SoC: improving Star Wars Empire at War support

[Bryan DeGrendel]

I have been thinking about a few different ideas for WINE/SoC.  One of the
official possible ideas is to improve a non-working application.

My proposal would be to improve WINE's support for Star Wars: Empire at War
(which currently has a garbage rating on both WINE [
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=4616 ] and Cedega [
http://transgaming.org/gamesdb/games/view.mhtml?game_id=3795 ]).  The
proposal's goal would be to provide a Windows-native level of support for
Empire at War, or at least improve Empire at War support to a playable
level.

I would like a some feedback, if possible, before submitting.

1. Is this a weaker, or less useful to WINE, proposal because it would lead
to likely result in more bug hunting than feature writing?  This is quite a
bit more open ended than working on a specific WINE feature (such as Rich
Text Editing).

2. I do not know how much work will be needed to get the game working well.
Currently, it crashes while loading due to an audio bug, but it is possible
that I might only need to fix a few bugs to get the game to a playable state
(though I think this is unlikely, the game is seems very picky on Windows).
Would this be a problem?

Bryan DeGrendel

[Stefan Dösinger]

Hi,
> - Is this a weaker, or less useful to WINE, proposal because it would lead
>
> to likely result in more bug hunting than feature writing?  This is quite a
> bit more open ended than working on a specific WINE feature (such as Rich
> Text Editing).

Bug hunting and fixing is not a bad thing to do :-)
> - I do not know how much work will be needed to get the game working well.
>
> Currently, it crashes while loading due to an audio bug, but it is possible
> that I might only need to fix a few bugs to get the game to a playable
> state (though I think this is unlikely, the game is seems very picky on
> Windows). Would this be a problem?

This is hard to tell. There was a report around 0.9.20 that the game started, 
but rendered graphics incorrectly. No idea how, why, when, whatever...

You can extend the bug hunting by writing unit tests for the bugs fixed.