AoD under Wine

[shimgray]

Just a quick note for those people who are or are considering playing under Linux using Wine...

AoD was quite problematic when I first got it a few days ago, despite the fact that HoI.2 was running cleanly on the same machine. I eventually tracked down the problems:

* it seems quite touchy about sound, so you may want to disable this entirely (at least to begin with)
* it may have DirectX display problems, which can be got around by separately installing DirectX 9 using winetricks.

(The wine version is currently 1.1.39, running windowed under Ubuntu 9.10)

Currently, some instances play fine, some result in a crash to desktop. It seems to be getting better, though. I'll post an update with notes once I've worked out the remaining setup bugs.

Anyone else? I know there's a few people who ran HoI this way...

 

[Amallric]

How are savegames working?

 

[shimgray]

They're loading fine, but a bit slowly. (Starting a scenario can sometimes take quite a while as well)

I've played from scratch and from a save, and neither seems - yet - to have obvious problems. Is there any known bug I should be looking out for?

 

[Amallric]

No, I was just curious about the general speed because games are usually a bit slower on Linux and since AoD has serious speed issues I was wondering if it was not game-breaking.

 

[shimgray]

Some testing says that a large scenario takes about six minutes to load from savegame, longer than before, but the gameplay itself isn't really slower than I remember from HoI. This is, admittedly, running in a window with Firefox open elsewhere to read my mail - doing it fullscreen without competition might be quicker. It's a bit of a lag, but it's not a dealbreaker for me - it's a good opportunity to stretch your legs and rest your eyes for a bit every now and again, after all, or make a cup of coffee before continuing!

CTDs continue infrequently - almost inevitable in a long game session, but it can run for two hours, tabbing in and out, before they hit. Haven't pinned down the cause yet, but looking at the error messages it seems likely to be some kind of problem with the graphics layer. YMMV...

 

[unmerged(104627)]

By far the biggest problem I've had is that the game ALWAYS crashes to desktop whenever I use the mouse wheel to scroll in or out of the map. If i don't zoom in or out, the game usually runs stable for at least a few hours.

Also, once the game closes, it completely changes my desktop and Gnome configuration, which is extremely annoying.

Just realized i'm using wine 1.0.1 instead of wine 1.1.39 (the latest development machine), maybe if I switch that will help...

 

[shimgray]

By far the biggest problem I've had is that the game ALWAYS crashes to desktop whenever I use the mouse wheel to scroll in or out of the map. If i don't zoom in or out, the game usually runs stable for at least a few hours.

Also, once the game closes, it completely changes my desktop and Gnome configuration, which is extremely annoying.

Just realized i'm using wine 1.0.1 instead of wine 1.1.39 (the latest development machine), maybe if I switch that will help...

If you run it windowed - emulate virtual desktop, 1024x768 - you get around the desktop resizing, I find, and you can read your mail during the boring pre-war bits...

I've definitely identified the mouse scroll as a contributing factor to crashes, but it doesn't seem to be a 1:1 correspondence for me - it doesn't always trigger it, and there are other things which do.

 

[Amallric]

Don't forget that HoI2 always crashed in Wine when zooming out with counters activated, maybe that's causing your crashes?

 

[shimgray]

Don't forget that HoI2 always crashed in Wine when zooming out with counters activated, maybe that's causing your crashes?

....how could I have FORGOTTEN the old counters problem. Smart - now, let's see if it works.