UFO Extraterrestrials

What works

Everything:

• Downloading and installing the game from Steam.
• Starting up the game, navigating in-game menus, changing game settings.
• Starting up a new game, playing in both "geoscape" and "tactical combat" modes.
• Saving and loading games.

What does not

Game require native Direct Sound, Direct Music and d3dx9_26.dll to be installed into Wine prefix in order to work correctly. Without any of the above the game would crash to descktop right after the start. These requiremens can be installed using "winetricks d3dx_26 dsound directmusic".

There's a bug in mouse and keyboard input handling introduced in Wine 1.3.35 by commit cb3b7237 (check bug #29871 for details) which affects UFO:ET. It's not a major problem as the game remains generally playable but the smoothness of the mouse input is far from perfect - there are a lot of noticable "input stutters" right after mouse clicks, rapid mouse movements, e.t.c.

For mouse input to work well Wine should be compiled with XInput2 support, and Xserver you use should have XI2 supported and enabled as well. Failing to meet this requirements would leave you with totally messed mouse input unless you apply a workaround described at the HOWTO section of APPDB game page.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Everything, except for prolonged gameplay. Testing session held for writing this report was about 15 minutes - is was enough to test most essential aspects of the gameplay. No problems were encountered on a way. ­

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Game was tested on computer with following specs: AMD FX 8120 CPU @3.1GHz, 8GB DDR3 RAM, GeForce GTX 550 Ti GPU with 1GB VRAM, nVIDIA Binary Driver v.275.09.07. Specifically for this test I had used a fresh clean Wine prefix in which I had installed d3dx9_26, directmusic and dsound using winetricks script (fixes "game crashes at start problem"). Silver raiting is due to "mouse input stutter" bug, as soon as it would be fixed the game should be rated as Gold.

• There's known bug that prevents game to run under Wine due to incompatibilities with Wine's dsound/dmusic implementation. It is possible to workaround the bug if you use Wine versions prior to 1.3.25 or if Wine version is 1.3.30 or newer. What you have to do is to install native implementations of Direct Music and Direct Sound dll by Microsoft. It can be easily done using winetricks script like this: "winetrick directmusic dsound".
• Mouse input is a total mess if your Wine and/or Xserver do not support XInput2. There's a workaround for this problem described in the HOWTO section of this page, but it isn't perfect so it's preferred to recompile Wine/Xserver with XI2 support rather than sticking with using workaround.
• Game requires native d3dx_26.dll to be able to start. This is due to Wine's implementation of this lib lacking support for DDS/DXT texture compression formats. You can install this lib into your Wine prefix using wintricks: "winetricks d3dx9_26".

Install the game as usual, just like you would do it on Windows^TM. There shouldn't be any troubles during the installation phase, no matter would you be using Steam to download the game or proceed with the ordinary install from the DVD disk. Installing from CD disks (game was released as a multiple CDs "jewel" bundle in some countries) might be somewhat tricky as you would be forced to do the required mounting and unmounting manually, but that's is a well-known problem with Wine applicable to a lot of other games and applications so you should be fine googling for howtos on the "multiple CD application installation under Wine" in case you need it.

Post-installation tweaks

In case your Wine version don't support Xinput2 (versions prior 1.3.17 don't support XI2, from 1.3.18 till 1.3.20 support might be somewhat buggy, 1.3.21 and later should be OK), you would need to modify game configuration file setting mouse sensitivity to be "zero". Forgetting to do it would leave you with totally messed mouse input: displayed mouse cursor position wouldn't match the position the game receives mouse clicks at. To change mouse sensitivity to 0 head into the folder where the game had been installed, enter the "data" subdirectory and open up file named "uto-et.ini" in the text editor of your choice. Text editor should support MS-DOS style of line endings, so in case you're unsure you'd better use "notepad" from Wine to edit this file. Search for the line containing "sensitivity=" and change it to "sensitivity=0". Save your changes and close the text editor.

It had been reported that the game might hang while playing introduction video sequence when run under earlier versions of Wine (was reported for 1.0.x and earlier, there are chances that some 1.2+ versions are affected too). To safeguard yourself from hitting this bug rename "videos" subfolder into "videos.backup". This subfolder is located at the same place as "ufo-et.ini" - under "/data" path. On the other hand it is known that Wine's video playback support gets better over time so you might wish to give it a try: some day it would work as it should.

It is also known that the game would crash at startup unless you install native version of d3dx9_26.dll (or d3dx9_36.dll, as by default Wine forwards all d3dx9_XX.dll calls to the d3dx9_36.dll). It can be easily done by executing winetricks d3dx9_26.

Another native libs from DirectX redist you would have to use are Direct Music and Direct Sound. Again, they can be easily installed by executing winetricks dsound directmusic.
Be sure not to use Wine versions starting from 1.3.25 and up to 1.3.29 (inclusive) as they contain a bug in the sound subsystem implementation that can't be workaround in any known way.

When you start the game for the first time you might get into a somewhat troubling state which is "system looks like being hanged with a totally black screen". In most cases this is due to required native DLLs not being installed into Wine prefix you try to execute game in. In case you fall into this "black screen" problem try to use Alt+TAB combo. If it would be visible that there is "Wine Application Crash" dialog among other windows then it is just the case. Alt+TAB into that dialog (chances are your screen would remain "totally black" despite the fact you had Alt+TABed from the crashed game) and press ENTER. If would close the dialog and let the game terminate relieving you from "black screen" trouble. Then proceed with installing required native libs and try staring the game up again. If nothing helps - most likely you are hitting yet another Wine vs. UFO:ET bug that isn't known (yet). Turn the Wine debugging on and analyze the output; try searching Wine bugzilla and related community forums. In other words do anything you would usually do to get your favorite Windows^tm application into working state under Wine.

In-game tweaks and issues

In case your Wine don't support Xinput2 and you stick with using "sensitivity=0" workaround - mouse input still wouldn't be working flawlessly. What you would sporadically get are "cursor getting out of sync" problems, most notably when rotating geoscape with the right mouse button and when shooting (targeting) in "tactical combat" mode. Good news are that it's not too hard to get the mouse cursor back in sync. Easiest way to do it is to play the game in fullscreen mode and do a "360 degrees leap" with a mouse over all screen edges. I mean: move your mouse full way up and to the left, then move it full way to the right, full way down, full way to the left and finally full way to the top. Having done this your mouse input should be again in sync with the displayed in game mouse cursor.