Planetside

What works

- Installs fine from CDs

- Planetside must launch through Lauchpad.exe with the /game:Planetside parameter. The correct command is:

wine "C:\Program Files\Sony\Station\Launchpad\LaunchPad.exe" -- /game:Planetside

If you try to run Planetside.exe directly it will come up with a window telling you to run Planetside through the Launchpad and quit.

- The Launchpad and login windows needs Gecko installed, Wine should do this automatically for you if not already installed. All buttons and dropdown menus work fine, only thing that does not display is the changelog that appears (unnecessary anyway). You can select your character from the launchpad too.

- The game ran with no crashes during hours of testing - I have a BR25 CR5 character and had access to all features in game. Everything was tested and only a couple of flaws were noticed:

• Plasma and explosion clouds do not draw properly. They appear as
  polygonal coloured objects. Same applies to vehicle weaponry fire.
• The 3D mini planets on the intergalactic map have no textures (appear
  all white.
• Only Dolby Surround, Miles 2D Fast, Direct 3D Software Emulated and
  RSX 3D audio modes work. D3DSoft seems to eat FPS, Miles 2D is the
  most FPS friendly.
• Some overlayed textures ('Draw Detail Web', 'Bullet Holes' and explosion
  scorch marks partially disappear/have problems overlaying existing building
  textures.
• Audio latency with any driver is anywhere up to ~1000ms. Assume thats's
  down to Linux audio architecture? Latency is lowest when dmixer is
  disabled in .asoundrc.

Everything else had correct texturing and behaved as on Windows. Windowed + Full Screen works fine.

What does not

• Launchpad does not display the changelog.
• Beryl causes stuttering unless you tell winecfg NOT to use window manager.
• 3d Mini-planets on intergalatic map show no textures.
• Character preview in PS's selection screen show no textures.
• Plasma + explosion clouds, vehicle weapon fire not displayed correctly.
• No EAX, D3D Hardware, D3D7 audio modes.
• Overlayed textures ('Draw Detail Web', 'Bullet Holes', Explosion scorchs) don't
  display correctly on existing building/terrain textures.

Workarounds

What was not tested

All game functions were tested, all combat conditions were tested (outdoor, yellow/orange/red alert base fights).

Game is near completely functional under Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

On Gentoo systems, PlanetSide will not work out of the box due to a missing Mesa library (note: if you are using proprietary AMD or NVIDIA graphics drivers, you probably won't need to worry about this) . Here are the steps and triage I used to debug the issues I was having.

Upon start, the PlanetSide window would launch, sound would be heard, but nothing would get drawn. The console was being spammed with messages similar to:

err:d3d_surface:surface_upload_data >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> GL_INVALID_ENUM (0x500) from glTexSubImage2D @ surface.c / 2369

This search led me to this bug which says that libtxc_dxtn.so is required for PlanetSide to load textures. To verify that this was in fact the missing library, I ran: MESA_DEBUG=1 wine LaunchPad.exe and looked for the error: Mesa warning: couldn't open libtxc_dxtn.so, software DXTn compression/decompression unavailable. This appeared and I resolved the problem by running emerge -va media-libs/libtxc_dxtn (for Debian/Ubuntu run apt-get install libtxc-dxtn-s2tc). I hope this resolves most people's problems with this specific issue.