Let's fix Steam!

[Stefan Dösinger]

Hello,
I forgot to cc this one to the list!
> Steam has had a serious problem for quite some time, failing with a
> strange debug assertion error popup at the dreaded 27% mark.
>
> What's interesting, however, is that Steam works perfectly in Crossover
> 4.1 - since I don't think Steam is supported, this is not due to a
> special hack, and the failure in Steam therefore represents a serious
> regression in Wine.
>
> This, quite simply, will be a really cool app to get working again.
> Plus, we'll need it to try out Half Life 2 once you awesome Direct3D
> boys finish up your work :)
>
> So, where do we go about this?  The installer demonstrating the error
> can be downloaded easily from http://www.steampowered.com/ - however,
> I'm not sure if it's plausible to run a regression analysis since there
> are no patches available against the direct crossover version of Wine.
> At this point, I'm not even sure which file has broken, although I do
> know that it's one we've had problems with in the past based off of IRC
> conversations.
>
> If anyone could follow up with more info, particularly about the
> specifics of the error, I'm sure we'd all appreciate it greatly.
Yet another update:

I managed to play something(Ricochet and old Half life). Installations was 
painless(IE6 is needed, builtin shdocvw with mozilla activex control doesn't 
work). I have to set winver to win98 to make the IE6 control work.

I downloaded hl and ricochet and played it(single player / server with no 
other players). The graphics worked nice with OpenGL, no surprises here. The 
problems I encountered were:

*The games lock up on exit. No error message, wine-preloader just uses 100% 
CPU time.

*I got a stange error on the secound start. Wine crashed and showed a lot of 
pthread_* functions. I can't reproduce the crash so no log. Sorry.

*Gaming get unstable if I turn of the internet connection. Say, does Steam 
download sounds & levels on demand during playing? The half-life folder's 
size is only 13 MB compared to ~500MB to the old version's folder.

*I can't get offline mode working.

*The keyboard and window management problems reported yesterday

Cheers,
Stefan