completely missed that one my apologies.
So here would be info:
Version and language (e.g. 7.10 Hotfix 1, English, etc.).
Operating System : Pop!_OS 22.04 jammy (x86-64)
Cinnamon Version : 5.2.7
Linux Kernel : 6.9.3-76060903-generic
Graphics Card : NVIDIA Corporation Device 2702
Game Version 7.00
English
Whether or not your game is modified using any third party scripts or mods (see note below).
NO MODS
Game start being played.
x4/Foundations
Exact nature of the problem, where and when it occurs and what you were doing at the time.
There is NO music or SOUND in game.
Settings in game are correct as the source of output is system default which is my computer where outside of X4 all sound works perfectly well.
Any possibly relevant changes you have made to your game, system, or software before the issue occurred.
NONE I just installed recently (used to play on my Mac in 99 when game came out so excited for nostalgia).
Where appropriate, additional symptoms, error messages, links to saves *, screenshots and crash dump files (see this Wiki entry).
No additional.
Your system specifications in the form of a DxDiag report and vulkaninfo (see this Wiki entry).**
I'm not technical and new to Linux so hope this is enough. I installed vulkanifo but I cant find how to export data. Please let me know if you need more data.
Thank you!
Alex

[Alan Phipps]

Just as a check, in the X4 Settings, Sound Settings, click the 'Restore Sound Defaults' option and see if that helps at all.

Are you using a dedicated sound card or the onboard sound chipset such as Realtek etc?
Is the sound driver from the actual manufacturer of the card/chipset or elsewhere such as a generic default, and is it fairly recent (say later than 2022)?
Have you tried changing the OS/card/chipset sound control panel settings, or just the ones in-game?

Make all out-of-game sound device selection and control panel changes before starting the game as changes made while in-game will likely not be recognised or work until you restart the game.

Just thinking of possible avenues to try.

[PGeyer-Ego]

I have just checked and I am getting audio locally on the version that's currently live on Steam. I will try to set up Pop!_OS on a second machine to see if I can reproduce it, but it feels like X4 might not be picking up your default sound device - try to see if you can set a different one in the settings. My guess is that X4 is actually trying to play audio through a HDMI monitor without speakers or something.

There are some other things you can try, but it gets a bit messy.

Linux has a complicated relationship with audio. Historically it was bad, so to make things better, new systems were added to improve on it, but some things rely on older ones. We're using OpenAL, which should handle this, but I've found that it gets confused if you have pulseaudio installed (honestly, 90% of my audio problems, I've fixed by removing pulseaudio) so you can maybe see if this is installed, and whether it is easy to remove as a test. This should cause OpenAL to fall back to ALSA which should be more reliable for X4 at least. It's also possible you have pipewire as an audio system, I have no idea what impact this might have. I haven't heard of problems but like with pulseaudio. One other thing is, you can create a text file called .asoundrc in your home directory, which can specify your user's audio setup for ALSA, this can be the default device. I seem to recall having to do this for X3, but not X4. For reference, mine is:

Code: Select all

defaults.pcm.card 2
defaults.ctl.card 2

pcm.!default {
    type plug
    slave {
        pcm "hw:2,0"
    }
}

ctl.!default {
    type hw
    card 2
}

But note, this is because I'm using a different sound device (which you can find by running 'aplay -l dump' in a terminal) so for yours would probably be either card 0, or card 1, with whatever it lists as the device for the specific output you want. I cannot really advise as to what a good configuration would be in your case unfortunately, as it will depend on your setup.

Hopefully this is of some help.

PG