Any POL or wine users out there?

[mrchuck]

This will only be of interest to the tiny handful (if any) of people running WITE under Play on Linux/Mac or wine. I know there are some guys running witpAE under wine (because I've helped them out), so I thought there might be some wite players too.

I'v been doing this without any problems for more than two years up until the 1.8.07 beta. The moment it tries to play a sound effect, it crashes POL. I believe it's something to do with the directx update included in the beta installer.

I've tried it under various versions of wine under POL, same reproducible result in all of them.

Anyone else seen this, and even better, got a solution? In desperation I installed under a relic copy of XP I have in a dual boot environment so I can test the update, but if I can avoid windows, I do. Why? Habits of 20 years die hard...ex-Sun here.

mrchuck

[swkuh]

@mrchuck:

always recommend a modestly priced merlot when wine is discussed

[morvael]

I played WitE using CodeWeavers Crossover/Wine, but it was indeed on older versions. 1.08.07 was compiled using "latest" DirectX 9.0c libraries, so instead of using old August 2007 SDK it uses June 2010 SDK. I think there were some changes in the engine concerning sound playback in WitW and these are now part of WitE too, since they share the same core engine. If adding support for June 2010 DirectX is impossible in POL, then try renaming sound and video folder to disable them completely. Maybe it will help.

[mrchuck]

OK, good to know--thanks Morvael.

I'll poke around and see if any other wine applications use the 2010 SDK and whether there's a workaround out there somewhere. I saw exactly the same thing with WITW (was an early tester but dropped out due to pressure of actual work, you know, stuff that makes money...) so this would possibly explain why.

As a last resort I can certainly disable the sound, but the FX do add something to the game experience and I'd rather have them than not.

mrchuck

[mrchuck]

As ever, don't know who is interested if anyone. However I now have it working. Configuration:

WITE 1.00 + 1.8.07 beta patch--did NOT install the bundled directx.
Ubuntu 15.10
Playonlinux 4.2.6
Wine 1.8
32 bit wine prefix.
Extra libraries installed:
amstream, devenum, quartz (you need those three for nearly every game I've tried)

Couldn't work out which directx, so installed lots of the variants known to POL, using POL's own interface for doing this:
d3dx10
d3dx11
directx9
dxfullsetup
dsound
One or more of these is almost certainly redundant, but at least one of them is right. Initial testing (some airfield and ground attacks) does not crash it now, and the sound works.
YMMV.

If you are interested further in this and hit snags, by all means get in touch, but I'm much less clear on how you'd do the same things if you don't use playonlinux. I had a look at bare-bones wine ages ago and there seems to be a lot more heavy lifting required; POL does it all for you. And for my money the game actually runs faster.

More news as it comes to hand, if any--if I don't post again, I'm too busy playing it.

Incidentally...Fort level 2 on so much of the 22/6/1941 front line is preposterous. Should be 1 or 0 except Brest-Litovsk