Supreme Commander

What works

- Campaign, Skirmish

- Multiplayer LAN (With issues, read comments)

What does not

Explosions of bullet impacts are sometimes rendered as a square

Workarounds

What was not tested

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

The game has a major design flaw. It applies to all game modes. The game logic is tied to the amount of FPS that you have. What does this mean? It means that if you have 30FPS instead of 60, the game will run literally at half the speed. If you're going to do multiplayer sessions, lower down your graphics if your computer cannot handle it, because otherwise the game will run sluggish for all players. (Game adapts to player with the lowest FPS) I highly recommend performing the tasks in the "Getting it to work" note! Additional info: I installed the game in a truly 64 bit environment.

Getting it to work:

• Use Wine 1.0.1 or higher, the more recent the better
  

• Install Supreme Commander

• Patch SupCom to version 3220 or higher

The patcher won't display anything. It takes a quite a while, but it's definitely doing something!
This patch is essential, since it disables the (broken) DVD check

Starting with Patch 3251, the patcher might fail. To test it yourself, you will need Mono, gdiplus, dotnet20 and vcrun2005 (use winetricks). Good Luck.
If that doesn't work, try installing the patches in a virtual machine running Windoze or stick with 3220

• In order to get sound:

Use a recent winetricks to install xact
You may also need to set your sample rate to 48000 in winecfg's Audio tab

• You will need d3dx9_36.dll. If it's missing, get it from dll-files.com, extract and put it into windows/system32

• Create the registry string HKCU/Software/Wine/Direct3D/OffscreenRenderingMode and set it to fbo
  

• Make sure your Color Depth is set to 24 bits. Otherwise the game will not render fonts or 3D models correctly

• cd into Supreme Commander/bin and launch the game with wine SupremeCommander.exe

If you're still running into problems, try starting the game with the /novalidate switch

Also, if SupCom complains about insufficient video memory or crashes very early into the game,
try creating the string HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D\VideoMemorySize with a value >64, e.g. 128

Issues:

• Movie frames don't get skipped, so sound loses sync with the video. A faster CPU helps a little bit 
• No network play (requires .net for GPGNET)
• The game may crash when you try to change the resolution. Do it manually in windows/profiles/*user*/Local Settings/Application Data/Gas Powered Games/Supreme Commander/Game.prefs
  

- HAARP (main maintainer)

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