I found a link to the demo of this game and thought will give it a try. To my surprise - GSB runs VERY smoothly on my old laptop, on Wine, on Ubuntu Linux 9.10 ! This is also made possible by being DRM-free.
Well done !
As I wrote this Iāve just bought the game. And I will recommend it to my friends looking for Linux games.
Itās not perfect, of course. But itās playable, and Iām having a lot of fun. So there
In this thread Iād list the problems encountered, and if available, its solution :
Doesnāt work at all under wine on my Ubuntu Linux 10.4 system, neither the demo nor the full version. (I bought the full version because I have access to a Windows machine as well, but Iād really like it to work on Linux.) The outline of the game window flashes briefly and thatās it.
Wine version: 1.1.42
GSB version: 1.38
Contents of debug.txt:
----DEBUG FILE----
Windows XP detected
GSB Debug File. App version Full 1.38
Desktop resolution is 1600 x 900
Initialising Direct3D
Contents of drawdebug.txt:
Initialising 3D Engine
Driver : ati2dvag.dll
Description : ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2600
DeviceName : \.\DISPLAY1
Checking For Shader Support
NumSimultaneousRTs:4
hal_caps.PixelShaderVersion < D3DPS_VERSION(2, 0)
About to Create 3D Device with width: 0 and height : 0
Attempting hardware Vertex Processing
Output from wine:
swolchok@starman:~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Gratuitous Space Battles$ wine GSB.exe
fixme:win:EnumDisplayDevicesW ((null),0,0x32db10,0x00000000), stub!
err:x11settings:X11DRV_ChangeDisplaySettingsEx No matching mode found 0x0x32 @0! (XRandR)
err:d3d9:device_parent_CreateSwapChain (0x1697dc) CreateAdditionalSwapChain failed, returning 0x8876086a
wine: Unhandled exception 0xc000000d at address 0x50dc1e (thread 0009), starting debuggerā¦
Observed behavior:
A wine error dialog pops up, stating āThe program GSB.exe has encountered a serious problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.ā Nothing useful there, but that exception code is āinvalid parameterā.
I tried to get some more information about the crash using winedbg, but I donāt see the unhandled exception in the debugger. Not sure why, but itās apparently not unheard-of with wine. (is there perhaps some anti-debugging going on?) One item of note is that my computer has a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650, not a 2600 as drawdebug.txt seems to think. Another is that it also doesnāt work in Windows XP under VirtualBox on the same machine, but I suspect that thatās unrelated.
The lines above are pretty interesting too - basically, I think, GSB is going to run with 1600x900 resolution; but somehow Wine is trying to create a screen with 0x0 resolution.
Possible fix: you can force set the resolution for GSB / any apps in winecfg :
Thatās good news. One less thing for me to have to switch back to Windows to use. Now I just need to find out if it works with Ubuntu 10.10. I might have a chance to do this in the coming weeks, but I doubt it. Anyone out there running 10.10 yet that can try it out?
Iām running GSB on a stock wine from Ubuntu 10.10 (i386). It works, with three problems:
Cloaking ships produce nasty graphical artifacts. (Workaround: edit the module file so cloaking modules run out immediately.)
Sound dies from time to time. Donāt know why, but this seems to be a Wine problem, not GSB-specific.
The game sometimes dies while trying to carry out a network operation. In particular, when I renew my list of challenges, the game freezes (in fact the process becomes ādefunctā). Upon killing and restarting the game, all the challenges have been successfully downloaded. More annoyingly, the conquest expansion will sometimes (thankfully not always) die at the beginning or end of a battle, forcing me to kill the game and restart the game. This is cheat-y in a statistical sense, since Iām more likely to have to retry turns where Iām randomly attacked. In spite of this the challenge mode is playable.
This last problem is kind of nasty, since I donāt think itās possible to trigger it with the demo. Iām still happy I bought both the base game and the conquest expansion in spite of the problems.
Just reporting back that the latest version of GSB 1.57/1.58 plus all the expansions still works with latest stable version of wine (1.3) and with crossover games 10.1.