https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29582
--- Comment #41 from Daniel Santos daniel.santos@pobox.com --- (In reply to Maxim Stewart from comment #40)
Oh man are the graphics beautiful; the sound design is awesome too but the game play is boring and just a standard FPS cluster bomb. I bought the first game but refuse to get the second. I also agree with the bull surrounding multilayer servers. Anyway, THANK YOU for working on this patch!! I would give you the biggest kiss and hug of all time if I could! XD Now, I'm using the Steam version of BF2 and running that through PlayOnLinux. I've tried figuring out how to import wine version that aren't hosted by PoL but am sadly lacking in Google foo or brain power and am still unclear as to how to do this. Got any advice? I already requested PoL to make a wine version with the patch but have gotten no word or update from them. Anyway, I'll try again (it's been about a year since I last tried) to get this working my end and will give you whatever info I obtain if successful. =]
Well, graphics and sound alone won't do it for me -- it's like coca-cola where you get a lot of pop, zip, fiz, but no substance or bang. It's just so sad they'll put all that work and talent into inventing new ways of making amazing graphics and then attach a crap game to it. It's like painting a masterpiece only to cut it out of the frame, rub a glue stick on the back and sticking it to the trunk of a beat-up 1978 monte carlo with fading paint and a busted muffler. I mean, it's their masterpiece and they can do whatever they want with it, but damn!
Anyway, I tested it it's working great with SWBF2. The computer I tested on is old (quad-core Phenom) and with the patch disabled it takes 87.5 seconds to load vs 12.3 seconds with. I only tested an old retail DVD version and not the recently patched one from steam, but I doubt much has changed structurally in the program its self.
I don't think this patch will be in PoL or Wine anytime soon because it's a *massive* change with around 8k new lines of code (not counting 2k lines of debugging and verification code) and altering a lot of how the wineserver works (which is at the core of Wine). My best hope is to have it in wine-staging within a month or two, but it still needs a lot of cleanup. However, I presume that something like the little hack patch could end up in PoL -- I haven't used it much and I'm not sure how their "connectors" work.
As far as integrating it with PoL, I don't know how you can do that. To my knowledge, you would just have to build it. There is a guide here: https://wiki.winehq.org/Building_Wine, but it's not very easy for the uninitiated. :o Then again, after you do it the first time it will get easier the next time you need to build it for some reason. The only thing you would do differently is get the sources from my github account and checkout the "hybrid-sync" branch.
As an afterthought, I have not yet tested building only 32-bit (with a 32-bit server), but that will be fine as long as I didn't break something. :D