https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48272
Bug ID: 48272 Summary: Crackling and slower audio on Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed 1 & Far Cry 3 games Product: Wine Version: 4.21 Hardware: x86-64 OS: FreeBSD Status: UNCONFIRMED Severity: enhancement Priority: P2 Component: -unknown Assignee: wine-bugs@winehq.org Reporter: adrien_fernandes2@hotmail.com
Created attachment 65940 --> https://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=65940 Output of Wine 4.21 running Assassin's Creed
So here it is, it might be a bit long and I'll try to be as precise as I can to explain the problem.
First, list of tested games :
Far Cry 2 : No audio problem ✔ Crysis : No audio problem ✔ XIII : No audio problem ✔ Far Cry 3 : Crackling audio ✖ Assassin's Creed : Crackling audio ✖
I ran all the games set on DirectX 9 and I built Wine to use Open Sound System for audio (if this is important). Assassin's Creed 1's prefix is set to WinXP and Far Cry 3's one is set to Win7 (because of Uplay).
The problem is that the audio on Far Cry 3 and Assassin's Creed is weirdly crackling and slower than it should be but, not EVERY sounds in the game are making the audio crackles. On Assassin's Creed, it's when a lot of people are around me and everytime I use the eagle vision. In the menu or when outside the Animus (in the present time of the game where there are only three people and a tiny room), the audio works well. Also, an important point is that neither Assassin's Creed nor Far Cry 3 are slowed down to fit the slowed down audio issue. They both work very well when it happens which is causing a strange issue I'll describe AND SHOW below.
I'm using a GTX 765m to play which is not bad for old games like these.
"Your computer certainly isn't powerful enough to run the game !" you say... Well, you are not totally wrong, I could have better hardware but, in the past, when I was playing these games on Windows then, later, on GNU/Linux, I never met this problem. The two differences are that I'm playing, for the first time, Assassin's Creed _ON_FREEBSD_ and we are now almost in 2020. My last Assassin's Creed session was on GNU/Linux in 2016. Wine changed so much in almost 4 years !
But let me remind you that only two of the five games mentioned above are having issue. all my native FreeBSD games (OpenMorrowind, Xonotic, Minetest, Tales of Maj'Eyal, Quake II from Yamagi's source code etc...), videos read with mpv, music listened with moc and even Firefox are all working well without crackling or slowed down audio. And three tested games on Wine with OSS are working perfecly. I could have tested more games but I think three is good enough.
So here is the "show" I mentioned in the beginning. I took a video of Assassin's Creed's problem. I recorded it with my phone so... sorry for the poor quality but you can see the problem : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5rhg-PwFeU
In this video, you can see two people speaking together. In the normal game, one speak and, when finished, the other answer. They _NEVER_ speak above the other. In my Assassin's Creed, the game is running well but the audio is slowed down which creates a desyncing between the slowed down voice played and the mouth of the character. And, because the game is running well beside this issue, one didn't finish his sentence and the other will start his speech over the first one (it shouldn't happen).
I found a longplay video of the game which is certainly played on Windows. I copied the video link to start at the exact same moment as the one I recorded from my computer and you can see how the game should normally behave : https://youtu.be/1gGz6vf35T0?t=2991
About the crackling audio issue, it can be heard by the end of my video when I use the eagle vision.
For Far Cry 3, don't even need to run the game to hear crackling and slowed down audio. I also took a video of the problem, it speaks for itself : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkOXvy_42jc
The original theme can be listened here : https://youtu.be/rfAeL4JfHj8?t=10 I copied the video to start at the same time of my video of Far Cry 3, in the menu. What you can notice is that the normal music is faster than in my video, it's the same problem than with Assassin's Creed 1.
I fetched the output of Wine when running Assassin's Creed 1. It repeatedly says two things so I cut it into "head -n 50" and "tail -n 50". I watched the long output and nothing is different between the first 50 and last 50 lines.
I hope I was clear enough, English isn't my native language so I apologize if I didn't use it correctly.