Newbie Questions

[DirtyHarri]

Hi folks,

I am new to the game and got the free game patched to v8.403 running in the Wine layer on a Linux machine.

Since I am considering to buy the commercial version, I'd like to know, wether there is a technical difference between the two games, besides the four mega campaigns. Especially regarding the video resolution. I got the free game scaled up to desktop resolution via the free DxWnd tool.

Kind regarnds

[tomlowshang]

Welcome, fellow Linux user. [:)]

The free and the commercial version have no technical differences. You are paying for the campaigns, essentially.

[DirtyHarri]

Thank you for the welcome.
I am glad that many of the technically not so state-of-the-art games work surprisingly well under Wine. Most glitches are minor and can be circumvented or don't spoil the fun.

[tomlowshang]

SPWAW was the very first game that successfully ran on Wine for me. That was in 2004.

[DirtyHarri]

Well, I believe it must have been Empire Deluxe Enhanced Edition many years ago in my case...

The only glitch I found so far is that the game completly freezes, when I try to show mission data by clicking the 'Mission' button in the Formation Selection menu, no matter if I want to create a random battle, edit a scenario, or buy formations at the start of a campaign.

[tomlowshang]

I've never seen that problem. Does it happen without DxWnd?

[DirtyHarri]

Yes, it happens nonetheless.

[tomlowshang]

Which Wine version are you using?

[DirtyHarri]

It's version 5.0.

[tomlowshang]

That's old. Current stable is 6.0. You can get it here if it's not packaged for your distro yet. Try latest development release if the problem exists in current stable as well.

[Red_L.E.D.]

ORIGINAL: DirtyHarri
The only glitch I found so far is that the game completly freezes, when I try to show mission data by clicking the 'Mission' button in the Formation Selection menu, no matter if I want to create a random battle, edit a scenario, or buy formations at the start of a campaign.

I can confirm this happening on Linux Wine environment in my testing. In this case it is Debian Buster with Wine version 4.0.

I will try to investigate more.

[Red_L.E.D.]

It's a curious thing as the process does not appear to be frozen. Music plays normally the mouse cursor just becomes unresponsive. This reminds the issue on Windows systems where hovering the mouse over the unit list while changing or fixing a unit in a campaign seems to cause a similar loss of input.

I wrote about that issue in this post:
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=4797045

But this new issue found does not happen on my Windows system. Additionally as tomlowshang points out it does not happen on his Linux/Wine 6.0 setup either. It's an interesting little puzzle to solve!

[tomlowshang]

It's a bug in Wine. I've had a few of them affect SPWaW over the years.

[DirtyHarri]

Thanks for the info! I will upgrade wine when the next system general overhaul is due. Right now, I don't dare so, since atm. I have several other programs using the current config which I depend on. It's the only issue I have so far afterall.

[Red_L.E.D.]

ORIGINAL: tomlowshang

It's a bug in Wine. I've had a few of them affect SPWaW over the years.

I'm afraid it may not be so simple. Testing on VirtualBox running the same Debian and Wine 4.0 did not produce the mouse cursor lockup when clicking on the mission button. My bet is that it is another bug in mech.exe that only affects some systems.

[Red_L.E.D.]

Well this is interesting... It would appear that the mission button works fine if I start the game using the console to navigate to the game folder and type in the command "wine mech.exe". If I try to run the game from a shortcut or double click on it in the file explorer the bug appears even if the shortcut is just a .sh batch file. Weird... Next step would be to try wine 6.0 and see if that makes a difference.

[DirtyHarri]

Nice! I tried the same and it works. I also did it the other way around. I launched the wine session and executed the wine built-in command shell start.exe in c:\windows\command and then mech.exe. This also works. I guess it may then be some path issue.

[tomlowshang]

I don't remember exactly when Wine changed, but it now requires changing to the directory containing mech.exe. However, in my case mech.exe wouldn't start at all. Different versions of Wine can behave very differently. It's just the nature of open source.

[Red_L.E.D.]

OK, I got the game running properly from a desktop shorcut on Linux using the following parameters for my spwaw.desktop file:


[Desktop Entry]
Name=SPWaW
Exec=wine "C:\\Games\\Steel Panthers World At War\\mech.exe"
Path=/home/username/.wine/drive_c/Games/Steel Panthers World At War/
Icon=/home/username/Pictures/example.png
Type=Application
Categories=Wine;
Comment=
Terminal=true
StartupNotify=false


The critical entry here was "Terminal=true".

[tomlowshang]

I don't use a DE or shortcuts so I would never have found this solution. I start everything from the command line via shell scripts.