Skip to main content

Adventures in Wine

A few months ago I started experimenting with Wine support in the launcher for EVE Online on Mac. We announced this on the EVE forums and players have slowly started migrating over to using the Wine wrapper. I want to use this blog to share my experience with using Wine, and describe my process of finding and fixing issues with running EVE under Wine on the Mac.

Who am I?

If you follow the EVE forums you may know me as CCP Snorlax - I have worked at CCP since 2007, doing all sorts of stuff, mostly low-level graphics and other systems. Lately I've been working on the launcher for EVE - redoing it from scratch with proper support for multiple accounts and logging in to test servers, as well as rethinking the patching mechanism used for updating the EVE client. As I mentioned above, the last few months I've been working on Wine support on Mac.

Before joining CCP I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area - I worked for Electronic Arts (Maxis) on various Sims titles, and even before that I worked for Midway Games West (used to be Atari Games). Somewhere in between I started up my own game development studio with 3 very good friends - we didn't make it, but it was quite an experience and we stayed friends.


Open source software

All of us have used open source software to varying degrees - EVE Online uses a fair number of packages and CCP strives to do that properly, according to its license as appropriate. There's more to this, though, than just honoring the license and getting free software - the point of open source software is to be useful to the world and when using it, you should think of ways to give back. I'm hoping that by documenting my experience it may be useful to the developers of Wine, and I'm certainly planning on contributing my code fixes to Wine (when they're not too EVE specific, that is).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Working with Xmpp in Python

Xmpp is an open standard for messaging and presence, used for instant messaging systems. It is also used for chat systems in several games, most notably League of Legends made by Riot Games. Xmpp is an xml based protocol. Normally you work with xml documents - with Xmpp you work with a stream of xml elements, or stanzas - see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3920 for the full definitions of these concepts. This has some implications on how best to work with the xml. To experiment with Xmpp, let's start by installing a chat server based on Xmpp and start interacting with it. For my purposes I've chosen Prosody - it's nice and simple to install, especially on macOS with Homebrew : brew tap prosody/prosody brew install prosody Start the server with prosodyctl - you may need to edit the configuration file (/usr/local/etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua on the Mac), adding entries for prosody_user and pidfile. Once the server is up and running we can start poking at it...
Post a Comment
Read more

Simple JSON parsing in Erlang

I've been playing around with Erlang . It's an interesting programming language - it forces you to think somewhat differently about how to solve problems. It's all about pattern matching and recursion, so it takes bit getting used to before you can follow the flow in an Erlang program. Back in college I did some projects with Prolog  so some of the concepts in Erlang were vaguely familiar. Supposedly, Erlang's main strength is support for concurrency. I haven't gotten that far in my experiments but wanted to start somewhere with writing actual code. OTP - the Erlang standard library doesn't have support for JSON so I wanted to see if I could parse a simple JSON representation into a dictionary object. The code is available on Github:  https://github.com/snorristurluson/erl-simple-json This is still very much a work in progress, but the  parse_simple_json/1 now handles a string like {"ExpiresOn":"2017-09-28T15:19:13", "Scopes":...
Post a Comment
Read more

SSL issues in the ingame browser

EVE Online has an ingame browser, and under Wine that browser has issues with opening some websites using https. Those sites work in the game under Windows, so I knew it wasn't a browser issue per se. It wasn't an issue with all sites using https, either, so it wasn't a matter of SSL not working at all, either. With the help of CCP's security expert, we noticed that the sites that were failing had certificate chains up to a root certificate with a very strong signature algorithm, ecdsa-with-SHA384, and chances were that Wine did not support that particular algorithm. Now what? Personally I'm no expert in security algorithms, SSL or TSL or anything like that, so I wasn't sure where to even begin looking at Wine source code to see if this algorithm was supported. After some digging around I decided to look at the output of the secur32 channel: export WINEDEBUG=+secur32 Then I started up the EVE client and opened up the browser, entering https://zkillboar...
Post a Comment
Read more