Member Avatar for sloan31

I've installed and am able to run the game: "Act of War: Direct Action" using wine. It seems to work perfectly with only one problem, the ambient sounds are really loud and the voice tracks are so low you can't even here talking on some parts.

On the other hand, sound works perfect while running the game in vmware but I have graphics problems there, like mouse cursor being glitchy.

Basically, I'm just wondering is there anything I can tweak on my system to get the sound to work correctly while using wine. If anyone could just point me in the right direction I would greatly appreciate it.

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Dani AI

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Good catch by — when Windows games run under Wine, audio-channel routing can easily produce very loud ambient effects while dialog or center-channel audio is nearly inaudible. The root cause is almost always a mismatch between how the game sends channels (center/surround/voice) and how the Linux sound stack (ALSA/PulseAudio) or Wine's DirectSound translation downmixes those channels.

Useful diagnostic steps that apply to this situation:

  • Check per-channel mixer levels with ALSA:

    alsamixer

    Press F6 to pick the card, then look for channels like Center, LFE, Surround and make sure none are muted or at very low level.

  • Inspect the live stream with PulseAudio (if present):

    pavucontrol

    Watch the Playback tab while the game is running to see which sink the Wine stream uses and whether any channel or per-application volume is low or routed incorrectly.

  • Verify channel mapping with speaker-test:

    speaker-test -c 6 -t wav

    This helps confirm how front/center/surround channels are presented by the system.

If diagnostics show the center (voice) channel is quiet or not being downmixed, next steps include switching Wine's audio backend in winecfg (ALSA vs PulseAudio/OSS), ensuring required 32-bit audio libraries exist on 64-bit systems, or adding an ALSA/PulseAudio configuration that forces a proper downmix. Keeping Wine updated and checking the WineHQ AppDB entry for the specific title often yields game-specific audio tips. Caution: mixer and device changes affect all audio applications, so note previous settings before changing them.

Member Avatar for sloan31

Ok, the solution to my problem was that I had to change the sound option in game from stereo to 3D.

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