Questions about GOverlay & MangoHUD..?

[mikewalsh]

Morning, gang.

Bit of a change of direction for me, I know, but I came across Urban Terror earlier on today, downloaded the current version - v4.3.4 - turned it into a 'portable' (at 1.4 GB, it's a slight case of 'ouch!'), and have just been generally messing-about with it all afternoon and most of the evening. Since it's a kind of "all-in-one" package, containing Windoze, Crapple AND 32- & 64-bit Linux launchers, I've been trying it out across the kennels. Seems to run everywhere, no matter what Pup I throw it at.

(Even for a 'non-gamer' like me, it's actually quite playable, and really rather fun!)

Now, to get to the thread subject matter....

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I subscribe to a number of YouTube channels, including this one:-

Dawid does Tech Stuff

Dawid (David) is a late 20s/30-something Welsh guy who emigrated to Canada several years ago. Mostly what he does is related to gaming, but he does a ton of vids where he basically loves taking the p**s out of AliExpress, Craigslist, Wish, etc, etc, in respect of how crap a lot of their products are..! He's got a standard range of games he uses to try out all these weird & wonderful setups he builds.

I've noticed, in most of these vids when he's demoing games, that he uses a kind of 'transparent'-backed 'window that gives all the relevant stats about GPU temps, framerates, CPU temps and load.....all that kinda stuff. Long story short, after much research it transpires there's a Linux equivalent of all this, powered by GOverlay and an app called MangoHUD. I ripped the .deb packages for GOverlay & MangoHUD from a PPA over at Launchpad.net - these are for Fossapup64 - and, except for the need of one specific Qt5 lib (obtained from the PPM), have it up-and-running in Fossapup.

Now; does anybody have any experience of this thing? I can't for the life of me figure out how to set this thing to run when actually playing a game! Would a script in /root/Startup be needed? The documentation for MangoHUD - which is maintained by an Italian guy who freely admits it's still in 'beta' & is not exactly 'stable' ATM - is absolutely piss-poor. Like, there isn't any.....at least, not that I can find.

The GOverlay GUI - see below:-

[Click to enlarge:-]

....has a 'Run' button down the bottom right, giving a preview of how it looks, superimposed over the top of a 'glxgears' window:-

But it's not at all clear how to get this running during gameplay. (I did find a brief mention - I forget where, now - of an exec line in something being set as

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mangohud --session=1

.....or something similar (not even sure I remembered it correctly, 'cos of course I can't find it again, can I?)

Any "experts" out there got any experience with using MangoHUD in Puppy? Advice would be appreciated, as always.....

Mike.

[dogbert]

https://github.com/flightlessmango/Mang ... rmal-usage:

To enable the MangoHud overlay layer for Vulkan and OpenGL, run :

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mangohud /path/to/app

I've just tried with mangohud glxgears and it worked. My steam client has turned black after update, so I can't try with steam games right now.

[dogbert]

MangoHud

Download: https://github.com/flightlessmango/MangoHud/releases/

Install:(32 and 64 bit)

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tar -xf MangoHud-0.6.7.1.r0.g58e277a.tar.gz
cd MangoHud
tar -xf MangoHud-package.tar
./mangohud-setup.sh install

Usage: https://github.com/flightlessmango/Mang ... rmal-usage

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mangohud /path/to/app

HUD Configuration: https://github.com/flightlessmango/Mang ... figuration

Screenshots: (FossaPup64 9.5)

Bit.trip.runner - OpenGL - 32bit - linux

Cogs(Steam version) - OpenGL - 32bit - linux

[dogbert]

I've just installed GOverlay, it seems to work fine:

Game: Super Mario 64 PC port - 32 bit - windows

[mikewalsh]

@dogbert :-

Hm. I dunno why, but for some reason this just doesn't want to work for me. And that's even with modifying LD_PRELOAD for libMangoHud's absolute $PATH in the start script.

Maybe it's my choice of games. The MangoHud demo runs fine from GOverlay, but in-game.....nothing.

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mangohud /path/to/game

.....doesn't start it. The game runs fine, but no "head-up" info display.

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It's certainly not essential. I'm only a casual, part-time player at best.....definitely no 'gamer'. But it's perplexing that it runs fine for you, and yet using the same instructions, for me it doesn't. Maybe my NVidia GPU has something to do with it. Does this thing need a certain minimum level of support from the proprietary driver?

Mike.

[dogbert]

Hello, it seems that you have installed a .deb package for 64bit only, which won't work with 32bit games.

So, you may try to uninstall that mangohud*.deb and then install mangohud from the link and instructions from my first post above.

Also please check again this link: https://github.com/flightlessmango/Mang ... rmal-usage

OpenGL games may also need dlsym hooking. Add --dlsym or MANGOHUD_DLSYM=1 env var to your command like mangohud --dlsym %command% for Steam.

There are some examples in my screenshots: (Wine and SuperMario64 windows port)

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mangohud --dlsym wine sm64-32bit-opengl.exe

[mikewalsh]

@dogbert :-

I'm not using this for ANY 32-bit games.What I do use it for are native Linux games which have a 64-bit port.....and out of MY "kennels", only Fossapup is supported anyway (I think it's the oldest release MangoHUD & GOverlay DO support, if I've read the GitHub listings correctly.)

My items came from a trawl through Canonical's Launchpad site; I figured out how to access the packages directly several years ago.

Mike.