Soldat on Linux & OS X Systems

[FliesLikeABrick]

Here's the place to speak about Soldat on your Linux or Mac system, e.g. running Wine or Parallels.

As of Soldat 1.7.0, pages 1 - 21 of this thread are more or less outdated (as well as the post below).
Soldat 1.7 should run pretty well on most linux / os x setups.
Use this thread to speak about your experience, share tutorials and ideas or ask for help if you run into trouble.

[Calp]


Original post:




This is just a continuation of the Soldat on Linux Systems thread from the old forums


-------------------------
Stealth870 had said:

Yea, here's the bug filed in bug tracker too guys:

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4869

Add whatever you can to there, hopefully a non-DirectX-inept-Wine-programmer will check it out
-------------------------
DeMo had said:

Ok I have just tested Soldat on my Ubuntu DapperDrake with Wine 0.9.11.
Wine 0.9.11 is available in Wine's apt repository, address is in the download page.

The problems from version 1.3 and wine 0.9 are still the same.
Can't setup controls, text is garbled and sound only works with ALSA but lags (even with WINEDEBUG=-all).

I had problems with the textures and sprites too.
They were invisible.. I couldn't see the health and grenade boxes and the map looked like a wireframe.. I could see just the borders of the polygons. Take a look at this screenshot:
http://img112.imageshack.us/img112/4440/soldatwine22jn.jpg

One more thing for XGL+Compiz (accelerated desktop) users, you have to disable XGL+Compiz or the game won't work. If you leave it enabled XGL will interfere with the game window and the game will be blooooody lagged. I posted this information in Wine's Application Databse, let's see what happens.

-------------------------
Elephant Hunter had said:

The installation works fine for me under Wine, Flies. Are you still having problems?

Latest Bugzilla update for font problems:

By the way, I worked out exactly what garbling is happening - the font symbols
are being rendered backwards (flipped horizontally), and its using the index
one above the one it should (ie, "sqweek" shows up as "trxffl").

The fonts I've attached here are a temp fix. I used fontforge to manually flip
the characters and shift them one index. It messes up the text on the menus but
at least once you get in game the text is readable (it's not pretty, but it's
readable ).

I just grabbed the latest cvs code (20051227) and the problem is still present.
However, there is something else at work here - I have a saved wine source tree
which worked great for soldat back in my Debian system. But, that same tree
compiled now under SourceMage has this font issue. Probably some font config
issue is involved... unfortunately I've reinstalled over Debian so can't
investigate it.

Here is the attachment.

Edit: And the Wine bug I've filed for this problem:
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3685

-------------------------

[ElephantHunter]

I was a supermaintainer of the Soldat Wine App for a while, but Linux hardware acceleration does not agree with my new HP Laptop. We need an active member of the community who uses Linux to take up maintaining the status of Soldat working on linux for Wine or they might not fix all our bugs. If you are interested, simply go to the Win AppDB and apply to be a maintainer. It usually takes some time to be accepted (and sometimes they decline randomly), so go onto the Wine IRC channel and nicely ask to be accepted. Shouldn't take more than ten minutes if you play your cards right.

[Stealth]

Here are some more tips:

Wine 0.9 (and maybe earlier) seems to be the only version that correctly renders polygons in Soldat. Anything later doesn't (it still works, its just you see a wireframeish looking map)
---
Another method to getting readable fonts (by Uncle Enzo) was by editting the wine registry. Run "regedit" in a terminal, go into the HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Wine -> X11 Driver section. If there isn't an "X11 Driver" section, just create a new key on the "Wine" folder. After you are in the "X11 Driver" key, you need to create 4 strings values, with names:
ClientSideAntiAliasWithCore
ClientSideAntiAliasWithRender
ClientSideWithCore
ClientSideWithRender

and have them all set to N. This will make Soldat render the fonts differently or something, and can look really ugly, but they are all readable. (I'm sure there's a way to set up the fonts used specifically, but I don't know how)
---
Soldat will run faster if you run it with this command:

WINEDEBUG=-all wine Soldat

This will disable all those fixme errors and junk from coming up. Speeds up things a lot.
---
If you start Soldat and get an access violation, try running the Config app that comes with Soldat and change the audio stuff. Click the Sound tab and try switching the "Sound Output Type". If you still get it, set it to "NoSound" in the driver's list.
---
And just to reinforce, Soldat DOES NOT work under XGL.

[FliesLikeABrick]

thanks for taking the time to constantly be trying new things and informing us.

Do you have any interest in being the new maintainer for Soldat in the wine AppDB?  I don't have the time for it, nor the knowledge of wine.  Elephant Huner  used to do it, but he got much busier and had to stop.  I hope you'll take it up, you're exactly the kind of person meant for it

[Stealth]

I guess I would be able to, what would it require? What would I actually do? 

[FliesLikeABrick]

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?appId=964

click the blue button that says "Log in to become a supermaintainer"

If you could actively take up this role, we would likely see a huge increase in soldat/wine compatibility

[Pathos]

I don't think it would improve compatibility.

Ask Michael what Direct3D command / primitive type is used to display map polygons then we can do some bug hunting.

I've already modified wine to see if it was a z-normal culling problem but I have no idea if my hack actually did anything :/

[FliesLikeABrick]

By having a super maintainer, there will be someone looking out for our interests, and whenever there are regression issues between versions he can say "Oi you, don't do that!"  That way we only progress forward, we don't do this whole two steps forward, then some random number of steps backwards thing

[Pathos]

That would be true if soldat was a high enough priority to stop wine developement, but its not.

The best we can do is find the problem and see what information we can provide the wine developement team.

[chrisgbk]

I don't think it would improve compatibility.

Ask Michael what Direct3D command / primitive type is used to display map polygons then we can do some bug hunting.

I've already modified wine to see if it was a z-normal culling problem but I have no idea if my hack actually did anything :/

If you look at the map editor code, you can see the mechanism used for rendering polygons. The client code will be similar, as at one point the map editor render code was part of the client.

Basically, a buffer of all the polygons is created with CreateVertexBuffer, it is filled with data, SetStreamSource sets it as buffer used to render, and it is rendered with DrawPrimitive using the TRIANGLELIST primitive type. It doesn't get much simpler than that.

[Stealth]

Ok, I've been assigned as super maintainer of Soldat. I've added chris' data to the bug about texture rendering, and have updated the App database with a lot recent info, and a nice how-to with all the tips mentioned here. Hopefully the more activity put on this, the more it will be noticed. 

[FliesLikeABrick]

We have to always remember that very few of the people who play soldat know about the soldat forums.  Linux users who aren't on the forums have a decent chance of finding information in the AppDB without ever coming here now, which is better.  I'm not sure if there is a place in the AppDB for the supermaintainer to put "helpful links", but if that is possible I'd suggest putting a link to this thread in here (though wait until we're on the forums.soldat.pl domain)

[jettlarue]

well i have been dual booting for a long time (i just keep windows for soldat and dreamweaver =D). but ill try some of this stuff. thank you all for working on this, or trying to fix bugs i guess.

[Pathos]

If you look at the map editor code...

  ... of course... now for some investigation ...

[Yoshi]

I'm a new linux user useing the latest ubuntu. i have tried to install soldat useing wine but it wont accept my share directory. can any one offer any help?

[Stealth]

What do you mean it won't "accept your shared directory"? Are you trying to install soldat by running the setup executable from a windows shared folder? Or are you trying to install Soldat INTO the shared? A little more specific please. 

Date Posted: July 11, 2006, 08:40:39 AMUh oh, this doesn't look good. Can anyone else confirm for me that the latest Wine (0.9.18) does not even start Soldat anymore?? 

[kestasjk]

Using WINE 0.9.9 and the registry hack above everything works fine except for polygon rendering. It's MUCH faster than it used to be a few months ago, though this may be because it's not rendering the polygons.

[TheKhakinator]

I think having a maintainer would help. Otherwise soldat gets drowned out by the millions of other bug reports. Without one, we would largely be ignored. Such a maintainer would probably help compatability with other apps as well.

[Stealth]

@TheKhakinator:
Well, I've been the maintainer for a little more than a month now, but I can't really say we've had any more attention. However, anyone who tries now will have a lot more documentation on getting Soldat running in WINE. Although, it appears that one coder on the DirectX portion of WINE has taken a little interest in that polygon rendering bug (he actually posted in it, asked for some feedback on something, and has apparently subscribed to the bug), so we'll see what happens...

[FliesLikeABrick]

thats  exactly the kind of attntion we need to start to get, so its great that at least one dev has taken up the interest