UFO Extraterrestrials

What works

• Downloading and installing using steam.
• Starting up after installing Direct Music and Direct Sound using winetricks.
• Starting a new game after making some modifications to the game settings ini file.
• Gameplay at the geoscape and base-related menus.
• Ufopedia.
• Tactical missions.

What does not

• Game crashes unless native MS dsound and dmusic are being used.
• Real mouse cursor position desynchronized with the displayed mouse cursor if the mouse sensitivity is set to anything except 0 in data/ufo-et.ini file.
• Even with sensitivity set to 0 there are situations where mouse cursor on-screen and real positions get's desynchronized. Best way to "resync" is to play the game in fullscreen mode and do a 360 degrees "loop" with mouse over all of the screen edges.
• Game engine fails to play introductional video correctly (and, most probably, all other video clips also, but I hadn't had a chance to test it). Clicking on "Play Intro" button on the main menus starts up the video playback, but there's no sound and playback gets interrupted in about 10 seconds. After a brief pause with the video picture stalled the game returns back to the main menu.
  

Workarounds

What was not tested

• ­Hadn't played the game for more than few minutes, so I can't tell if the game behaves rather stable enough to play it through under Wine.
• Multisampling hadn't been tested if it works correctly for this game under Wine.
• Hadn't tried to play with ORM, RTLM and GLSL registry settings for this game. It seems that the game renders properly-enough with the default Wine settings. The only case to play with the above is if it would be required in order to fix render bugs when trying to maximize visuals quality with MSAA+SSAA.
  

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

The specs of computer that was used for testing: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Black Edition CPU @3200MHz 6GB DDR2 PC-6400 RAM Gigabyte GeForce GTS-250 with 1Gb VRAM Wine 1.3.10 compiled from source.

• 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.