wine users - Mar 2008 - Bryce 5.5 once ran, before update.

In the application database, there is a revue according to which Bryce 5.5 does
not run under WINE. But not having looked at the AppDB first, I went ahead and
installed Bryce 5.5 some months ago, which ran fine under WINE 0.9.44 or some
such version...

Here is an old screenshot of the app, which has been used to render a tree on
the Linux Box. (Kanotix 2006-RC4)

[Image: http://www.dirkmittler.com/Bryce_WINE.jpg ]

But since I've upgraded to a newer version of WINE, the startup behaviour of
Bryce has become, to paint the screen, but then to let most of the GUI turn
black. Bryce is one application, which will use windows that have no visible
borders on the desktop. And the GUI seems to appear for a split second, only to
disappear after the document / render window has been painted. Here's the
new screenshot:

[Image: http://www.dirkmittler.com/Bryce5_5.jpg ]

I suspect that what has happened, is that since the application database was
last added to by a tester, newer versions of WINE will run Bryce 5.5 .  But in
an even more recent version of WINE, I suspect that ambitious reprogramming of
GUI-related code has resulted in some kind of layer miscount. Thus, I feel that
this problem is GUI-related and not .NET related, which is what the tester wrote
instead. Also, the rendered scene is still on my Linux Box / home WINE
directory. But now that the GUI can't be clicked, Bryce 5.5 is temporarily
unable to produce any more scenes or render them under WINE 0.9.58 .

Also, I find that the Bugzilla people just tend to ignore this sort of bug
report. Will this ever get noticed or fixed?

Dirk

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 6:33 PM, dirkmitt <wineforum-user at winehq.org>
wrote:
> In the application database, there is a revue according to which Bryce 5.5
does not run under WINE. But not having looked at the AppDB first, I went ahead
and installed Bryce 5.5 some months ago, which ran fine under WINE 0.9.44 or
some such version...
>
>  Here is an old screenshot of the app, which has been used to render a tree
on the Linux Box. (Kanotix 2006-RC4)
>
>  [Image: http://www.dirkmittler.com/Bryce_WINE.jpg ]
>
>  But since I've upgraded to a newer version of WINE, the startup
behaviour of Bryce has become, to paint the screen, but then to let most of the
GUI turn black. Bryce is one application, which will use windows that have no
visible borders on the desktop. And the GUI seems to appear for a split second,
only to disappear after the document / render window has been painted.
Here's the new screenshot:
>
>  [Image: http://www.dirkmittler.com/Bryce5_5.jpg ]
>
>  I suspect that what has happened, is that since the application database
was last added to by a tester, newer versions of WINE will run Bryce 5.5 .  But
in an even more recent version of WINE, I suspect that ambitious reprogramming
of GUI-related code has resulted in some kind of layer miscount. Thus, I feel
that this problem is GUI-related and not .NET related, which is what the tester
wrote instead. Also, the rendered scene is still on my Linux Box / home WINE
directory. But now that the GUI can't be clicked, Bryce 5.5 is temporarily
unable to produce any more scenes or render them under WINE 0.9.58 .
>
>  Also, I find that the Bugzilla people just tend to ignore this sort of bug
report. Will this ever get noticed or fixed?
>
>  Dirk
>
Dirk,
   If it's a regression then it has a better chance of getting looked
at. Can you determine which version of Wine broke Bryce? If so then I
think you have a pretty good chance of getting someone to look at it.

- Mark

I'm embarrassed to admit, that I don't recall which WINE version that
was, which broke Bryce 5.5 .

I'm really sorry for that. {:-(}

Dirk

I have to admit, (1) that I don't do a dist-upgrade very often, which would
keep my WINE version actual as well. But I did a d-u on January 1, 2008, that
nearly broke my whole Linux Box. Rest assured, I was able to finish a broken-off
d-u. And after that d-u, Bryce 5.5 ran under WINE. The most recent version was
0.9.52 at that time.

But later, my very next upgrade of specifically WINE was to version 0.9.57 . 
This version no longer allowed Bryce 5.5 to run properly.

Thus it could have been any one of 5 versions.

But, (2) I'm not really willing to reinstall WINE a number of times. I just
hope that knowing within 5 versions might help the actual developers.

Dirk

Because you guys have made a convincing argument, I did the regression test.

After installing version 0.9.55 ,  I found that Bryce 5.5 still worked.

Next, I installed v0.9.56 ,  and found that Bryce 5.5 no longer worked (ie that
the GUI error has cropped up.)

Now, as far as traces go, I always recalled, that Bryce 5.5 under WINE did not
seem to produce any meaningful output. There were some messages, but they did
not lead to a a fatal problem. But, to be sure I copied and pasted the output of
Bryce 5.5 under WINE 0.9.56 ,  after which I downgraded back to WINE 0.9.55 so
that I have a working version of Bryce, and copied and pasted the output again.
Here is the output, from a text file as intermediate storage:

WINE 0.9.56 :

fixme:spoolsv:serv_main (0 (nil))
fixme:ntdll:RtlNtStatusToDosErrorNoTeb no mapping for 8000000a
fixme:imm:ImmGetDefaultIMEWnd (0x10024 - (nil) 0x11a290 ): semi-stub


WINE 0.9.55 :

fixme:spoolsv:serv_main (0 (nil))
err:advapi:service_get_status service protocol error - failed to read pipe r = 0
count = 0!
fixme:imm:ImmGetDefaultIMEWnd (0x10024 - (nil) 0x11a290 ): semi-stub


I think that I did 'spoolsv:serv_main()...' to myself, by trying to
install Poser a while ago. But in WINE 0.9.55 this finally does not prevent
Bryce from running. It also appears when I give 'wineboot' .

Now I intend to stick with WINE 0.9.55 until I see a specific bug-fix for Bryce
5.5 GUI.

Dirk

Instead of building a debug version of WINE for now, which would probably make
me a part of your team, I just wanted to warn readers about a fact in Bryce
under WINE. Maybe one day soon I will start debugging WINE with you, but right
now this statement seems more important.

One should not think, that just because Bryce 5.5 works partially under WINE
0.9.55 ,  all of it works.

In the beginning, I found that starting up the part of Bryce 5.5 which is called
the "DAZ Studio," would cause the whole virtual desktop to freeze. But
more recently, I found that by overriding the library msvcirt.dll with its
native, will stop that from happening, because this part of Bryce opens an
interface to Poser, and Poser needs for msvcirt.dll to be overridden. And now I
find that the DAZ Studio part will also load successfully.

Yet even now, the central panel of DAZ studio fails to redraw itself at times,
leaving pieces of prior dialog boxes visible. This may be due to my LinuxBox not
having its hardware-3D installed, which Poser tends to use.

Also, I can render stationary scenes with Bryce, but not animations, in spite of
having installed a Codec pack. In fact, trying to create an animation with
keyframes eventually causes the buggy GUI to display again, with parts of the
virtual desktop blacked out. So my earlier theory may also be wrong, that this
anomaly was just a GUI problem.

And it was in the hopes that this behaviour would improve, that I was upgrading
WINE before. I'm still hopeful that the behaviour of these programs will
improve.

Dirk

I'm afraid that my Kanotix box is just not strong enough at this point. I
installed git and ccache.

But after that, when I just ran the git clone ... command, the data was
downloaded, after which git began resolving ~300 000 commits right away, which
caused my KGet systray app to crash, after which my whole computer froze.
Alt+SysReq+REISUB didn't even work.

And after that, thinking that git might be ready just to fix commits belonging
to specific wine versions, I next tried

apt-get build-dep wine wine-dev

But when it told me that it needed to install 43 packages, forget it. Kanotix is
Etch but isn't Etch 4.0! And one of the packages it wanted to install, was a
whole new version of cpp.

Sorry, you guys are going to have to do this yourselves.

Dirk

Why didn't you just say so?

You can get Bryce 5.5 for free by now, right here:

http://www.download.com/3120-20_4.html?tg=dl-20&qt=Bryce&tag=srch

Dirk

I understand that 'git clone ...' is supposed to download far more data
than my attempt did. But can somebody explain to me - Why did my KGet crash?

Dirk

You know, my hardware might be flaky.

This machine is an ancient Pentium-3 at 600MHz, custom-built non-professionally.
Now by itself, this should not stop it from recompiling tons of code. And it
wouldn't explain the Bryce bug recurring under the exact conditions either.
But on the other hand, when I rebuilt certain other large source trees in past
months and years, it has happened to me that the machine just froze like that.
Maybe the old hardware does have a glitch. Outside of hardware problems, even a
huge malfunctioning make job shouldn't halt the system.

Dirk

Of course what Dr. Goldberg has written is 100% true. And this conclusion seems
even more likely, considering that Linux / UNIX tend to encapsulate both their
data and their processes more than Windows does.

I'd like very much to get a more serious, Linux-based PC one day, but one
factor which has caused me to hesitate, has been the large number of 3D
applications I currently have installed under XP. Thus, while Linux even offers
us good alternatives in 2D graphics, I feel that some catching up needs to be
done in 3D, while the really good 3D apps are highly expensive, both for Linux
and Windows. But in the past I've purchased 3D graphics software which was
at the bottom of the price scale for Windows, which does not exist yet for
Linux.

Mind you, the companies which sell 3D graphics / game design software, also have
their own agenda for making some versions of it available to Windows users for $
200 etc.. They don't really make profit off those $ 200.

But that also makes me look to projects such as WINE, for maybe one day allowing
some of my apps to run under that future Linux computer I'm hoping for.
Because sure as taxes, I'm not going to buy Vista !

About the Bryce download:

You may find that this download file does not include the full documentation
PDF, for which you might have to go to the DAZ Web site.

Dirk