I just found out that sometime in the last month or so while doing regular updates Wine got bumped to 8.12... (likely from 8.0) and my games have gone haywire: Neverwinter Nights and Diablo2 would kind of start but then halt. Switching to desktop and back unblocks games for the next few seconds and then things repeat.
I've downgraded wine to 7.12 and things are working back.
Question: should I have done some migration step for 8.12 to work properly or is it even a known issue?
I am using PlayOnLinux for Diablo2 with System Wine and Vanilla System wine for NWN.
I don't know about this specific Fedora situation, but you should really be using something like Lutris or Bottles to create individual prefixes for each game and use downloadable Wine versions to launch the games instead of your system Wine. That will avoid situations like this in the future.
Agreed. I use Lutris on 37, and play a bunch of stuff with no issues. Took me too long to figure out how to use the Lutris posts, but it's been smooth sailing ever since.
You don't need to install it with Lutris per se - as long as the files are already "installed" somewhere on your drive you can set it up in Lutris as a locally-installed game and just use Lutris as a Wine prefix manager. This is largely how I use Lutris - I don't tend to use their installer scripts because I tend to already know how I want the install to go.
I understand that the 8.12 version of Wine is buggy, but by using a manager like Lutris or Bottles you're able to use any Wine version you want in order to run the game, and you could just pick a different Wine version from the list without messing with your system Wine installation. If you don't have time to mess with learning Lutris or Bottles right now that's fair, but they're generally a much better solution for this sort of problem, for now and for the future.
PlayOnLinux is not maintained consistently and hasn’t been for a couple of years. I have Diablo 2 on Lutris. It works great. However, I’m on Fedora 38, so there’s that. I don’t think that makes much of a difference, though. Your problem is probably related to PlayOnLinux being behind the times.
it's not POL. It's System Wine. Lutris has the same problem with system Wine (and some of it's own Wine versions). All I'm trying to do is figure out the source and report upstream