gstreamer 32 vs 64 bit

[mrchuck]

All,

New to wine and I see that discussion around gstreamer has been going on a _long_ time. What I'm not at all clear about is what the current state of play is.
Platform:
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 13.04
Release: 13.04
Codename: raring
wine: wine-1.4.1
playonlinux: PlayOnLinux 4.2.1
Everything up to date as at yesterday.

I've just installed War in the Pacific (matrix games) with the same results as the last entry in appdb: game installs correctly and runs, no audio. Debug log shows lots of this type of error:
GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstfaac.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstfaac.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
[..., several libs mentioned]
fixme:gstreamer:GST_Connect Could not make source filter, are gstreamer-plugins-* installed for 32 bits?
fixme:gstreamer:GST_QueryInterface No interface for {f90a6130-b658-11d2-ae49-0000f8754b99}!
[...]
I find a comment from late 2012 in askubuntu that the gstreamer libs have not been multiarched and this won't go away until they are. However I see other comments which suggest that it shouldn't matter.
What makes this more confusing is that I have another game, War in the East (same publisher) which throws the exact same errors but the sound works fine.
To me this just seems like witchcraft and I now can't work out what is causing the sound problem in WitP, and whether this gstreamer business matters or not.
Can anyone shed some light on what's going on and possibly suggest a workaround?
WitP dates from 2004 and WitE from 2010 or thereabouts, and no doubt the sound implementations are different--well, they must be, because one works and one doesn't. But this doesn't get me any closer to hearing those dive-bombers...
I am sincerely trying to exterminate windows altogether from my life, so this is a good cause But it's like trying to get rid of roaches once they've moved in.

mrchuck

[dimesio]

The architecture does matter, and you would need to install 32 bit gstreamer and plugins to get it to work, if winegstreamer still worked. But it doesn't; winegstreamer is broken on glib 2.32.0 and later. http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30557

FYI, PlayOnLinux is not supported here. When asking for help, please test in plain Wine only.

[DanKegel]

Last I heard from Maarten, his patch worked well except for the minor problem that
32 bit gstreamer doesn't co-install on recent ubuntu with 64 bit gstreamer, or something,
due to upstream dependencies not being set up for that yet.

[dimesio]

Last I heard from Maarten, his patch worked well except for the minor problem that
32 bit gstreamer doesn't co-install on recent ubuntu with 64 bit gstreamer, or something,
due to upstream dependencies not being set up for that yet.

So he's solved the problem of it not building on openSUSE and Fedora?
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30557
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-de ... 00383.html

[mrchuck]

Well, I seem to have arrived at a solution myself after messing around with it over a couple of days.
--added w32codecs and w64codecs (not sure if this is relevant, but...)
--used POL to create yet another installation
--added quartz, devenum, wmp9 and wmpcodecs BEFORE installing the game
--installed WitP and voila, in-game sounds and combat animations...the latter, sorta.

WitP uses ASF (supplied with extension SFX just to utterly confuse the issue) files for sounds, and hence requires multimedia support, not just sound support. It clearly calls wmp to play them (since it didn't work until I installed that).

This is what had me running around in circles--all the sound and directx tests in the virtual drive worked right from the start, but the game sound didn't.

Now the game handing off combat animations and sounds to wmp seems to be kinda scratchy, has caused at least one crash, and the animations don't exit properly, but they do work enough to get sick of them and turn them off If anyone can suggest things that might make this work better, feel free, as I'm happy to tinker with it--in another copy of the installation, at any rate

Incidentally, and rather gratifyingly, it runs about 10x faster under wine that it does under native XP, and about the same in VirtualBox but with useless screen resolution. I would guess that handoff to wmp doesn't work all that well under windoze either. The game doesn't have any video resolution controls, which is lame, so whatever it decides at install time is what you get. Under VB it defaults to 1024x768, not much good on my 1920x1080 monitor unless I squint.

Inspecting the output of 'strings' on the WitP binary this is clearly one of the old-school games using winmm and dsound referred to in the FAQ. It dates from 2003 so no surprises there. I would additionally guess that it tries to set up the sound system at install time and silently fails if it's not right, as I've had all the elements above installed previously, but after the game was, without success. There is no game interface to detect or set up anything post-installation, which is also lame.

I'll be posting to AppDB as well in the hope that this assists someone.

mrchuck

[mrchuck]

Since my appdb entry was rejected due to POL being in the mix, I tried to be a good citizen and reinstalled in another prefix using the exact same steps, with vanilla wine and winetricks:
--installed devenum, quartz and wmp9
--no wmpcodecs as this package is not identifiable in the winetricks gui.

I noticed a lot of extra stuff installed -- all the dx9 variants, I didn't ask for these, and loads of other stuff besides. About 30 overrides instead of three with POL, which are devenum, quartz and jscript.dll

It didn't work. Whatever you're doing, the POL people are doing it better. You should get talking to them as to why, but they seem to be using a scalpel not a bludgeon. At any rate my game is still working under POL and I'll stick to that I reckon.

mrchuck

[dimesio]

Wine doesn't install "extra stuff" or set overrides by itself, and winetricks devenum quartz wmp9 will not install any dx9 dlls. If dx9 was installed, you must have done it. My guess is that you installed to a wineprefix (probably the default one) where you had previously installed dx9 and other things.

You should be able to manually do whatever POL does in their script.