[Bug 20041] Multiplayer not working for Rise of Nation Gold

[wine-bugs at winehq.org]

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20041

--- Comment #66 from Richard <shiningarcanine at gmail.com> 2010-11-25 09:58:17 CST ---
Rise of Nations can update itself inside of WINE without any assistance, which
demonstrates that internet connectivity works. There is a discussion on an
internet forum about getting the OnLive Gaming Service client to work with WINE
and someone said:

"OnLive checks for a Windows Ethernet driver & connection before running. The
problem is that OnLive can't detect these non-windows network devices."

http://onlivefans.com/showthread.php?4025-LINUX-Getting-Onlive-to-run-in-Linux-Operating-systems-(status)&p=23157&viewfull=1#post23157

After reading that, I strongly suspect that Rise of Nations' multiplayer
functionality checks the state of the network adapter before doing anything
else. Since WINE likely has a stub that says that there is no network adapter,
we then see the error message:

"Unable to establish a network connection. Please check your network connection
and try again."

This happens even when you attempt to host a game, so I doubt that the failure
occurs because of network connectivity. I also know for a fact that the game
can talk over the network because it can talk to Microsoft's update servers, so
this definitely is not a problem with network connectivity. With those things
in mind, I think that the failure is related to hardware detection. I think
patching that area of WINE could get Rise of Nations' multiplayer functionality
to work.

I also did some more digging and a hint regarding the cause of the error
message is available at Microsoft's knowledge database, which suggests that
"The Microsoft DirectPlay Dpnet.dll file is incorrectly installed or
registered.":

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/829151

Perhaps Rise of Nations is querying the network state through Dpnet.dll, which
then makes some system calls which WINE has implemented in stubs. Those stubs
of course have no real implementation behind them so after talking with them,
Dpnet.dll thinks that there is no network adapter present and reports that to
Rise of Nations.

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