Broken Sword: The Angel of Death

What works

• Installation.
• Playing the game (after a fix).
• In-game movies.
• Sound.
• Music.
• Uninstallation.

• It is possible to change anti-aliasing (bug #34625; whether the anti-aliasing actually works would be another matter.)

What does not

• Blank/black screen when the game is run.
• Game plays sluggishly.

• There are graphical glitches (maybe a shader problem?):

  • Flashing pieces in certain regions viz. the sky.
  • Several objects viz. characters, pigeons, salamis, apron, etc. are rendered black.

• When run in Wine's full-screen mode, the game window automatically minimizes when the desktop workspace is changed. (Bug #37937).

Workarounds

• To get rid of the blank/black screen (when the game is run), requires `d3dx9_29.dll'  (or `d3dcompiler_47.dll') to be dropped in the game directory.

• To prevent the problem of auto-minimize, the game must be run in Wine's virtual-desktop mode.

What was not tested

• Playing through the entire demo.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Intel
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

• As for the graphical glitches:

  • The bug crept in since v. 5.0.3 and needs some investigation.

  • Dropping of `d3dx9_29.dll' in the game directory does not fix it!

  • Disabling CSMT does not help.

  • Disabling anti-aliasing does not help.

  • Maybe this is bug #52235?

  • Patches from bugs #36564, #44514, #52233 do not fix this issue.

• I am not sure if the anti-aliasing bug was actually fixed in Wine (since v. 5.0.3), or went away after a hardware upgrade: from G41M to H81M.

• The following line is repeatedly output on the console:

  0120:fixme:d3d9:Direct3DShaderValidatorCreate9 Returning stub validator 67A9D038.

P.S. N.B.: It turns out that the problem of missing/black textures is introduced due to the hardware upgrade, precisely hyper-threading (HT) or multi-threading (MT). I finally did manage to find a solution to the problem: Disable Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) before running the game (you can enable it later):

First, check if it is enabled:

$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/active
1
$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control
on

Then, disable it (as root):

# echo "off" | tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control
off