Monday, October 24, 2011

Funny thing about Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

I've been playing a lot of Splinter Cell games lately. Something funny came to mind and I thought I'd share it.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory on the DS features multiplayer modes Shadownet vs Mercs and Coop. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory on the Gamecube features only a Coop multiplayer mode. Splinter Cell 3D (3DS remake of Chaos Theory) has no multiplayer.

What an interesting case of de-evolution!

Monday, October 10, 2011

A few short notes on the backport of Wine

Before I forget, there were a few nuances with the packages I backported (into Karmic) from the Wine PPA site that Scott Ritchie provided (for Maverick and other Ubuntu releases).

Firstly, the orig tar gzipped file had wine folder name while the diff expected wine1.3 which is the release name. I had to repackage the orig.tar.gz file to use wine1.3 folder name.

On the control file, I had to deal with debhelper version checking which I'm pretty sure is caused by the new Ubuntu releases moving to newer versions of files. I saw two other new items, gcc-4.5-multilib and oss4-dev of which I removed as dependency. I'm fairly certain that Wine will compile on old GCC 3.x so, the requirement of GCC 4 looked a little silly from my point of view. I don't plan to release the package to the masses anyway, so it won't hurt anybody but me.

Final touches, I updated the changelog also to reflect karmic version numbering and then removed the reference CC="gcc-4.5" on the rules file to avoid forcing GCC 4 when building. Everything built fine and wine is running well after packaging and installing.


Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Sims 3 Teaser Update!

I'm going to keep this very brief. I've basically updated to 1.3.29 and boy it really eliminated most of the graphical glitches on the game. It basically runs very well although it still gets some minor culling problems. Works very well!

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

The Sims 3 Teaser on Wine

When EA unveiled a Sims 3 demo that could run on your browser through the Gaikai service, I thought it was a great way to provide cross-platform Sims gaming. After all, the Sims Social facebook game was utter piece of crap. I figured I'd give this game a go to see how everything worked, but as it turns out Gaikai deemed my area too far from their data centers. I guess that was it as far as running it from a browser went. Time for plan B on playing Sims 3.

I checked out EA's online store Origin and discovered there that if you have Origin setup on your computer (please guys, read the Terms and Conditions for some nasty I surrender my PC to EA banter), you can add the game to your account and download the actual teaser. Sweet.

I did try to install Origin on Wine (version 1.3.11) but everytime I tried to log in, Origin would say 'Login Failed'. That did not work the way I had hoped for sure. The only sure fire way to get Origin to work was install it on my throwaway XP box and I managed to get the 2.5 GB download there. It was time to plan on how to transfer the game into Wine, so I started poking through the innards to figure out how it could be done.

Basically, the idea is to fool the game into thinking that it is installed with all the proper registry entries slipped in. To perform this surgical operation, I exported several registry entries out of my XP box. Look at "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software" and grab the following keys:
  • EA Play
  • Electronic Arts
  • Origin Games
  • Origin
As far as I could tell, the rest are either miscellaneous or not related at all. Truth be told, I wasn't entirely sure that the registry entries are necessary, but I used them anyway. Aside from the registry entries, I also snagged these folders off my XP box and dropped them into my Wine virtual drive.
  • C:\Program Files\Origin Games\The Sims 3 Teaser
  • C:\Program Files\Common Files\EAInstaller
After putting these into the proper install paths, I tried to run the game on a 1024x768 virtual desktop and although the game didn't immediately complain about install corruption, it was complaining about msvcrt80. To fix this, I ran 'winetricks vcrun2005' to make wine install the proper libraries. I imagine that installing 'vcrun2005sp1' would be a better idea though.

The end result is that the game did run, albeit not perfectly. There's very apparent problems with the Z-buffering rendering causing the game to cull incorrectly. Several objects were de-rendered incorrectly causing Sims to turn temporarily invisible. Tweaking the OffScreenRenderingMode on Wine Direct3D settings to FBO did not help either. On the Wine console debug printing, I see plenty of Stencil Buffer errors and fixmes so this is definitely a Wine deficiency.

The next step I plan to do is to update my Wine libraries to 1.3.29 and hope for the best. I will post back results as soon as I have them.