How to isolate a problem with a game running in Wine?

[ischou]

Hi,

There is a new game engine available for a MMORPG called Anarchy Online. The previous game engine works well enough, but I'd like to try the new engine: http://ctrack.funcom.com/ad/?ref=AONEWENGINE

I download and install the game using Wine, but when I run the game, I just get a black screen. If I leave the program running long enough, it eventually crashes, but I don't know if it crashes because of a problem or the program exits because it can't do something it needed to.

I'm not knowledgeable about Wine, but I have some basic C/C++ skills. (I can compile Wine myself and track down why sometimes new version don't compile on my system.) So rather than just a generic "hey, someone fix this for me" plea, instead, I'd like to ask the community how I would go about trying to narrow down why the new engine won't render in Wine.

Are there specific values I can set in WINEDEBUG that might give me more of a clue? Are there specific error messages I can look for?

Thanks,

[bernhardu]

You probably want to have a look at the FAQ/Wiki sites:
http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-16da35b ... 16862d0f5e
http://wiki.winehq.org/DebugChannels

However, it seems the new engine tries something not working with builtin dlls at the moment:

Code: Select all

Failed to compile shader (0x80004005)

And tries then to create "MiniDump.dmp" while really not showing any error message.

By using native d3dcompiler_43 (winetricks d3dcompiler_43) we hit this:

Code: Select all

wine: Call from 0x7b83a2bc to unimplemented function d3dx9_36.dll.D3DXGetShaderInputSemantics, aborting

Additionally using native d3dx9_36 (winetricks d3dx9_36) finally renders a login screen.

[ischou]

Thanks. That's some good sleuthing. I got the login screen up, but the game has lots of visual glitches. Could be the ATI Radeon video card on my machine. I need to try this on a nVidia machine to see if the visual glitches go away.

Were you able to make the connection between "Failed to compile shader" to d3dcompiler_43 simply because you are familiar with the D3D API?

Do you think that eventually implementing these unimplemented shader functions fix the visual glitches?

[bernhardu]

If I remember this "Failed to compile shader" was surrounded by some d3dcompiler_43 FIXMEs or similar. (And "familiar" is way to much of what I know about this API.)

When you run the game now again without WINEDEBUG probably you get now some other FIXMEs?
With these you can e.g. search bugs.winehq.org.
Also changing some render options of the game could help.