[Wine] Workarounds for Splinter Cell: Conviction

[janverm]

Hi 

I've been able to get Splinter Cell: Conviction running quite smooth on my system, and I just want to share with any others what I had to do to get it all working.

A few days ago, I submitted a testreport in AppDB, but it was rejected with the info that I was testing a patched version of wine. Which is true, because vanilla wine just crashes with the exception as tested by other people. 

I don't know how else to share my info with other people eager to play this nice game, so I guess the forum would be a good starting point.

My PC is a Phenom II 940 with Ubuntu 11.10 amd64, with 2 additional PPA's installed: lowlatency-kernel PPA and the latest binary nvidia drivers PPA (295.20 as of this writing).


Okay ... here's a rundown on how to get this game to work really well with Wine (tested with 1.4-rc3) ..

1. Install the raw input patch. (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6901628/raw3.patch)

in wine source dir, do:
# patch -p1 < ~/Downloads/raw3.patch

2. With your favorite editor, open "wine-1.4-rc3/dlls/kernel32/thread.c" and find the following piece of code:

BOOL WINAPI SetThreadPriorityBoost(
    HANDLE hthread, /* [in] Handle to thread */
    BOOL disable)   /* [in] TRUE to disable priority boost */
{
    SetLastError(ERROR_CALL_NOT_IMPLEMENTED);
    return FALSE;
}

Comment out (or delete) the SetLastError line and change the return value to TRUE. (the FALSE statement cause the ASSERT ret() failure some people talked about with Unreal Engine based games.)

3. execute the following:

# ./tools/make_requests

4. Do your normal configure, make, make install steps.

5. Run winecfg so it can update your settings and you can review yours. (Note: I have set my global windows version to win2003. Just saying that here in case it might be important. Haven't tested it with any other version.)

6. run regedit and set the following Direct3D settings:

"AlwaysOffScreen" "enabled"
"StrictDrawOrdering" "enabled"

The game runs fine without these, but some gfx glitches occur when these settings are not enabled, most notable is the volumetric fog toggling on/off randomly as well as light reflected off glass seems to be buggy too.

7. run the game.

The game is pretty resource demanding, so I'm playing on low quality settings.

With all this done, I'm able to play for hours with very smooth gameplay.


Let us know if these workarounds worked for you as well.

As a last note: the game was pretty slow, but that's because my cpufreq governor is set on 'conservative'. 

Enabling all cpu's to run at 'performance', made the game run (much) smoother:
# sudo cpufreq-set -c 0 -g performance
# sudo cpufreq-set -c 1 -g performance
# sudo cpufreq-set -c 2 -g performance
# sudo cpufreq-set -c 3 -g performance