[Wine] Re: EA Download Manager

[motub]

I have spent all today installing The Sims 3, the two expansion packs, and the Stuff pack, so I have a fair amount of very recent experience with getting the Download Manager partially working....

... I say "partially" because as far as I can see, you're not going to be able to get it to download anything; it will try, but it will fail to find even the PatchProgressWindow.html (despite the fact that that file is local and exists exactly where the error message says it is, so why it claims it can't find it is a mystery), and presumably thereafter fail to connect to the Internet/EA servers, but there is no error message to that effect (because the progress window is not shown except as a "missing texture pink" area without text to tell you what's going on).

The two things that seem to be necessary to some extent to get even partial success (insofar as if the DM is running when you launch TS3, it will tell you what patch you need --even if you then have to download and install it yourself-- or that you're up-to-date) are:

1. AdobeAir pre-installed via Winetricks. Probably also IE. For good measure, I also installed native inet, IE6 (haven't tried with 7), Flash, ActiveX plugins, and Shockwave, but they may not be strictly necessary.

2. The correct version of the DM. The screenshot you have looks like a standalone program, whereas with TS3, the program runs as an icon in the system tray and feeds its information to the SimsLauncher app. According to wine uninstaller it's version 5.0.0.255, installed with the game(s).

Several times (after a wineboot, or upon a reinstall of IE6, which also must cause a silent wineboot) the DM tried to update itself to version 6. You must not let it do so (click the "Stop Update" button while it's downloading, and laugh at the irony that it can download that just fine, but not a patch to the game as was intended). Version 6 is the one that won't initialize and I have found no way to get it to do so, short of uninstalling the thing from wine uninstaller and reinstalling from the game CD (taking me back to version 5).

Version 5 works as well as the thing is apparently going to atm, insofar as it does initialize, appear in the wine systray, the context menu is useable (although you get a number of script errors if you try to change the settings, and no html page can be displayed in the main UI), and it does feed the correct information as to what patch version it would download, if it could, to the SimsLauncher (which can connect to the EA server well enough to display the patch details, though the Download Manager/IE6 itself can't display any web page, local or remote).  It works so well, in fact, that the game (which I have running in a virtual desktop) won't exit me back to the real desktop until I close the EA Download Manager in the Wine systemtray.

So there you have it; you can get the Download Manager v.5 to run embedded in a Launcher, as long as you have Adobe Air (and possibly IE) installed via winetricks before you install the DM (during the game install, or separately from the game DVD-- for TS3, the EADM installer can be found in \Support\EADM). However, it's not of much use. Once you find out what patch you need, head over to The Patches Scrolls (http://www.patches-scrolls.de/index.php)-- they just carry official patches old and new, no cracks or anything of that sort-- and get the patch you need, install manually, and smile when the next time you launch the game and the DM says you're all up-to-date.

Hope this helps.