trying to get it working on linux

Here is my progress using wine

from Sins Forums
It would be really nice to get this working under wine in linux. I've tried the latest beta version and it seems sporadic, but it does something at least. I've gotten the intro logos to play and the sins splash screen. It tries to resize the wine desktop window and then the sound becomes rather choppy and it hangs for a while. After a couple minutes I see the picture of the planet flash up there for half a second, then it goes black for a few seconds and finally the menu comes up. The problem is that the interface doesn't respond, probably because its stuck taking 100% of my CPU. Wine gives an error about frame buffering, so that may be the problem, or it could be the sound. I have a similar problem with stuttering sound in half-life 2. After I kill the process the sound keeps playing for a while and is much more smooth.

A few times when I've tried to start sins it's also given me an error about not being able to read English.str, but I haven't gotten that lately. I could provide the dump file if anyone's interested.

zac@zac-desktop:~$ wine "C:\Program Files\Stardock\TotalGaming\Sins of a Solar Empire\Sins of a Solar Empire.exe"
fixme:advapi:LookupAccountNameW L"" L"zac-desktop" (nil) 0x33e3b8 (nil) 0x33e3bc 0x33e3c4 - stub
fixme:advapi:LookupAccountNameW L"" L"zac-desktop" 0x22a4200 0x33e3b8 0x12dfe0 0x33e3bc 0x33e3c4 - stub
fixme:win:EnumDisplayDevicesW ((null),0,0x33f834,0x00000000), stub!
fixme:d3d:IWineD3DImpl_CheckDeviceMultiSampleType Quality levels unsupported at present
fixme:d3d:IWineD3DDeviceImpl_CreateAdditionalSwapChain The app requests more than one back buffer, this can't be supported properly. Please configure the application to use double buffering(=1 back buffer) if possible
fixme:dbghelp:MiniDumpWriteDump NIY MiniDumpWithDataSegs
2,896 views 13 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
The reason seems pretty clear from the error message:

"The app requests more than one back buffer, this can't be supported properly. Please configure the application to use double buffering(=1 back buffer) if possible"

However, you can confirm that it's not the sound by going into your user.setting file and setting all the sound volumes down to 0.0. No sounds should play apart from the movies (which you can also skip by setting ShowIntroMovies to FALSE).

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
I hope you can work this out. Letting the community know or better yet marketing this title as one that will work on Linux should be a big shot in the arm sales wise given the growth of the market share for Linus in recent months.
Object Desktop - Get all of our enhancement utilities in one suite
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
I've played around with some of the settings in user.setting, but I can't get any change. Still always the two messages about the multisample type and the double buffering. I tried multisample types 1, 2, and 3 with no affect and I don't see anything about buffering in the settings file so I think we're SOL unless Stardock decides to fix it.

I'm also getting this error about unable to open .\Strings\English.str. It seems like sometimes I get it and sometimes I don't, but the past 5 times in a row I haven't been able to get past that error.
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
I've also tried the most recent version of the beta in wine. I disabled the intro movies through the text file to prevent them from being an issue. I also have wine set to emulate a virtual desktop which helps out quite a bit with the game resizing the desktop (so that if it breaks you at least still have use of your screen to kill the process).

First time I fired it up it died pretty much immediately with some sound error so I disabled the OSS drivers and had it use ALSA instead. This helped quite a bit. I was able to get to the main menu. As I recall there was no music but the button-click noises played when I clicked on things.

Only problem was that there was no text. Despite this I was able to actually start a single player game. It died almost immediately after that. I haven't spent much time trying to make it work and am far from an expert. I'll fiddle with it some more if I find the time this week. If you find a way to get it working better please share! I'd love to not have to reboot into Windows when I want to play Sins.


Edit:
BTW, I'm using wine 0.9.33 on Ubuntu 7.04 in case you were curious.
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

We have no intention of spending time/money to get Sins working on Linux. It would be a royal pita for us to support. That said, more power to any of you who want to try. ;)

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
wedge did you try a reboot?(silly question i know XD)
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
I've played sins on my laptop (7.10 Ubuntu, 8600M GT, C2D 1.8, 2GB RAM) flawlessly since Wine 0.50. In one of the previous versions of Wine there were instabilities, slowdowns and in some instances fonts that didn't render correctly. But now its working flawlessly.
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
whoot!
Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top

I've played sins on my laptop (7.10 Ubuntu, 8600M GT, C2D 1.8, 2GB RAM) flawlessly since Wine 0.50. In one of the previous versions of Wine there were instabilities, slowdowns and in some instances fonts that didn't render correctly. But now its working flawlessly.
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This is very good news... but could you clarify what version of wine you are using? I thought I had the most up to date version with 0.9.33. Did you install yours from the Ubuntu repos? What do you get when you run 'wine --version'? Any helpful winecfg settings?

All I've been able to do is get into the menu. No text and as soon as I start a single player game it crashes.

Again, running Ubuntu 7.04, 7600GT, P4 3.2GHz, 2GB RAM.

Edit:

Screenie
Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top

whoot!
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I dont want to bust your chops, but "w00t!" is now a real word. Lets spell it properly. :LOL:
Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top


This is very good news... but could you clarify what version of wine you are using? I thought I had the most up to date version with 0.9.33. Did you install yours from the Ubuntu repos? What do you get when you run 'wine --version'? Any helpful winecfg settings?

...

Again, running Ubuntu 7.04, 7600GT, P4 3.2GHz, 2GB RAM.
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That would be your problem then, the latest version is 0.9.52, the version your are running is almost a year old. I recommend you add the Wine HQ repository and download the latest version from there, as described here: http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb

That should get you a long way. :)
Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top
Thats a bit of a result, and good PR too.

Can I suggest an unofficial idiots guide to running SoaSE on Wine would be a cool thing for all concerned?
Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top
Fantastic! Thanks XRolando!

Now it seems to work... the fonts are a bit ugly (rendering too large) but that could well be my fault. Also froze up when I clicked on ICO but that may be related to the Stardock Centeral version issue that others were complaining about. I'm going to reinstall SDC and Sins and see how it works.

Thanks again XRolando. Had just about given up on it.


Edit:

After reinstalling I still get the jumbo fonts and it freezes when I click on ICO. Have you been able to play online, XRolando?