Startopia

What works

The game installs and plays normally and at a smooth framerate, if you work around the sound issues.

All campaign missions can be completed, the end sequence and credits play correctly, downloadable user missions can be played. All buildings in-game appear to work as expected, including the prison building.

What does not

Quitting the game causes a hard hang, possibly forcing you to terminate the process. Startopia 1.02 does this on Windows as well. It's not a big deal.

Although sounds work otherwise fine, it seems specifically trying to load or play too many sounds at once will cause a massive slowdown, slowing the game below 1 FPS. This makes the more intense missions impossible to complete. Disabling sound effects (by turning the effect volume to 0 in the audio settings) allowed the game to run as smoothly as it does on Windows.

There were rare visual glitches if there was a huge amount of particles on-screen at the same time - the particle textures turned white for a moment. This may have been caused by the open source Radeon drivers.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Did not test if the particle glitches would also happen on other graphics drivers.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Further experimentation showed that my bronze rating for Wine 1.7.51 on this game is incorrect; disabling sound effects should allow the game to run well enough on both 1.7.51 and 1.7.52.

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