Most people know what Wine is, so I won’t give it much introduction. It’s simply a compatibility layer written for Linux, to make Windows applications able to run on a platform without Windows. For being such a difficult task, Wine is now starting to mature. Lately, I have tried to play some popular games in Wine to see how they perform. I’m gonna be brief, but the games I’ve written as working has been tested in-game for a couple of houres.

My Setup

• AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 4000+
• 2GB RAM
• nVidia GeForce 7900 GT (driver 100.14.03)
• Debian testing (Lenny)
• Wine 0.9.44

The games I have tried to make work are the following

• Half-Life 2
• Counter-Strike: Source
• World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (2.2.3)
• Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (1.21)

Steam, Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source

The prerequisites before installing Half-Life 2, is to install Steam. And to install Steam, one needs the gecko-plugin (for web-browsing), and some fonts. In addition to the msttcorefonts-package, you should get tahoma.ttf and put it in ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts. This makes additional text readable both in and outside the game later on. You download the steam-installer msi-package from steampowered.com. You start the installer by running: wine msiexec /i <themsifile>. When Steam is installed, and you have the needed fonts, you should be able to log on to Steam and install Half-Life as you usually do. I don’t think it’s necessary to define anything more, as it works as you would expect it to work in Windows. This is what does NOT work:

• There’s an expected performance decrease.
• When you play, you might experience that the sound starts to stagger for some seconds, and the game exits. When this happens, you will have trouble to restart the game. Logging off and on X solves the problem.
• The game sometimes fails to start, “because an application is locking the registry”, restarting X solves the problem.
• Steam is not a stable application in Wine. Browsing the shops and such is not recommended as Steam may hang unexpectedly at any time.
• The community-stuff recently added to Steam does not work well, you’re not able to search for and add friends.

For the casual player, this works, but it’s not awesome. There’s still things you wish were fixed, but some people are willing to live with these flaws. Let’s hope that Valve will create a Linux-port of these games soon!

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (2.2.3)

The prerequisites before installing this game is pretty much not more than having the gecko-plugin installed, and the only real effect it has is that you can read the patch notes when the patching is done. As far as I can tell - the game works quite well. What does not work well is the following:

• When you try to exit the game, it hangs, and you have to kill the processes yourself (with the -9 flag)
  • As a result of this, you have to accept the patch notes every time you start the game. This can be worked around by editing the ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WTF/config.wtf, and add the lines
    • SET readTOS “1″
    • SET readEULA “1″
• There’s a noticable performance decrease compared to running the game natively. This is expected. You can cope with a lot of it by doing some reading on this site: http://wowwiki.com/Linux/Wine
• There’s an error message in the blizzard launcher, making it seem like there’s an error.
• Occasionally in-game, you may experience a hang-situation which makes audio stagger and the PC seems unresponsive for up to 5 seconds. This can be provoced by accessing things outside of the game (other applications and the desktop).

World of Warcraft is totally playable in Wine, and if you’re a casual player - the only reason to not stop running the Windows-version should be the performance decrease, and that your hardware can’t handle it well.

Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne

This game works quite well. It installs flawlessly, and it plays quite well. What does not work well is the following:

• Probably a performance decrease, but I can’t notice, the game isn’t brand new, and my hardware handles it quite well.
• Poking around at desktop-items makes everything slow and unresponsive. Multitasking while playing this game is not a good idea - pay attention to the game and you’ll be fine.
• The installer blocks the audio device, so launching the game from the installer makes the game run without sound - exiting the installer and launching the game manually (from the desktop shortcut if you have one) is one way to work around this.

Conclusion

Linux is becoming more gamer-friendly as the market share goes up. More companies are looking at making Linux-ports of their games, and Wine is becoming a more mature product as development goes by. Even though Wine is a product which makes some Windows-titles playable in Linux, we seriously want real Linux-ports of these games most. If EA would port The Sims-series to Linux, it would probably make noticable changes to the market share - including my girlfriend

Here’s some useless screenshots

posted by Trygve at 5:12 am & filed under Games, Linux |