Earth Eternal

What works

Installation, sound, gameplay, UI, all graphical features

What does not

Nothing

Workarounds

What was not tested

I can't think of any.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Works flawlessly following the steps in the HOWTO listed below. Overall game performance is somewhat slow in comparison to a Windows installation, but that is to be expected.

Earth Eternal forum users akoshka, PsyQ and others have assembled patches to hack Earth Eternal into working on WINE. The patches are required to work around bugs in Earth Eternal itself, which is closed source, so the problems cannot be solved at the root at this time.

Forum user akoshka supplies this extensive howto for patching/hacking WINE in order to play Earth Eternal:

Running Earth Eternal On WINE

As Earth Eternal is still in Beta, I would suggest you try running the client on Windows first to make sure your hardware is supported. If it doesn't work on Windows it's quite likely you are going to have problems on Linux as well.

This procedure was tested on 32bit Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) with Wine 1.1.31 and a NVIDIA 7600 GT video card.

Patching Wine

Wine needs to patched in order to work around a few issues with Wine and/or the client. The first is to correctly resolve the addresses of the Sparkplay servers. This is apparently caused by the client using an undocumented feature of the Windows Socket API.

The second and third patches are to allow the window to be resized without crashing the client. Be warned that due to the nature of the change, this may slightly affect the performance of DirectX in wine in general. It doesn't appear to have any noticeable effect on playing EE though.

1. Download wine source to your home directory from sourceforge.net/projects/wine/files/Source/
2. Extract source in your home directory.

cd
tar xjf wine-1.1.31.tar.bz2

3. Remove old wine.

sudo apt-get remove wine

4. Install required development packages. More may be required, these got me going from a relatively clean install of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic). Some are just to get rid of any warnings when running the configure stage of the wine install and may not actually be required.

sudo apt-get install flex bison xorg-dev libhal-dev libopenal-dev libmpg123-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libjpeg62-dev libssl-dev libpng12-dev libxml2-dev libgnutls-dev wget

5. Download the socket.c patch from http://www.tanktarta.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ee/inet-address-hack.patch, and the two D3D9 patches from http://www.tanktarta.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ee/d3d9-test-hack.patch and http://www.tanktarta.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ee/d3d9-types-hack.patch  and apply them to the wine source

wget http://www.tanktarta.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ee/inet-address-hack.patch

wget http://www.tanktarta.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ee/d3d9-types-hack.patch

wget http://www.tanktarta.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ee/d3d9-test-hack.patch
cd wine-1.1.31
patch -p1 < ../inet-address-hack.patch

patch -p1 < ../d3d9-types-hack.patch
patch -p1 < ../d3d9-test-hack.patch

6. Run the wine build. There are a few ways of doing this, the simplest being :-

sh tools/wineinstall

Follow the prompts and sit back and wait. You wil be asked for either your
own password or the root password when it gets to the installation stage.

Installing And Running Earth Eternal

Option 1 - Automatic

Download the ee script from http://www.tanktarta.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ee/ee. Place it somewhere on your PATH and make it executable.

wget http://www.tanktarta.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ee/ee
chmod a+rx ee
sudo mv ee /usr/local/bin

First off, prepare the wine prefix. This will set up a brand new Wine directory solely for Earth Eternal ($HOME/.wine-ee). It will download winetricks and apply the tricks required. You only need to do this once or after using the uninstall command.

ee install

Now you can install the client itself. This will actually wipe out the current and completely reinstall it. This was done because I have yet to get the Spark updater to work properly. If this is NOT the first time update has been run, the cached content is moved out of the way before the re-install and moved back in when complete to save a lot of downloading time when the game is running.

ee update

When this is complete, you are ready to play! DO NOT use the entry created in your menu, it probably won't work. Just run the script without any arguments :-

ee

There are a few other 'ee' commands you may be find useful.

• clear-cache clears out cached content.
• uninstall removes all trace of the game.
• and command run with the EE wine prefix. E.g. 'ee winecfg'.

Option 2 - Manually

I would recommended that you start with a clean wine setup (or use a 'prefix'). There is plenty of information out there on how to do this, but for now the simplest way would just be to move any previous configuration out of the way

mv ~/.wine ~/.wine.backup

Download winetricks and run it with all of the required tricks. Remove when done.

wget http://winezeug.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/winetricks
sh winetricks winxp corefonts d3dx9 tahoma vcrun2008 vcrun2008sp1 fontfix fontsmooth-rgb
rm winetricks

The next step you may or may not have to do. This started to be a requirement for me after an update to the client just before open beta. For some reason the installer doesn't like the link to 'My documents' that is created by wine, they have to be real directories. If the installer fails to complete, try this :-

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/users/$LOGNAME
rm -f "My Videos" "My documents" "My Pictures" "My Music" "Desktop"
mkdir "My Videos" "My documents" "My Pictures" "My Music" "Desktop"

You can now download and install the installer.

wget http://static.beta.eartheternal.com/Release/Current/Platform/SparkPlayerInstall.exe
wine SparkPlayerInstall.exe

The installer will now download the rest of the client. Again, the shortcut created on the menu probably won't work. See the section below for details on how to create your own.

Troubleshooting

"Unable To Write Cache File" errors

These occur when game content is downloaded after the character selection page. The download will stop and an error detailing the file that failed will be displayed. Re-running the client may get you further, it may not.

Make sure your per-process file handle limit is high enough. Run the command :-

ulimit -n

A number of around 1024 is way too low, a value of 20000 should be good. The exact way to change these limits will depend on your distibution, so check its documentation for help.

On Ubuntu at least, these are set in the /etc/security/limits.conf file. A problem was found in Ubuntu 9.10 where the default limits file was incorrect.

Edit the file as root :-

sudo gedit /etc/security/limits.conf

Go to the bottom of the file and look for the hard and soft limits. Change both occurences of 'nolimits' to 'nolimit' and save the file. Reboot, then run unlimit -n again to make sure the change has taken.

No Sound

You may need to run winecfg and play with the audio driver used. If you used the ee script, run :-

ee winecfg

If you you took the manual route, run :-

winecfg

Go to the Audio tab and try various different drivers. Depending on your setup you may want to try Alsa, OSS or ESound. Use the Test Sound button in there as well.

Other Bits

Creating a desktop icon

The icon that gets installed in the wine group won't work as it is. So, you have a few  ways to create your own. First download a suitable image (I have uploaded one to

http://www.tanktarta.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ee/ee.png) and move it to global icons directory.

wget http://www.tanktarta.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ee/ee.png
sudo mv ee.png /usr/share/pixmaps

You can now either create a .desktop file manually, or use one of the tools on your desktop such as Add To Panel. If you decide to create a .desktop file, here is a template you can use. Simply save this as a file on your desktop called ee.desktop, you can drag the icon from there to anywhere you want to after that.

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Earth Eternal
Exec=ee
Terminal=false
Categories=Games
Icon=ee
Comment=Earth Eternal
Type=Application

If you are not using the ee script, Exec will have to be full command needed to launch the client. I.e.

wine "/path/to/Spark.exe" "http://static.beta.eartheternal.com/Release/Current/EarthEternal.car"

If you are using the ee script, but it is not on the PATH, you will need to change the Exec attribute to contain the full location.

Known Issues

The client is known to crash when :-

• Upon exit
• Changing some video settings from the F10 menu

 

This guide is current as of 2009-10-26.

 

Forum discussion on Earth Eternal forums

Most of the wisdom here is from this thread on the Earth Eternal forums and contributors Avaera, akoshka and others.