Call for testing: TrackMania Nations Forever

Wimpress · June 16, 2018, 9:44am

Inspired by some of our community contributors who’ve been snapping Windows applications we decided to have a go at creating snaps of Windows games as a bank holiday weekend project.

After several evenings of “extensive QA” we’d like to invite you to test the snap of the free to play Track Mania Nations Forever, the most popular online PC racing game E-V-E-R!

snap install tmnationsforever
snap connect tmnationsforever:joystick

The single snap is multi-architecture (i386 and amd64) and downloads/installs the game into a WINE environment on the first run. It’s been tested on nvidia GPUs (with proprietary drivers) and Intel IGPs but we’d be interested in wider testing on IGPs and GPUs.

There’s one more optimisation @popey and I would like to add to the launcher but for the purposes of wider testing, it’s good to go. Our hope is this will become the basis for a template to create snaps of any Windows application/game supported by WINE

The snapcraft.yaml and sommelier launcher are available on GitHub:

https://github.com/snapcrafters/tmnationsforever

Ads20000 · June 1, 2018, 1:17am

Can you imagine massive games like League of Legends being available for install straight from GNOME Software? I can… it’ll be really impressive if y’all can pull it off!

ogra · June 1, 2018, 9:36am

The first start takes quite some time to actually show a progress bar (over 1min here), i guess a zenity popup “please wait…” message before it does any operations might be helpful here.

mcphail · June 1, 2018, 9:48am

I look forward to stealing sommelier for my own evil porpoises

Wimpress · June 1, 2018, 9:50am

And that is the remaining optimisation we’d like to add

Wimpress · June 1, 2018, 9:51am

I stick what we have in GitHub later.

Wimpress · June 1, 2018, 10:38am

@mcphail Here you - https://github.com/snapcrafters/tmnationsforever

@ogra - This is what needs optimising - pull requests welcome

junglerobba · June 5, 2018, 10:10pm

Great idea to make wine usage more accessible, hoping this can be applied to more games down the line.

However, after the installation finishes all I get is a popup saying ‘Could not find DirectX9’.

Launching from the terminal outputs this:

libGL error: No matching fbConfigs or visuals found
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
0009:err:wgl:X11DRV_WineGL_InitOpenglInfo  couldn't initialize OpenGL, expect problems
0009:fixme:win:EnumDisplayDevicesW ((null),0,0x33ec24,0x00000000), stub!

I have an Nvidia GTX 980 Ti on driver version 396.24.02, glxinfo outputs the usual info and native games work fine.

Alculete · June 6, 2018, 8:30am

I’ve written an article about it on linuxandubuntu

YamiYukiSenpai · June 12, 2018, 9:31pm

I got an error that says DirectX9 couldn’t be found

Wimpress · June 16, 2018, 9:45am

@YamiYukiSenpai What GPU and drivers are you using?

Wimpress · June 16, 2018, 9:46am

@junglerobba As we discussed last night we identified that the nvidia 396 drivers are sadly not working with any snap right now

The workaround is to use the 390 drivers from the 18.04 archive.

Wimpress · June 16, 2018, 9:47am

We released tmnationsforever to the stable channel after some “extensive QA” on a live stream last night

mcphail · June 16, 2018, 10:52am

There may be a serious issue with the snap - https://github.com/snapcrafters/tmnationsforever/issues/5 .

lucyllewy · June 17, 2018, 4:39pm

I agree with @mcphail! I’m a great driver, as evidenced by my “learner” driving license, and yet somehow I am terrible at this game! There is a serious bug in my opinion that is preventing me from entering the leader board…

YamiYukiSenpai · June 17, 2018, 9:57pm

GeForce GT 820M

lspci | grep -i 'nvidia'
03:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF117M [GeForce 610M/710M/810M/820M / GT 620M/625M/630M/720M] (rev ff)

!
!

Wimpress · June 17, 2018, 10:05pm

@YamiYukiSenpai Are you using the proprietary nvidia driver? If so, what version? Also what distro?

pizzadude · June 17, 2018, 10:10pm

Hi.

When installing Trackmania Nations normally in wine, there would be a launcher before the game starts that you could configure graphics options, which is useful for really old computers.

However, this snap skips the launcher and launches directly into the game.

Can you modify the snap so it doesn’t skip the launcher?

Thanks for this snap btw!

Wimpress · June 17, 2018, 10:15pm

@pizzadude You can execute tmnationsforever.launcher to access what you describe

pizzadude · June 17, 2018, 10:17pm

@Wimpress thanks, here’s some more characters so i’m allowed to post because 20 characters or more is required to post