Panzer Battles on Linux Wine

[berto]

Yes!!



No glitches so far, seems to work fine.

I can play PzB on my Linux netbook! 

[Ricky B]

Good to know, thanks for sharing that.

[blond_knight]

So Im having a couple issues running PB and PC in wine. I reached out to Berto for suggestions and he recommended I post our conversation here:

blond_knight: Berto, I saw in a thread that you use Ubuntu to run Panzer Battles games. I thought previously I had run the panzer camp games on Ubuntu years ago without issues. But now Im not seeing the red "fire lines", and the unit movement is kinda stuttering. Are you having any issues, and did you have to do anything special or just install wine, and install the game?

Thanks for your time.
Hi, BK.

I play PzB on my Linux netbook exclusively, where everything is WAD except for intermittent sound issues. Often but not always, the background sounds will play, then keep playing, without end. Other than that, everything -- including fire lines and movement -- appears to be fine. By now, I have played at least a dozen PzB scenarios in this fashion.

My Linux netbook is a

Dell Inspiron 14 3000 series
Intel® Pentium® Processor N3540 (2M Cache, up to 2.66 GHz)
4GB DDR3L(4GBx1)
Intel HD Graphics
Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS SP1

fully patched and running the latest Wine. Pretty low-end. (I also have a Linux desktop, and two Linux virtual machines (webservers) running on Oracle VirtualBox. But I don't play any games on those other three systems.)

From my experience, I think the fire lines can be spotty on over-taxed, slow-running systems. I always see the fire lines, but sometimes they extend only half-way, at other times not right away, only after a pause.

The unit movement "stuttering"? I don't observe that at all. Your seeing this could be due to any number of things: multi-tasking, background processing, insufficient memory, under-powered CPU, under-powered GPU, old drivers, obsolescent Wine -- the list goes on and on.

I doubt it slows things down much, but the latest PzB updates introduced logging, to engine.log etc. in the Logs folder. Maybe in future updates I could add a no-logging command line switch, to eliminate that overhead on the system. It might help a bit.

FWIW, I also play successfully on the netbook: CS (Campaign Series: Middle East); TOAW; JTS Civil War Battles; JTS Modern Air Power (this runs a bit slowly); Lnl Heroes of Stalingrad. There are also a number of other games of recent vintage I have tried on the netbook, but they fail for various reasons. In general, JTS games appear to run fine.

Other than making these observations, there's not much else I can say. If you wish (in fact I hope you would), you could seek out the thread here at The Blitz where I reported my success running PzB on Linux Wine. Raise your questions there, and quote this PM of mine as you wish. Maybe some other Blitzer can add his (or her) insight.

Good luck.

Berto


I should mention Im also experiencing the sound looping. Any other brave souls running PB or PC on Linux?

[blond_knight]

I wanted to post a little follow up.
Im tested with Linux Mint 18.1. Following Berto's suggestion I installed the latest version of wine (2.0) instead of the (1.6 I think) in the default Ubuntu/Linux Mint install. The experience was much better, no unit movement stuttering, and usually the red "fire lines" were drawn correctly.
As he indicated I do still experience the looping sounds, but I found if I let the background sound start before I started moving and shooting the looping effect was minimized.

Here are the instructions on how to get the latest version of Wine if your using an Ubuntu clone:
https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu

[berto]

Good for you!