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immi101: side note: eador genesis just crashes with wine 3.0 for me :( pretty sure that this game used to work at some point, hm
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getthat: Same for me. Out of 4 new installer I have tested (arcanum, capitalism 2, eador and outcast) only one works out of the box (in wine) - outcast.
Eador Genesis crashes if there isn't a folder named 'save' in the game directory. If I create that folder the game runs fine.
It's not quite clear to me why the folder isn't created when running the installer. It is listed in the innosetup script
mysterious ...
Post edited April 04, 2018 by immi101
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immi101:
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getthat: Same for me. Out of 4 new installer I have tested (arcanum, capitalism 2, eador and outcast) only one works out of the box (in wine) - outcast.
When unpacking installers with your version of innoextact all games listed above works fine (except for arcanum, which is easy to fix). "Funny" that official installers so slow and buggy (even on Windows), hopefully GOG will fix it soon.
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immi101: the script may be more complicated, but they only have to write that once. Once it is working they have the added benefit that for every game update they only have to package the data once and then push out the same data set over galaxy and into the offline installer. sharing work load & aiming for consistent data between the two distribution channels seems like a sensible development goal.
(obviously without any detailed knowledge about their work flow it's hard to make a real judgement about this change)
There are other issues with this new method too.

The newer installers are much slower and less efficient, as they need to first unpack the file fragments to the user's temp directory before it can then decompress and reconstitute all of the original game files. I expect that the slowdowns caused by this method will be even worse on lower spec systems with a single HDD and low RAM.

Since the compressed file fragments need to be extracted into the user's temp directory this may also cause a lot of unnecessary SSD writes if the user hasn't moved it to another drive. SSD endurance is much better than it used to be but I still try to limit unnecessary writes in order to prolong the life of my SSDs.

And at least in the case of Freedom Force, the installer size is larger as well (new installer for FF is 40MB larger than the old one).

Doing it this new way also does not preserve the original file timestamps - they'll have different timestamps each time they're installed.

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immi101: played around with the innoextract source code and managed to hack in some basic support for the new installers

https://github.com/immi101/innoextract/tree/gogextract

just grab the source, and use the same procedure as for the original to compile
Great :) Although I'm still hoping that GOG will go back to using the older method for packaging their installers...
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adamhm: The newer installers are much slower and less efficient, as they need to first unpack the file fragments to the user's temp directory before it can then decompress and reconstitute all of the original game files.
In fact, innoextract with immi101's changes unpack new installers faster than old ones and doesn't create any temp files (as far as I can see).

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adamhm: Although I'm still hoping that GOG will go back to using the older method for packaging their installers...
Unlikely. New installers not a bad thing. Bad thing is that GOG started to use them without proper testing.
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getthat: Unlikely. New installers not a bad thing. Bad thing is that GOG started to use them without proper testing.
Some mods check timestamp to keep compatibility.
New GOG installers do not keep correct timestamps.
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getthat: In fact, innoextract with immi101's changes unpack new installers faster than old ones and doesn't create any temp files (as far as I can see).
That is not the case with how the installers actually work when being used normally on Windows/in Wine though.

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getthat: Unlikely. New installers not a bad thing. Bad thing is that GOG started to use them without proper testing.
New does not necessarily mean better... and from what I've seen there are quite a few downsides to this new approach beyond the issues affecting us.
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kbnrylaec: New GOG installers do not keep correct timestamps.
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adamhm: That is not the case with how the installers actually work when being used normally on Windows/in Wine though.
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adamhm: New does not necessarily mean better... and from what I've seen there are quite a few downsides to this new approach beyond the issues affecting us.
That's what I meant by saying: "Bad thing is that GOG started to use them without proper testing." :)
These new installers are just terrible and often broken in one way or another. But I can see the reason why GOG wants to switсh to new installers, in the long run it's a good thing, they just need to do it properly.
Post edited April 04, 2018 by getthat
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kbnrylaec: Some mods check timestamp to keep compatibility.
New GOG installers do not keep correct timestamps.
hm, that's a good point. haven't seen any issues with that myself but I can imagine that this might cause problems.
That's a general problem with galaxy though. Anybody following the galaxy development/feedback thread and noticed this problem ever being mentioned ?
It's probably not even that hard to fix.

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adamhm: ...
personally I didn't perceive the new installers as notably slower. But your argument about the increased hdd usage does make sense. (while my innoextract modification avoids the intermediate copy, I don't think there is a way to avoid it when normally running the installers)

as for the installer size: that's the old argument between faster (de)compression [zlib] <=> better compression [lzma2].
I would very much favour smaller files as well, but apparently GOG rather chooses speed over size.
same reason our linux installers are stuck with using zip.

hopefully most games keep their game assets reasonably well compressed for better loading times so that the additional compression algorithm applied for distribution won't be that important.
Post edited April 04, 2018 by immi101
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kbnrylaec: Some mods check timestamp to keep compatibility.
New GOG installers do not keep correct timestamps.
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immi101: hm, that's a good point. haven't seen any issues with that myself but I can imagine that this might cause problems.
That's a general problem with galaxy though. Anybody following the galaxy development/feedback thread and noticed this problem ever being mentioned ?
It's probably not even that hard to fix.
GOG Galaxy often break mods, so modders rarely use it, or just disable auto-update.

About the timestamp issue:
https://www.gog.com/forum/elder_scrolls_series/mods_not_working_in_oblivion/post5
https://www.gog.com/forum/elder_scrolls_series/oblivion_mods_the_best_fixes_and_features/post16
Is there any way to get Carmageddon working on Linux? I was unable to get it running on Mint 18.3 with the current version of Wine.
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immi101:
InnoSetup seems to apply compression for the whole installer – at least I have not found a way to specify it on a per file basis. The installer for Snapshot is lzma2 compressed according to innounp and innoextract…

So it is not the old argument fast vs. good compression, but it is fast compression inside good compression which breaks the good compression and is very slow.
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immi101:
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mk47at: InnoSetup seems to apply compression for the whole installer – at least I have not found a way to specify it on a per file basis. The installer for Snapshot is lzma2 compressed according to innounp and innoextract…
no
compile innoextract with DEBUG=ON, then examine the installer with -l --debug and you'll see something like this:

[starting stored chunk @ slice 0 + 0x2d600 + 0x0]
- "tmp/bf/1c/bf1c5c56422645f9d4500140c2460ed1" @ 0x0 (1.02 MiB)
[starting stored chunk @ slice 0 + 0x2d600 + 0x1066c4]
- "tmp/f9/6d/f96d81c4cbb230aa09cc504618a59ef4" @ 0x0 (558 KiB)
[starting stored chunk @ slice 0 + 0x2d600 + 0x192084]
- "tmp/4e/1b/4e1b68f7da3b18ee0424c906de5de262" @ 0x0 (3.03 KiB)
[starting stored chunk @ slice 0 + 0x2d600 + 0x192ca7]
- "tmp/d1/80/d1801b344a3cc869abe995ae0bfafb36" @ 0x0 (59.9 KiB)
[starting stored chunk @ slice 0 + 0x2d600 + 0x1a1c3d]
- "tmp/01/6c/016cf2994aabcd711e8a39827f376647" @ 0x0 (271 KiB)
[...]
[starting stored chunk @ slice 0 + 0x2d600 + 0xc611c91]
- "tmp/e8/0c/e80c9bef4cca6c5aa8e8d42044ebf4a0" @ 0x0 (414 B)
[starting lzma2 chunk @ slice 0 + 0x2d600 + 0xc611e33]
- "tmp/background.jpg" [temp], "tmp/gog_installer_background.jpg" [temp] @ 0x0 (318 KiB)
[starting lzma2 chunk @ slice 0 + 0x2d600 + 0xc65cd67]
- "app/goggame-1207659147.ico" @ 0x0 (146 KiB)
[starting lzma2 chunk @ slice 0 + 0x2d600 + 0xc68141e]
- "app/webcache.zip" @ 0x0 (278 KiB)
[starting lzma2 chunk @ slice 0 + 0x2d600 + 0xc6c6bb3]
- "tmp/EULA_fr-FR.txt" [temp] @ 0x0 (42.5 KiB)
[starting lzma2 chunk @ slice 0 + 0x2d600 + 0xc6ca8de]
- "tmp/EULA_pl-PL.txt" [temp] @ 0x0 (37 KiB)
you see that the galaxy data is simply stored without further compression (stored chunk), while the rest of the files is stored as "lzma2 chunk", ie. compressed with lzma2.
I just loaded up Oblivion on an Ubuntu 16.04 fresh install....the wrapper worked perfectly, but I'm getting no audio. Every time I start the game, the audio sliders are turned all the way down as well. I checked the audio section of the .ini folder to make sure everything is set properly. Not sure what's going...anyone have any ideas as to where to look next?

This is the first wrapper from adamhm that I've attempted to use...and since I'm quite new to linux I thought it might be quite hard. I was pleasantly surprised by how smooth/quick the process went.

Wanted to thank adamhm personally. Thanks!

Now if I can just get some audio I'll be rocking!

Best,

TCG
Post edited April 09, 2018 by TheCoinGuy
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TheCoinGuy: I just loaded up Oblivion on an Ubuntu 16.04 fresh install....the wrapper worked perfectly, but I'm getting no audio. Every time I start the game, the audio sliders are turned all the way down as well. I checked the audio section of the .ini folder to make sure everything is set properly. Not sure what's going...anyone have any ideas as to where to look next?
You might be missing some dependencies like libasound2:i386 or libasound2-plugins:i386 - have you installed the system-provided version of Wine from the repositories to get all of the dependencies (this is the easiest way to get them all, rather than installing them all separately)?

If not then you should be able to install it using Ubuntu's software center, or you can open a terminal and run the command:

sudo apt-get install wine --install-suggests

While you're at it, you might also find it useful to install the ia32-libs package, which will install the most commonly used 32-bit libraries & should prevent a lot of missing dependency issues later on as a lot of games are 32-bit. I recall Ubuntu being a bit of a hassle for installing misc packages like this, but you should be able to install it from the terminal using this command:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
adamhm...

Stayed up until 4 AM trying to get it working....when I got up I read your post and remembered that I didn't install Wine. Worked perfectly. The game actually looks better in Ubuntu than it did in Windows!

Can't say it enough, you're doing a great service to the linux community with these wrappers. I spent many many hours/days viewing youtube videos of people playing Windows games in linux, but they're always short on helping you to get it working as well. Not to mention...playonlinux and Wine are not new user friendly in the least. These wrappers work really well!

You might get tired of hearing it, but I for one...am extremely appreciative of your hard work.

Thanks again...

TCG

P.S. I can remember seeing somewhere that you had some type of tutorial on Linux mint? If so...a link would be appreciated. I might switch to mint, everywhere I read people are using it with great success when it comes to gaming.
Post edited April 10, 2018 by TheCoinGuy