[psychonauts] S3TM

[Luiji Maryo]

Hello:

I recently purchased Humble Bundle V, primarily so that I could play
Psychonauts on my netbook while on long airplane flights. I didn't
find out until afterwards that it required S3TM, which my netbook's
Intel card does not support. (I'm not too saddened, though, I'm
crazy-loving Super Meat Boy and Bastion).

I successfully got Bastion running despite the S3TM "dependency." By
setting the environment variable "force_s3tm_enabled=true" on my Arch
Linux machine, Bastion ignores the lack of S3TM and plays normally.

Psychonauts, when combined with the same adjustment, starts up and
plays the initial cut scene smoothly. (Nostalgia!) Sadly, when it
comes to the section where I must select a bed, all it renders is
Raz's clothing in slightly-shaded white and some really screwed up
text (note: the message about shaders at the beginning of the game
displays correctly, though).

Hence, I have two questions:

1. Why would that environment variable fix work for Bastion perfectly
but not for Psychonauts in any playable way? Is it perhaps an
unrelated bug? I'm running on a 64-bit system using the linux32
command and a series of 32-bit compatibility libraries I downloaded
from the package repositories.

2. Why does Psychonauts even need S3TM? From what I understand, it's
just a texture compression algorithm. Since Bastion functioned, I
assume it compresses it in VRAM instead of in the data files as a way
to conserve resources. Is this really necessary?

Thank you for your time, and I appreciate any help I can get. I would
love to play Psychonauts on the plain, it's a major-throwback for me
(despite it only being seven years old).

Sincerely,
- Luiji Maryo
luiji at users.sourceforge.net
http://entertainingsoftware.com/