Fairy Fencer F

What works

The following worked:

• Starting the game
• Intro movies
• Sound
• The main menu
• Starting a new game
• 3D scenes and combat
  

What does not

It is impossible to proceed beyond the tutorials, the game crashes due to one of two errors:

• "d:\projects\fairyfencer\prophetlite\DirectXValidate.h (138) : DXFAIL : E_OUTOFMEMORY" - This tends to happen if you take your time in battles.
• "Texture.cpp (292) : DXFAIL : D3DERR_INVALIDCALL" - This happens after the 3rd batch of tutorial screens, immediately after exiting the last one.
  

Workarounds

What was not tested

Gameplay beyond the beginning was not tested.

Saving and loading was not tested as I was unable to reach a save point.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

The game would not start at all initially, however a quick investigation revealed that it's engine was similar to that of Hyperdimension Neptunia, for which the AppDB has steps to get it running. Following those, the above results were achieved. For the record I was using a 32bit wine prefix and the abbreviated winetricks commands that were followed were: winetricks --force xact_jun2010 winetricks devenum quartz wmp10

Please include your video card in any test results. Otherwise, I'll require a resend. This game may have issues relating to specific cards.

Info

This game does not work perfectly. Despite bearing superficial similarities to the Neptunia Re;birth series, this game does not share much of the same code for backend. This game uses directx9 rather than OpenGL - this can be verified with a tool such as dependency walker.

Performance issues

Update - It seems that after upgrading to Mesa 11.1.0, performance has rather significantly improved. Most parts run at full speed, with an occasional stutter here and there. However, it still chokes in lava caves for unknown reasons. On the upside, controls are responsive enough due to minor differences to trudge through them at least.

On an intel integrated 4000-series card, it doesn't seem to run well, at all. I believe intel cards are underspecced to play (at least under wine.) As a stopgap fix, Triple-buffering with xorg seems to slow things a bit, so disable that. Disabling the tear-free option also may lead to a performance increase, but I'm unsure. Neither are enabled unless you explicitly do so in xorg.conf.

You can also try the following. It will degrade the quality of effects in-game, but will make it mostly playable (except lava areas.) Open the folder with the game, and change the following lines:

EnableEffects=0
EnableShadows=0
AntiAlias=0

This following tweak may or may not help; The game locks FPS to 60, and offers the ability to modify that. Upping it may or may not improve things.

LockWindowFrameRate=120.000000

Getting it to run

The game will not run in a 64-bit prefix, because unlike Neptunia Re;birth, the game silently exits when video playback fails. Also, this game is much more cutscene-heavy. You'll need a 32-bit prefix, and the following commands will get things running (if imperfectly.)

winetricks wmp10 windowscodecs xact quartz devenum

Other issues

There are a few issues due to stubs in wine; check the bug links for info. But right now, it's safe to assume without patching that the game's RNG is crippled.

There are a few issues documented which I have seen occur on my Windows 7 and Vista box - these are not wine's fault. Do not blame them on wine.

'DXFAIL ... out of memory' message box - Don't switch in and out of the game's window. This causes a rather severe memory leak for some reason. Also, this includes switching VTs.

The other is a runtime error popup. I'm going to assume this is the same issue as DXFAIL, it's just a difference between which function hits the memory limit - texture loading or runtime code.

For those curious; running a screenshot program to capture the game's display counts as switching windows. Yes, I am serious. Running mate-screenshot triggers the memory leak crash.

These errors will probably require you to run wineserver -k to fix. I had to reboot my Windows system when it occured there - Windows didn't clean up the leak (then again, when does it?)