[Bug 17956] BGII: Sluggish performance with fixpack installed

[wine-bugs at winehq.org]

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17956


marzojr at yahoo.com changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |marzojr at yahoo.com




--- Comment #9 from marzojr at yahoo.com  2010-05-27 10:38:03 ---
I can confirm it is still an issue in 1.2-rc1. I can also give two different
workarounds, which are different from biffing, which also establish that the
cause of the slow down is caused by combining Wine's case folding combined with
large amounts of files in the override dir and the game dev's expectation of a
case-insensitive filesystem API. The demonstrations are as follows:

Workaround #1: Change all files in override folder to uppercase and change the
corresponding chitin.key entries to uppercase also; this is easy to do with a
bash script, and I can provide an example of such. When this is performed, the
slowdown essentially disappears; this is because entries in chitin.key (and in
other resource files in the game) do not contain the file extensions, but only
their names and types, and both BGI and BGII both seem to append uppercase
extensions to these file names. I do not, however, recommend this method,
because there are game files other than chitin.key that contain resource
entries which will also cause minor slowdowns for the same reason (and it would
be too annoying to write an utility to parse all files and convert the names to
uppercase).

Workaround #2: Using a case-insensitive file system. I have tried with FAT32 as
well as with a ciopfs (http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/ciopfs/) layer over
ext4; in both cases, the slowdown disappears. FAT32 is slower, but ciopfs may
segfault during installation (particularly of some heavy mods such as BGT) for
a reason that yet eludes me (but you can still install under Wine to the ext4
dir directly and only run the game through the ciopfs mount point). Despite the
occasional segfaults, I recommend using ciopfs to play because ext4 is a lot
safer than FAT32; moreover, I have yet to see it crash during normal gameplay.
Even the segfaults are harmless -- it simply disconnects the mount point
(forcing you to umount it before remounting it again). Moreover, I recommend
converting all files in your BGI or BGII dir to lowercase using an utility like
the tolower that comes with WeiDU even if using ciopfs; this is to ensure that
there are no duplicate files with names differing only in case.

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