Witcher and Wine

Long ago, I started playing Witcher.  I haven't finished it yet because it's a darn long game.  When I played with it, I was running the Cross Over Lame Duck edition but I had to use version 7.2.2 because version 8 would just silently crash.  Running that had a few graphical glitches like the trees and the vitality and endurance bar, but other than that, perfect.

I just reinstalled the game and it's running on Wine 1.3.33, but I noticed a few peculiarities in addition to the graphical glitches. 

The first was that Geralt would only walk for a few steps.  Then he would start to glide on the floor.  I believe this has something to do with the keyboard input that is bugged in Ubuntu 9.10.  If you pull out the sword, you will notice Geralt walking a few steps and then perform a roll on the floor, indicating that the game was reading double-tap direction input.

Second was this occasional problem of Geralt not being rendered.  I toggled UseGLSL to disable which seems to help although it does still happen.  Restarting the computer seems to fix things, so I'm not sure what it is.

Third was an issue with the so-called puppeteer lines that are rendered on Geralt.  I noticed this when I ran the game from the launcher but when I ran the game from Witcher.exe it didn't have this problem.  I deduced that this has something to do with the fact that my AppDefaults on Witcher.exe weren't getting picked up when I run Launcher.exe.  Since I have separate Wine bottles for each game I have installed, I decided to push the AppDefaults into the actual Direct3D settings.

Lastly was a lack of sound.  My experience with Wine apps and sound (and PulseAudio) is that the longer my computer runs, the more Wine performance seems to suffer.  My suspicions are that PulseAudio is still not in a good implemented state.  After copying my audio settings from Tomb Raider Underworld, I rebooted the machine and ran the game.  The game gave me a good scare when it still didn't have audio but after checking the game's options, I realized there was a toggle to disable sound.  Bah!

I hope to finish Witcher this time around.  The game is really huge and I really want this to be over in preparation for Witcher 2.

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.