[Bug 8051] Sims 2 demo exits prematurely

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8051

--- Comment #107 from Robert Showalter  2011-04-25 18:50:02 CDT ---
(In reply to comment #105)
> - it is not clear if the graphic bugs are caused by the hack or is entirely
>
> unrelated. The hack is not in wine because it is an incorrect hack, not because
> Sims 2 doesn't render properly with it. Even if Sims2 worked perfectly with
> that hack it would not be committed.

Yup.  Who implied that this hack should be committed?  It was purely to
demonstrate what causes the game to fail to start.
> - DirectX 10 capable nvidia cards(geforce 8+) support 1024 vertex shader
>
> constants, so they should work around the SW vertex processing bug. This does
> not apply to AMD dx10 cards.

Last I checked, Wine hardcodes the constant instead of actually checking the
hardware.  But what I've never understood about this bug is, lots of bugs are
filed that prevent an application or game from starting, and they might be the
only affected app/game, but people pay attention and usually attempt to fix the
problem.  This bug for some reason has been demoted its entire life as
unimportant.  Is it because of the complexity of it or just because it just
doesn't seem as important as a missing reference in a DLL?  I would think any
known deficiency, whether a popular one or not, should be fixed simply to keep
Wine's performance as close to its targeted imitation as possible.  I don't
mean this as an attack or anything, and I appreciate the HUGE undertaking of
Wine as a whole, I'm just trying to understand the politics.

Can't say that Sims 2 is too old and out of date... a lot of people still play
Sims 2 over Sims 3, if for no other reason than the massive amount of custom
content available to it, with still more being made.

Although I will admit, I don't think this bug alone will solve all the
problems.  Last time I tried to implement the hack in Wine, there were reports
of some operation on stencils not being supported.  This may have to do with
the visibility issues.  The final glaring problem of Sims being spread eagle
and glowing I can't even begin to guess... although a similar thing happen when
a texture fails to load on an object, although that's a glowing blue effect.