./play.it 2.34.0 fifth release candidate

A new release candidate is ready for the upcoming ./play.it 2.34.0 feature update: http://git.dotslashplay.it/play.it/?h=release/2.34.0

This update fixes the initial setting of registry keys for some Windows games, that is done when creating the WINE prefix.

In addition the way indentation is handled in generated launcher scripts for Windows games is improved. This is only a cosmetic change, with no impact on what is actually run.

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The full changelog for this new release includes more stuff, you can read the full release notes here: http://git.dotslashplay.it/play.it/tree/CHANGELOG?h=release/2.34.0

The plan for this update is to gather your feedback, using the usual contact methods, and to finally release it once it has spent one full month with no new bug reported.


Shutting down fediverse.dotslashplay.it

For two years ./play.it had an ActivityPub account as @playit@fediverse.dotslashplay.it, used mostly to share news about whatever was going on around ./play.it at any given time. During that time, this account never got any meaningful interactions with the broader Fediverse. Only a couple posts triggered a significant amount of answers and shares, all of them having a common point: they were not about ./play.it at all.

Now that this dedicated website is now available to share news about ./play.it, there is no reason to keep the ActivityPub server running. It is going down, and replaced with a redirection to this here website.

Since it got no interactions, it does not need a replacement on that front. Our IRC channel and e-mail addresses are still available anyway, and for persistent public discussions some forums are listed on http://dotslashplay.it/.

Let us end this with big thanks (truly deserved) to @grunfink@comam.es for the development of snac2, the only sane and maintainable ActivityPub instance. Without their work, we would not even have given a try to the Fediverse.

I certainly see them ignoring copyright for material lifted to create competing derivatives.

Something that bothers me is that so much content is being machine-generated that it will be impossible to prevent it contaminating their future training dataset. It will be inbreeding, and it will be a down spiral from that point onward.
Human content will become an artisanal product. So little will survive the great flood, and so few will be able to create original content. Will we be doomed to live under a machine-created culture?

Now that is new to me. Would you mind pointing me to more information on that?


Say what!? But... they get millions in funding! Why go through this? Cheaper network connections? Avoid being blocked? And I'm sure people would not agree to it if they knew, so are they not inviting a class-action suit?

Things are working great! Thanks.

If I had to guess: they use the same "fine print" pretending "consent" which "legitimate" enterprises regularly use as well: they give you a crappy "app", and call that "for free", because you don't pay money directly. Instead you "allow" them to abuse your computer/telephone.

Since this seems to be the most active Linux discussion, asking here.

tl;dr: Have you gotten the videos (movies) to play in Sacred Gold?

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I installed Sacred Gold (GOG) with Lutris. I think it had a ready option for this game but it had a warning that one should disable the game movies in Settings.cfg file in order not to be stuck in a black screen. ("SHOWMOVIE : 0"). Anyway I left it to 1, tried also with 0.

"You should edit config file, which located here: '/drive_c/GOG Games/Sacred Gold/Settings.cfg' and change line SHOWMOVIE : 1 to SHOWMOVIE : 0 otherwise you will experiencing black screen after starting game."

At first the game wouldn't launch at all but when I enabled dgVoodoo2 in the Lutris options, the game would start and run fine. Except that that wmv videos don't play at all, so you get no intro etc.

Googled for it and this bug was reported already back in 2008, and is supposed to have been fixed for many years already?

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16250

Two things on that page that I noticed:

From 2016:

On a clean prefix with no winetricks, the developer/publisher logo movies do not play when starting the game, in the Extras section the Intro and Underworld Intro movies will not play.

I then ran the following winetricks:

winetricks quartz = no movies
winetricks devenum = no movies

I was finally able to work around the issue by running "winetricks amstream". After that, the dev/pub logos played and so did the two intro movies in the Extras section of the main menu. (So he had to use all the three winetricks to get it work.)

On 2020:

Videos play properly for me in Sacred Gold using wine-6.0-rc1-56-gbe459282420.
...
If you still are encountering errors, please ensure you have the requisite 32-bit GStreamer libraries.

Any idea how to fix this, how do I confirm I have the "32-bit GStreamer libraries"? It is not a real biggie, the movies in that game seem very short and are not related to the story apparently, but I would still like to get it fixed because why not. I tried the game also in Windows 11 and there the videos play fine.

I may still try this also in Linux Mint in case this is some OpenSUSE specific problem, but generally Wine/Lutris has worked better for me in OpenSUSE than Mint, possibly because by default OpenSUSE uses more recent packages.

wine --version says wine-10.17 in case that matters.

Just to be clear: using Lutris is not a requirement for me. I just decided to try it first because so far it has been the most plug'n'play solution, just click click click and you are done. So if there is a ./play.it script or Adam's script or whatever that installs it fine, that's enough. Or even installing it manually.

I noticed when installing it with Lutris, in the Lutris Game Options I had to change Prefix Architechure = 32bit (the default was "Auto"), otherwise the game would not launch at all.

Apparently glVoodoo2 didn't need to be enabled after all, I just tried it without and it launched fine. That 32bit setting was vital though, apparently.

I don’t own Sacred on GOG, so I can not add support for it to ./play.it myself.

I think I might still have a boxed copy of it, so what I can do is add support for the CD-ROM. You then would have to adapt that (or ask someone else to do it for you) to the GOG build of the game.

I guess it is some Gstreamer library problem, and I have no idea how to fix it. The Lutris log gets lots of lines like these when running the game:

(wine:12538): GStreamer-WARNING **: 01:54:39.224: Failed to load plugin '/home/timppu/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/wine-ge-8-26-x86_64/lib64/gstreamer-1.0/libgstivfparse.so': /home/timppu/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/wine-ge-8-26-x86_64/lib64/gstreamer-1.0/libgstivfparse.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
(wine:12538): GStreamer-WARNING **: 01:54:39.224: Failed to load plugin '/home/timppu/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/wine-ge-8-26-x86_64/lib64/gstreamer-1.0/libgstflv.so': /home/timppu/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/wine-ge-8-26-x86_64/lib64/gstreamer-1.0/libgstflv.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
(wine:12538): GStreamer-WARNING **: 01:54:39.238: Failed to load plugin '/home/timppu/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/wine-ge-8-26-x86_64/lib/gstreamer-1.0/libgsttheora.so': libtheoradec.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
(wine:12538): GStreamer-WARNING **: 01:54:39.243: Failed to load plugin '/home/timppu/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/wine-ge-8-26-x86_64/lib/gstreamer-1.0/libgstgtkwayland.so': libgtk-3.so.0: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
(wine:12538): GStreamer-WARNING **: 01:54:39.265: Failed to load plugin '/home/timppu/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/wine-ge-8-26-x86_64/lib/gstreamer-1.0/libgstuvch264.so': libgudev-1.0.so.0: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
(wine:12538): GStreamer-WARNING **: 01:54:39.279: Failed to load plugin '/home/timppu/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/wine-ge-8-26-x86_64/lib/gstreamer-1.0/libgstv4l2codecs.so': libgudev-1.0.so.0: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

It seems these errors are due to Lutris trying to load 64-bit libraries while at the same time running a 32-bit build of WINE (or some other cross-architecture mess). I am not a Lutris user, so can not tell you how to fix that.

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I just realised that you are using an RPM distribution, sadly we have no support for these in ./play.it yet. So unless you’re willing to generate packages in another format then convert them to RPM with alien, ./play.it can not be used to integrate games with your system.

Sorry for hijacking this thread, I try to find a more generic Linux gaming thread but maybe this is also of interest to this play.it project.

I tried it also on another laptop with the latest LTS Linux Mint, and the same problem in Lutris (the game runs at all only when setting prefix specifically for 32bit, but videos don't play and the Lutris logs show those same ELF-complaints). So at least this doesn't seem to be specific to OpenSUSE, but also on other Linux distros apparently.

Also tried the game also with the Heroic Launcher, same story, game otherwise works ok but those videos don't play.

According to that discussion I linked, this should have been a recognized bug in WINE which was fixed already in 2020, but maybe it would work fine in Wine, but something has changed related to the needed libraries.

I can’t say anything about Heroic Launcher, but the errors you shared above are created by Lutris.

By that I do not mean they are written by Lutris (that much is obvious), but Lutris creates the situation spawning these errors by forcing the use of an inappropriate build of WINE that is not going to work correctly with a 32-bit WINE prefix.

I suspect Heroic Launcher forces the use of some custom build of WINE too, all trendy open-source Steam clones seem to have gone that way.

Yes, you should do that. Get rid of the layers that are causing extra errors, so you can focus on the original problem (videos not playing).

Yeah, if only I understood what is the root cause I am trying to fix. 32-bit WINE trying to use 64bit gstreamer libraries or something? And how exactly do you fix something like that, ie. force WINE to use correct libraries? I've now started googling how to create wine prefixes manually, or at least with winetricks. It was a new thing to me that you can't apparently much modify an existing prefix (e.g. turn a 64bit prefix into 32bit), but often (always?) you have to create a completely new prefix when you want to change something? Maybe I misunderstood something but that is how some instructions seemed to suggest.

Come to think of it, most "library problems" I've faced in Linux are related to trying to get some 32bit Windows games to run on WINE, using correct libraries. It is as if the whole WINE and Linux is now optimized for running newer 64bit applications (Linux or Windows), and you have to go through extra hoops to "enable" running of 32bit applications with correct libraries, and sometimes that might not be even possible anymore.

I googled for "32bit gstreamer libraries opensuse" where someone asked years ago why the 32bit libraries for this and that had disappeared with some OpenSUSE update. Apparently it was a mistake, but still one of the developers seemed to suggest that there is very little need to include 32bit libraries nowadays, or something like that...

Ummm, how about them 32bit Windows games people still try to run in Wine? :(

Exactly zero of these library problems exist with ./play.it, so it is not a WINE problem in the first place. It’s either caused by Lutris, or the custom build of WINE pulled by Lutris.

Using either regular WINE or ./play.it (that’s the same, actually), there are no "extra hoops" to go through to run 32-bit games. The extra layers you are trying to put on top of WINE are the cause of your problems, so I very much doubt the fix is going to come from adding even more layers ;)

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To create a clean 32-bit WINE prefix: To run some 32-bit Windows software from this new prefix:

This just means it's not sufficient to have the AMD64 files installed, you need those for 486/586/686 as well. ("Multiarch" enabled in Debian-type distributions, and $PACKAGE_NAME:i386 installed). Can't tell how the required packages are called in Suse.

So let's take a real life example. I have my Sacred Gold Windows offline installer files under /home/timppu/Downloads/, so does it go like this (I use the full paths below because ~ is acting up on my keyboard for some reason):

su - timppu
mkdir -p /home/timppu/GOG/Sacred_Gold
export WINEARCH=win32
export WINEPREFIX=/home/timppu/GOG/Sacred_Gold/
wineboot --init
cd /home/timppu/Downloads
chmod +x Sacred_offline_installer.exe
wine ./Sacred_offline_installer.exe

(I point the installer to install the game into e.g. C;\GOG_Games\Sacred_Gold\)

When the installation is complete and I want to run the game:

export WINEPREFIX=/home/timppu/GOG/Sacred_Gold/
cd /home/timppu/GOG/Sacred_Gold/drive_c/GOG_Games/Sacred_Gold
wine ./Sacred_Gold.exe

And everything should work, as long as Linux has needed libraries like the 32bit GStreamer libraries etc.?

Alternatively, if the GOG installer created a desktop icon for running the game, should it already contain all the needed exports etc.?

I presume the existence of Lutris and/or Heroic should not affect doing this all manually, as long as I don't use the same subdirectories as they do?