Setting up Wine for Transcendence on Linux

[Ferdinand]

Edited by Ferdinand 23-10-2019

So you have finally installed Linux and wonder if you can still play your favourite game? Yes you can, Transcendence works great on Wine, but you'll need to configure it right.

This guide is for Debian based distributions, such as Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!_OS and many others.

First, best support for graphics is in the latest development Wine versions. As I am writing, this is Wine 5.xx series but latest stable (5.0) should also work fine. Instructions on how to download and install for your system can be found here: https://www.winehq.org/download

Do not use Wine version 4.17 this has a regression that prevents the music from playing. I've filed a bug with WineHQ for this. (https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47822) Circumvention of this bug causes a crash so really do not use wine 4.17

However these regressions have been fixed in wine 4.18, Even better, in this version there is no need to tweak wine for Transcendence, everything works (almost) out of the box (could get a platinum score on WineHQ) So if you are on wine 4.18 or better, the guide below does not apply to you, install wine, In order for the music to play you also need to install the package Gtreamer1.0-plugins-good:i386 as this will not be installed by default. By default the AMD64 version is installed, but Transcendence is still 32bit.
Now you can start Transcendence . The first time You'll be asked to install Mono (not necessary for Transcendence) and WineGecko, you need that to connect to the internet for the multiverse so click Yes. Transcendence will start and you can continue playing your favourite game!

For wine versions <= 4.16 follow the guide below:

If you have used Wine before and your version was <= 1.9 please make sure to remove all Wine configuration before installing the new version.

After installation of Wine, download and unzip Transcendence to a directory on your computer

Open a terminal and from there run winecfg

Make sure default Windows version is set to Windows 7
There are problems running Transcendence with winegstreamer, we need to disable that, go to the Libraries tab, select winegstreamer in the New override for library box and click the Edit... button

select Disable and click OK

You have now disabled Winegstreamer. Click OK to save your configuration.
You can now start Transcendence, This will startup with Wine. If it is your first start, Wine will ask to load Mono. You don't need it for Transcendence.
After that it will ask to load WineGecko. You do need that if you want to connect to the multiverse!
After WineGecko has been loaded and installed, Transcendence will start and you can enjoy your favourite game on Linux!

[george moromisato]

This is super awesome! Thank you!

[AssumedPseudonym]

 I’m moving this to Tech Support.

[Ferdinand]

Edited the first post.

Wine 4.17 changed the handling of audio, at least for popular music formats like mp3. Because of this, the music in Transcendence no longer worked. Turns out that now Winegstreamer is needed to play, and this caused Transcendence to crash in wine when changing music, or exiting the game while music was playing.

I filed a regression bug for this, because before wine 4.17 Transcendence was fully functional. This got picked up quickly and within one day was solved!

This means that for the upcoming Wine 4.18 Transcendence should work out of the box and the guide as posted above is no longer needed for Wine version 4.18 or up. I'll change whatever is appropriate for those versions while keeping the old version as well, because most distributions are still on the stable Wine 4.0

[Ferdinand]

Edited first post again, update for Wine version >= 4.18

[Ferdinand]

Edited yet again, added 32bit Gstreamer installation that is needed to play music on 64bit systems with wine >=4.18

[SpongeJr]

Thanks for this info, was just what I needed, and I am currently running Transcendence under WINE on my Ubuntu box with no issues so far!

[relanat]

Using Wine in Ubuntu 19.xx. All going well so far.

Could I get some instructions on how to run a debug game, please. Selecting properties doesn't give the option to change the 'target' with " /debug" code.

Also I got the easy decompile code for Linux from this topic: https://forums.kronosaur.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7899 (thanks, AP) but it doesn't work. "File type not supported by Archive manager" error. I assume it needs a change to the 'Open with' property but I don't know which one. TIA.

[AssumedPseudonym]

 Yeah, that’s actually a change with Wine some versions back. I just updated the relevant posts, but basically, whatever you were doing to decompile, just prepend “wine” to the front of the command for running TransData.

 Also to run a debug game:

Code: Select all

wine ~/TranscendenceNext/Transcendence.exe /debug

 Alternately, in Settings.xml:

Code: Select all

<Option name="debugMode"	value="true"/>