wine users - Feb 2012 - Workarounds for Splinter Cell: Conviction

Hi 

I've been able to get Splinter Cell: Conviction running quite smooth on my
system, and I just want to share with any others what I had to do to get it all
working.

A few days ago, I submitted a testreport in AppDB, but it was rejected with the
info that I was testing a patched version of wine. Which is true, because
vanilla wine just crashes with the exception as tested by other people.

I don't know how else to share my info with other people eager to play this
nice game, so I guess the forum would be a good starting point.

My PC is a Phenom II 940 with Ubuntu 11.10 amd64, with 2 additional PPA's
installed: lowlatency-kernel PPA and the latest binary nvidia drivers PPA
(295.20 as of this writing).


Okay ... here's a rundown on how to get this game to work really well with
Wine (tested with 1.4-rc3) ..

1. Install the raw input patch. (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6901628/raw3.patch)

in wine source dir, do:
# patch -p1 < ~/Downloads/raw3.patch

2. With your favorite editor, open
"wine-1.4-rc3/dlls/kernel32/thread.c" and find the following piece of
code:

BOOL WINAPI SetThreadPriorityBoost(
    HANDLE hthread, /* [in] Handle to thread */
    BOOL disable)   /* [in] TRUE to disable priority boost */
{
    SetLastError(ERROR_CALL_NOT_IMPLEMENTED);
    return FALSE;
}

Comment out (or delete) the SetLastError line and change the return value to
TRUE. (the FALSE statement cause the ASSERT ret() failure some people talked
about with Unreal Engine based games.)

3. execute the following:

# ./tools/make_requests

4. Do your normal configure, make, make install steps.

5. Run winecfg so it can update your settings and you can review yours. (Note: I
have set my global windows version to win2003. Just saying that here in case it
might be important. Haven't tested it with any other version.)

6. run regedit and set the following Direct3D settings:

"AlwaysOffScreen" "enabled"
"StrictDrawOrdering" "enabled"

The game runs fine without these, but some gfx glitches occur when these
settings are not enabled, most notable is the volumetric fog toggling on/off
randomly as well as light reflected off glass seems to be buggy too.

7. run the game.

The game is pretty resource demanding, so I'm playing on low quality
settings.

With all this done, I'm able to play for hours with very smooth gameplay.


Let us know if these workarounds worked for you as well.

As a last note: the game was pretty slow, but that's because my cpufreq
governor is set on 'conservative'.

Enabling all cpu's to run at 'performance', made the game run (much)
smoother:
# sudo cpufreq-set -c 0 -g performance
# sudo cpufreq-set -c 1 -g performance
# sudo cpufreq-set -c 2 -g performance
# sudo cpufreq-set -c 3 -g performance

janverm wrote:
> 
> A few days ago, I submitted a testreport in AppDB, but it was rejected with
the info that I was testing a patched version of wine. Which is true, because
vanilla wine just crashes with the exception as tested by other people.
> 
> I don't know how else to share my info with other people eager to play
this nice game, so I guess the forum would be a good starting point.
You can include information about patches that may fix problems in the
"Extra comments" section of your test report, but what you report
under "What doesn't work" and your overall rating should be based
on the performance of plain Wine.

On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 2:33 PM, janverm <wineforum-user at winehq.org>
wrote:
> Hi
>
> I've been able to get Splinter Cell: Conviction running quite smooth on
my system, and I just want to share with any
> others what I had to do to get it all working.
The Applications Database is a great place to do this also.  And if a
bug report exists, it would be appreciated if you update what you did
in it as well.

Since you included an external patch (outside of the project's
control) it might be good for the author of the patch to open a bug
report with information on the patch and what it affects within Wine.

James

janverm wrote:
> Hi 
> ...
> 
> I don't know how else to share my info with other people eager to play
this nice game, so I guess the forum would be a good starting point.
> 
> ...
> 

It's not rocket science. Get the fix out in the wild (which you have done).
Make sure at least one or two other user can use the 'fix' to confirm it
works.

Then why not volunteer as a maintainer for the application on WineHQ AppDB? Then
you will be able to recommend work arounds to get the game working in the
Splinter Cell: Conviction page wiki...

Updating AppDB is more useful than submitting a test report which **must** give
the game a Garbage rating (since it will not work well/ at all with vanilla
Wine) - will be buried by other reports and probably not looked at by users
(given the rating you will have to give).

Just a quick comment the RAW3.INPUT patch is a fairly well known fix for
applications that need to use raw mouse/keyboard input. It helped me get Deus
Ex: HR limping along recently (other graphics problems hamper that game).

Bob