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RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 is a third-person building game where one either plays in sandbox mode, creating enormous rollercoasters, or in career mode, where one must gain enough profit through ride ticket sales to complete the requirements for each level - Apprentice, Entrepreneur, and Tycoon. There are 18 or 19 parks in career mode, (some are locked until previous ones are completed) each with their own financial difficulties. There are also quite a few built-in cheats which can do almost everything from (almost) unlimited speed to making guests drift long distances through the air when struck by a rollercoaster car.

 

In order for RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 to run properly for me, I needed the proprietary AMD driver for the GPU. RCT3 did not run on Linux Mint (on the same computer) and complained about graphics drivers which did not meet the minimum standards. I do not know how RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 will run on computers with hardware other than AMD/ATI.

 

Although my script warns the user about this false-positive, it is worthwhile to mention that POL may complain that the RCT3 disk is mounted on a no-exec filesystem. However, this did not actually cause any problems in my test. I was also forced to use wget to download Mono 2.10.9, due to an error with POL_Call and POL_Download. Possibly, this is an error with DNS resolution, but in that case it must be purely within POL, since wget worked perfectly.

 

Here is my script:

 

 

Edited by MTres19

Here are some screenshots of the game, which by default is in 1024x768 resolution.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_iE50uqUIIbMlJnemhnVmU4WVU&authuser=0

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_iE50uqUIIbWjRraXhocUdSR0U&authuser=0

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_iE50uqUIIbcVJOenN1S0ZUcWM&authuser=0

Edited by MTres19

My apologies about the screenshots.  I couldn't get them to work properly when I got the full links from drive, and PlayOnLinux didn't accept them when I copied and pasted them directly into the post.
 

Edited by MTres19

Hi MTres19,

Here's my script review:

Script is missing standard header here (http://wiki.playonlinux.com/index.php/Scripting_-_Chapter_9:_Standardization)

Do those redundant comments help you read the script? I found them very distracting, and the first thing I had to do when reviewing the script was to remove them all...

All user-oriented messages must have localization support: http://wiki.playonlinux.com/index.php/Scripting_-_Chapter_10:_Script_Translation. However I'm not sure the script is the right place for such messages, because they'll have to be translated into nearly 50 languages...
Basically your amount of custom messages are a problem.

If it works with Wine 1.6.2, use that; Otherwise maintaining your script means testing it with 3 Wine versions, not to mention the extra script complexity. I hope that people that want to try another Wine version know how to do that in PlayOnLinux GUI.

POL_Wine_PrefixCreate will download Wine as necessary, did you check that all this logic has any use?

Components will display their own messages, so I think this statement is useless, the messsage will just show up for a second or two...

Does it really need all those components? Some like d3dx9 or directx9 should be subsets of dxfullsetup, I'm intrigued. Less is better, try to trim down the list to the minimum

I don't remember seeing any bug report, or comments on the POL_Install_mono210 script. This is a good enough reason to reject this script as it, each script should try to "fix" problems with their own workarounds, this is seriously wrong

Lot more complexity, to enable virtual desktop or not. Mmhh...
I understand what you're trying to do, but I'm not sure it's the right solution, because most (fullscreen) games will suffer from the same issues, so maybe it should be handled elsewhere. And again, that's probably something that users that suffer from Gnome 3 know how to enable (Right click on shortcut > Configure Wine > Display tab > Emulate desktop)

Use POL_SetupWindow_cdrom and POL_SetupWindow_check_cdrom ( http://wiki.playonlinux.com/index.php/Scripting_-_Chapter_7:_Installation_Media)

Remove "start /unix" if possible. (http://wiki.playonlinux.com/index.php/Scripting_-_Chapter_11:_List_of_Functions#POL_Wine_.284.0.2B.29)

The point of POL_Wine_WaitExit is to display a standard waiting message, remove the redundant custom one before that'll display for a split second.

Maybe that should be converted to a function script, in any case it's way too verbose. One should work on automating those installations, set parameters in registry or configuration files instead of giving user instructions, etc.

Same thing

Maybe you should warn about Gallium/Mesa at the beginning of the installation instead of the end?
Also, while not documented, I wonder if POL_SetupWindow_RequiredCard/POL_SetupWindow_AdvisedCard/POL_SetupWindow_TestedCard could be used instead. Documentation really needs updating...

Regards,

Pierre.

Thank you for your script review. I've cleaned up the script a lot and I was able to switch back to POL_Call POL_Install_mono210, although I do not know why the function started working again. The only suggestion left that I could not resolve is how I would go about automating the installation of VLC and Media Player Codec Pack. Looking at other scripts which were more automatic, I noticed the /quiet argument in the POL_Wine line, but when I tried this with POL_Wine vlc-2.2.0-win32.exe, it did not change the VLC installer wizard at all. Looking at the documentation on the wiki, the POL_Wine command was shown with the possibility of arguments after the .exe file, but it did not explain what these arguments would be. So, other than automating the installer wizards, I've managed to resolve all the issues you listed. Here's the new script:

 

Also, it seems that something in the new script allows for the animated developer logos to play as the game is loading. I'm not exactly sure what particular change caused this though.

    Hi,

Thank you for your script review. I've cleaned up the script a lot

Yes, it'll be much easier to maintain this way :)

The only suggestion left that I could not resolve is how I would go about automating the installation of VLC and Media Player Codec Pack. [...] Looking at the documentation on the wiki, the POL_Wine command was shown with the possibility of arguments after the .exe file, but it did not explain what these arguments would be.

Those arguments are for the .exe to interpret, so there's no general rule. Sometimes the /? or /h argument can be used to display all the arguments that can be used, but again it's not a hard rule. Maybe those installers cannot even be fully automated.

So, other than automating the installer wizards, I've managed to resolve all the issues you listed. Here's the new script:

Ok, few things left and as far as I'm concerned the script will be publishable in the scripts repository:

I missed that one the first time around, but you cannot use the $WINEPREFIX variable name, it's a name used internally by Wine; The standard name for this in PoL scripts is just $PREFIX, hence my confusion.

Also, it's recommended to use longer virtual drive names, to lessen the risk of collisions with other scripts. As far as I could tell RCT only stands for Roller Coaster Tycoon today, but who knows tomorrow...

You forgot to add the $(eval_gettext ...) to support localization of all user oriented messages. Even if it means some work for translators, it's mandatory.

And then a lesser one:

$REPERTOIRE is deprecated (a french legacy ;) ) in PlayOnLinux 4, you can use $POL_USER_ROOT instead.

That's it!

Pierre

Thank you, once again. I couldn't get any response to /h and /? from the installers, but I fixed all the other issues and resubmitted it as a update to my original post on the Supported Software page, with the icons for the listing on the website and the installed program.