Startopia

What works

On an up to date Archlinux, Startopia boots and plays with game functionality working perfectly. There were no visual or audio bugs that I could notice - everything except game speed was pretty much identical compared to running it on Windows XP. Load times even seemed a bit faster.

What does not

Although the game starts out running perfectly smoothly, on all levels after building up a couple rooms and have a dozen aliens on board, intermittent lag started occurring. Changing the graphics and audio settings made very little difference. The game could render complex scenes at full speed at the highest graphics settings, only to suddenly fall down to below 1 FPS - the slowdown was especially prominent when anything started shooting. Saving the game or task switching away restored smooth gameplay for a short time. Might be a bug in a common library call or something.

On Windows XP on my testing system the game did not experience any such slowdown, so it must be Wine-specific.

The game crashes hard when you quit, and you may have to terminate the process manually. It did this on Windows XP as well, annoying but not a huge deal.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Did not test the second half of the game, since the drastic slowdown makes the more intense missions impossible to complete.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Tested using a Radeon HD 8490 with the open source drivers.

When you have performance issues.

Set your audio to lower quality en less sound events.

It seems that wine is not very good with dealing with a lot of sound events and pulse.

 Cheers

Rob