I love you - and a little question

Questions about Wine on Linux
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Shiney
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I love you - and a little question

Post by Shiney »

Howdy... 8)

Well this forum seems not have many places to post off-topic content, idk where to post my message else. But I got a question too, so it's not off-topic at all.

First, I want to tell developers of wine this: THANKS!!!

Second I need to tell you a little story...

Some months ago I made a new PC with mid-range hardware (msi/intel z270 chipset, i5 gen7, gtx 1060 etc.).
The reason why I write here is because I like to play a old game: Dungeon Siege II (DS2).

And now the funny story: Win 10x64: DS2 -> No mouse cursor -> no solution found.
Well I WANT TO PLAY THIS GAME!!!!
What did I? Install XP. After hours I got a running XP but still no drivers available.
Next: Vista -> Deleted after installation - no sense no comments at all (vista was crap is crap and will be crap forever, no drivers too (lol)).
Next: Win 7. Well first time (lol) I'm able to install my drivers. Got mouse cursor in DS2 too. BUT graphics and sound bugs... Played around a long time and give it up at the end, because the result was playable but not smooth enough for me (flickering while scrolling on border and sound ends before text ends).
Well I could play the game with Win10 in Window Mode with the bugs of Win7, but if I play a game, it has to be smooth and fullscreen, so no point for me to play it this way.
So what now...? You will laugh, but I was thinking about to make a second PC with old hardware from my storage. But then I got a idea:
My knowledge of linux is over the common but still bad. But theres is something named WINE. So I google a little, saw some youtube. Seems to be worth a try (already got a partition of Win7 which I can replace easy with linux, no need for that Win7 shit anymore, so not much time needed to test it). One big point was my Razor Naga Epic. I can not live without the buttons on the side of the mouse... I was surprised: It is possible to use it on linux too now! :mrgreen:

Ok, I like Mint and I read (you will laugh again that Mint is like Ubuntu (same environment or what ever, no idea at all)). How ever I installed "Linux Mint 18.2 Sonya - Cinnamon x86 (well 32 bit, since there was infos in the app database of 64 is bad idea"). At this point my hope was like zero to be successful.
I didn't need much time to understand how WINE works (Winetricks -> Select default prefix -> Install Windows DLL -> MFC32, thanks to the infos of the ppl found with google). It was still a mezz to get DS2 installed. I tried cd, then iso from cd without success and finally installed it by copy all 4 (original) cds to one folder and install it from hdd.

And then THE BIG HUGE SURPRISE: It is running absolutely smooth and great. Better then in ANY OTHER WINDOWS OS. You see the bitter inronie of that???? The game used to run on WINDOWS is running better with WINE on LINUX, much better then in any Windows OS.... lol. :roll:

So again thank you WINE. You made by bad day to a good day. ;) First day I ever use WINE.


Now my Question:
There is a little point, I hope you can help me to get a solution: When I enter the full screen mode of the game (with locked mouse). The (Cinnamon?) Menu Bar at the button of the screen do no disappear. Stay on top or something like that. I set it to auto hide. But there is still a line on the bottom of the screen. Is there a solution to hide the menu bar completely when WINE start full screen mode...?

Regards Shiney ;)
Shiney
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Re: I love you - and a little question

Post by Shiney »

Well I played around a little with settings and now I'm not sure anymore that the cause is the menu bar. How ever the mouse cursor hides on bottom of the screen.
Maybe you got a idea why that happen? It's not that bad at all but maybe there is a easy solution.
I made a screen video to show you what I do. Please note that the window is full screen for me; only the linux menu bar is visible. I don't know why but the screen recording software shows up my desktop where for my self I see only the game full screen and the menu bar nothing else. But you still see what I do and the problem of the mouse cursor hiding at bottom:

http://hurtec.ch/out.ogv

Regards
Shiney
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Re: I love you - and a little question

Post by Shiney »

After some more deep testing I can say that it is NOT the menu bar of linux... The cursor disappear if I move the cursor to ANY border. Funny is, the bottom border hides the cursor on a greater value of any other sides. Maybe it's the border scroll? I have no idea. I have no idea if it is a ingame issue or a linux desktop issue at all.

Here is a 2nd movie:

http://hurtec.ch/out1.ogv

Regards
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SquareAperture
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Re: I love you - and a little question

Post by SquareAperture »

Hey Shiney.

Hmm. Well, it might be, some desktop managers like to keep their bars up and overlayed, it can be frustrating. KDE and me had a bunch of issues once.

Are you running a display manager? When you reboot and get the login splash screen, if you click the Sessions button, you can pick cinnamon 2d, for a software rendered desktop.

I think you can also restart the running cinnamon from a console window, try typing in cinnamon2d --replace and wait for it to restart your desktop. Full-screen wine app should run fine now. You can restore 3d mode afterwards with the same type of command, cinnamon --replace)

Or something. I know I'm close. Just google "cinnamon 2d mode" if my command is wrong.

Good luck!

PS: Yes, yes we do love them! Usually a good healthy relationship, but sometimes a dark stalker-ish, leave-me-and-I'll-kill-your-family-then-myself kind of love... ha ha. :demon: I can only imagine the "love" the devs have for most of us, when we mob them at a software conference.
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Re: I love you - and a little question

Post by Shiney »

Well ill kill myself and let my family be. :D
I think ds2 is a very special point to do what I did, There are some points I'm not happy, but the main and most important reason of a smooth game was solved with wine.

Whap I am really not happy is, that I posted 2 more reply while moderators need to confirm them before we see them here... thats st can not agree at all...
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dimesio
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Re: I love you - and a little question

Post by dimesio »

Shiney wrote: Whap I am really not happy is, that I posted 2 more reply while moderators need to confirm them before we see them here... thats st can not agree at all...
A new user's first three posts have to be approved by a moderator. It's inconvenient, but it's proven to be the only way to keep out human spammers.
Shiney
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Re: I love you - and a little question

Post by Shiney »

dimesio wrote:
Shiney wrote: Whap I am really not happy is, that I posted 2 more reply while moderators need to confirm them before we see them here... thats st can not agree at all...
A new user's first three posts have to be approved by a moderator. It's inconvenient, but it's proven to be the only way to keep out human spammers.
It is your web space, your forum and your rules. I need to accept your rules. But I do not agree with it, how ever this is not the place (if there's any place) to talk about that.

But if someone got some infos to solve my problem I would be more happy then you could think about it... ;)
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SquareAperture
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Re: I love you - and a little question

Post by SquareAperture »

Hi again.

LOL! good answer... but you do get the joke. It's got to be frustrating for them as well as us, when things don't work as expected. We show up and just want our stuff to work - whereas they have to deal not only with code doing things they didn't program it for, but us wanting our problems fixed. :cry:

re: windows vs wine, My guess is your win7 install has issues; improperly installed/configured drivers, not updated, laden with bloat and background tasks, etc. Or you "downloaded" a "copy" from "that one website" ;-) Shh.

My point is there's no way a modern wine-executed (interpreted?) directx game will match the native PE execution speed of actual Windows. Things have improved over the years and some apps get very close, but games are a different story, and a lot depends on how they were coded. Wine development is part inspiration and part forensic work, it's a unique situation to be sure! And modern systems are so powerful, we don't notice just how much actual work is being done, I mean if the game runs smoothly at ~60fps under wine, do we care if it's a .15 load or a .85? Nope not really.

While I'm happy the game is working for you under wine and all, many thousands upon thousands of people played DS series games under every edition of Windows with smooth-as-buttah gameplay. For a modern i5 with a GTX1060 ?? DS2 is so old, you can play it with the high-resolution and widescreen patches @ 1920 at least, with 8x/16x FSAA, all the nvidia driver tweaks you want, and still exceed any framerate possible back then. (with that system you can play a modern game like Fallout 4 @ 4096x2160, just saying!)

At any rate, please try the cinnamon 2d mode trick. I understand that every other windows app may work fine full-screen and it's only this one app, but it does seem to help other wine gamers myself included (although I've since switched to MATE as I miss GNOME2 and loathe GNOME3), and it's something you can try with a running system without modifying your config.

#valdiswaspossessed! :twisted:

(remembering DS2 is going to make me reinstall it, thanks. lol)
Shiney
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Re: I love you - and a little question

Post by Shiney »

Nope I'm 99,9% sure that my windows operating systems were well configurated. The main point I think is, ds2 was made for win xp. Wine can emulate win xp while I got no drivers for xp.

You are right - I did all the things, filtering and widescreen and it looked great at win7. But as said there was some kind of very very annoying lagging screen if I move the mouse to border where the game change the fov / perspective / visible area. I googled and tried many things but found no solution.

cinnamon2d --replace cause mint to crash completely. :(
Is there any other way to set up 2d with a more safe mode?

Just to avoid misunderstanding: The game IS full screen - only my screen recording software shows it in a window with surrounding desktop no idea why. The problem I have is the mouse cursor that disappear on any border area of the screen inside the game.
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SquareAperture
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Re: I love you - and a little question

Post by SquareAperture »

Hey

re: a way to start cinnamon w/o crashing, it depends on it you start to a display manager or if you log in to a console and manually start your X server, like with startx or a script? If you use a dm, like you are presented with a background and a login box, then usually there is a dropdown somewhere. I'll attach a screenshot of lightdm running on Fedora 26. (actually a photo since a screenshot app isn't running a that point) that shows how to select your preferred desktop, and cinnamon 2d is highlighted. If you do it manually then you can start it with a command like /usr/bin/cinnamon-session-cinnamon2d again that's Fedora, Mint may be something different.

Also, are you familiar with the nvidia-settings utility that installs with the nvidia binary driver? It can adjust many things for you, most of them on-the-fly too, and it has made many an nvidia gamer under wine very happy. From vsync issues to a whole range of others. The borders "popping thru" can sometimes be prevented by triple buffering, what today is called Full Composition Pipeline, and you can toggle it via the nvidia-settings GUI on the Advanced tab, or when using the command line with {ForceFullCompositionPipeline = On} if you want to make a shell script to start your game... this utility is quite handy! Nvidia also hates offscreen rendering, some apps are more tolerant with their drawing but others flicker and flash like crazy, you haven't mentioned this so I won't cover it, but that utility rocks.

You may be new to wine, but you don't sound new to windows, there's many a registry key that you can manipulate for affecting graphical changes. check the WineHQ: Useful Registry Keys page for ideas. (there's also a ton of OpenGL related environment variables that you might want to investigate.)

Oh crap, new to wine! totally spaced on that part. So did you know there's an app database for wine? Have you read the entries in Wine AppDB: Dungeon Siege II? Most of them are old, but might give you some clues if other users experienced a similar issue?

Please keep us updated, invested in your success! :-)
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lightdm showing dropdown of available desktops
lightdm showing dropdown of available desktops
Shiney
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Re: I love you - and a little question

Post by Shiney »

Hey. Really nice to see that ppl care of what I try to do. Thank you very much for your reply! ;)

First, I found the button to switch to 2d desktop finally. Stupid me because I was searching for it on the top of the login window. Hrhr. How ever it didn't solve anything.. :(

I checked out some settings from the nvidia control but it seems that they do not apply to the game anyway. For deeper settings I search the xorg.conf but it seems that this file is deprecated in Mint 18..? So I got no idea where the nvidia control actually store my settings.

It tried some wine registry settings (see the movie). But still the same result as always. The only thing that change something for me, is the ini settings of the game.. :(

I think I am missing something important.. maybe Software Draw (DirectDraw, HAL, Hardware TnL) or know the huckhuck what...

I know the app-db. But there are no graphic related infos as far as I see.

So far I didn't found any setting for tripple buffering...

The graphics are nice. But the border cursor hiding bug still remains.
I saw there are a lot of dlls and windows system apps (directx files too) which I could install. Is there any problem if I would install all of them to try out? Since they would be installed on a default windows anyway..? Maybe one of them would fix my cursor problem...

Here my new video with some testings:
http://hurtec.ch/out2.ogv
Shiney
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Re: I love you - and a little question

Post by Shiney »

Here is a movie of testing dxdiag and running a random other game; I tested Gothic 3 with high-end settings seems to run without any problems..

http://hurtec.ch/out3.ogv
Shiney
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Re: I love you - and a little question

Post by Shiney »

Well I got something new: If I run the game windowed I got all like it should be. No cursor bug anymore. But then the problem would be to completely remove windowed borders and "simulate" full screen. Any1 got idea if that is possible somehow? :)

I heard, that compiz fusion maybe could do that?

http://hurtec.ch/out4.ogv
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Re: I love you - and a little question

Post by Shiney »

FINALLY 100% SUCCESS!! :) :) :)

Well there is a unbelievable great tool: "PlayOnLinux". Why nobody told me about that tool?

So what I did:
- Install PlayOnLinux via Software Manager
- Copy all 4 Setup CDs to one folder

Setting up PlayOnLinux:
- Tools -> Manage Wine Versions -> Add 1.8 (no 1.8x exactly 1.8)
- Press install
- Select "install a non-listed program"
- Select "Install a program in a new virtual drive"
- Select all three options:
> Use another version of Wine
> Configure Wine
> Install some libraries
- Select Wine 1.8
- In Wine Config Select:
> Windows 7
> Graphic -> Capture mouse checked. All other unchecked
- PlayOnLinux Packages -> Select this Packages:
> POL_Install_mfc42
> POL_Install_corefonts
> POL_Install_d3dx9
> POL_Install_tahoma
> POL_Install_vcrun2005
- Select Setup File: Setup.Exe from the Setup CDs Folder.
- Go through installation (maybe there is a error message after you close setup after installation but it do not matter)
- Add DS2VideoConfig and DungeonSiege2 shortcuts
- Back to Main PlayOnLinux Menu Select the DungeonSiege2 Shortcut and Click Configure
- Set Arguments: -no-dwrite -no-cef-sandbox
- You can apply the ds2-patch2.2 by Clicking Install -> install a non-listed program -> Edit Existing Application -> Show Virtual Drives -> Select DS2 Drive -> Leave all 3 Options unchecked -> And then select your patch file

And here is my final result then:
http://hurtec.ch/out.ogv

I removed the old movies from webspace since there is no more need for it at all ;)

Btw if only knew that great tool, I would be finish 2 days ago.. :D
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dimesio
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Re: I love you - and a little question

Post by dimesio »

Shiney wrote: Well there is a unbelievable great tool: "PlayOnLinux". Why nobody told me about that tool?
I'm glad it worked for you, but be aware it's not supported here. If you have any further problems, ask for help on their forum.
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