Too slow in wine

[clray]

I just checked out the TSE2 demo on Linux/wine 1.1.4 on a 2.8 GHz P4 with 1GB RAM, GeForce4 MX 440 AGP. It seems more stable than TSE1 (which crashes every so often after combat), but sadly, all combat scenes run like slide shows (TSE1 runs very smoothly). Switching off all graphics effects that could be switched off didn't help. Can the performance be improved somehow or is there no hope without hardware upgrade?

[Mark Pay]

Hi clray. Unfortunately I don't know enough about the emulation process to know what might be causing the slowdown, and subsequently whether anything can be done to fix it. The game was developed on a similar spec machine, but in native Windows XP.

There are two potential software improvements that I may be able to include in future versions.
Clickteam, who make the Multimedia Fusion 2 software that the game is built upon, have both a Java runtime and a proper, graphics hardware accelerated version of the main runtime in late beta.
Unfortunately there is no indication when these may see a final ( hopefully stable ) release.

[clray]

Mark, thanks for the quick reply.

I managed today to nail down this awful performance to the routine DrawTextExA, which is used to render all text in the game. Once I replaced it with a null-op in wine source code, everything started running smoothly. All text also completely disappeared, which is a minor flaw in this surgical strike...

Anyway, as it stands, I am hopeful that it can be fixed soon, either by myself or by wine developers.

[Mark Pay]

That's great that you've been able to debug the issue with the wine source.
I'm not aware of there being anything unusual about the text rendering in the game. It should be in the Arial font too, without fancy frills like anti-alisasing.

I'd like the game to be runnable under wine, so please let me know if there's anything I can do to help you. Any fix for this issue would presumably help other games developed in MMF2 as well.

[clray]

More on it here: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13801

I'm afraid the fix might not be as easy as I originally imagined.

[Mark Pay]

The collaborative process for open-source projects is very interesting.
Instinctively the idea of letting that many cooks into the kitchen sounds crazy, but evidently it works, and works quite well.

Thanks for looking into this issue. If it turns out that a fix is not possible, I can at least let other wine users know of the problem.

[clray]

I've debugged it further and found a rather easy workaround in the process. Switching the video driver from nvidia to fbdev gives acceptable performance.

[Mark Pay]

That's good news, thanks clray.