Oblivion on Wine

[maYuYang]

Hi there^^,

 

I really hate windows!!(great opener, right?) And thanks to the fact that I (will) spend this entire week with a reinstallation and configuring of my winxp home AGAIN and encountering the 1st issues AGAIN really makes me want to take my computer and throw it out of the window(ah damn, that word again!). Starting a desktop everytime only to have another Bill-Gates-Memorial-Moment... Not sure how I should finish this sentence since I'm a System Administrator and actually like my work...

 

Ok, to the point we go: I'm thinking to change my home Desktop's OS to unbuntu(Linux Gnome) and dump windows, BUT I need to know how my favourite game Oblivion(with mods) is running on Wine and how the installation process looks like(since unbuntu supports other disk formats). I already read some how-to articles but would appreciate opinions of other gamers who have some experience with it already(I guess that mods would also work if the game runs smoothly, but additional info would be great^^).

 

Thanks in advance^^

[Jezza0]

Hey - you have my sympathies with XP! ;-)

 

I use Ubuntu, but my attempts to make it run games have been pretty poor. The only games that run anywhere near acceptably for me have been OpenGL-based games such as Warcraft III and Half Life (1). When I've tried DirectX based games, no game I have tried has worked acceptably.

 

For me, the solution is dual boot: Linux for serious work, WinXP for games. That way, you can keep the XP install streamlined, disabling anything you don't need - maybe even leaving off drivers for hardware not required for gaming.

 

I've not tried Oblivion in wine, and I confess that my experience are about a year old (pre wine 1.0), so perhaps things have improved. But, with a game like Oblivion, which has a tendancy to crash (esp. when you're modding), I think it's best to stick with XP.

 

That's my 2 cents worth.

 

-- Joe

[Phrostie]

i've been running Oblivion on Ubuntu/Wine for a few weeks now.

there is a performance hit compared to XP but seems to run close to par with Vista.

i still have Vista on my other partition that i use as a baseline.

 

installing, i had to go into the wine setup gui and define my CDrom drive. when installing games like halo or oblivion it would forget where the drive was d:, e:,,, part way thru the install and tell me it couldn't find a file that i could see was there.

defining it ahead of time stopped that.

i think it was on the first start up(possibly end of the install, but i can't remember) it didn't like one of the wine dll.so's.

i copied the dll of the same name over from my vista partition and it ran fine.

 

i would recomend getting the latest Wine from http://wine.budgetdedicated.com

currently downloading wine 1.1.14, have been running 1.1.13.

 

if you're a debian or ubuntu user they provide a sample line for your apt-get/sources.list.

always the best way to go.

 

the latest oblivion patch installed with out a hitch, but i'm having trouble getting the OBSE to run.

anyone have any ideas?

 

oh yeah, turn off precipitation in the ini file. it crashes me every time.

 

Edited:

 

i forgot to mention, Wine may not see all your video memory by default.

you need to check and verify this.

use, "wine regedit" to check this.

first click thru: HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Wine > Direct3D

 

the below values should be defined. the memory size should be what ever your computer has. if not then copy and paste the below text block into a asci text file and save it as <something>.reg. i used Video.reg, but i don't think it matters that much. anyway, then import it into regedit. click thru again to verify it's there and you should be good.

 

as with anything else, back up reg files before tinkering.

 

 

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D]

"OffscreenRenderingMode"="fbo"

"UseGLSL"="enabled"

"VideoMemorySize"="256"

 

all this comes from the wine appdb