Episode One is the first in a series of games that reveal the aftermath of Half-Life 2 and launch a journey beyond City 17.
Follow HL2 installation howto to install and configure HL2 Episode 1
Old test results
The test results you have selected are very old and may not represent the current state of Wine.
Selected Test Results (selected in 'Test Results' table below)
What works
Everything. No wine moderations. Installed via steam
What does not
n/a
What was not tested
n/a
Additional Comments
my PC AMD64 x2 4200, 2GB ram, gForce 9600GT 512MB. Sometimes you can see that game slows down for asecond if new texture is loaded, but not affecting gameplay in anyway. Plays flawlessly IMHO.
Half-Life 2: Episode One - Reactor room slowdown bug workaround
In case the game experience a huge slowdown to around 0.5 FPS, most probably you had hit so-called "some other (close) place displayed on the screen" bug. First time you may hit it is in the reactor room just before raiding down on a lift to the core chamber. There would a big screen displaying various parts of the reactor core room. This screen is the bug-trigger.
It was reported that the bug occurs only in case the "Offscreen Render Mode" is set to "backbuffer". To workaround the bug simply set ORM to "fbo" (or "pbuffer", if your GPU supports it) and the FPS will raise back to a playable values.
Keep in mind that setting ORM to anything other than "backbuffer" will break the game shaders dealing with refraction (water and alike) when the AA is on. Another unfortunate effect of setting ORM to "fbo" is that the performance level when using dxlevel 90/95 in Non-HDR mode will be very low, especially in areas where there are a lot of refracting surfaces. For now it seems that the best choice would be to turn off AA, set ORM to "fbo" and switch the game to the dxlevel 81 before entering the bug-triggering area. After successfully passing it redone the changes back to gain more FPS or better quality graphics.
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. WineHQ is not responsible for what they say.
Bug assignment
by quaker on Friday May 20th 2011, 9:22
Half Life 2 FakeFactory Cinematic Mod 10.10
by Milena on Thursday January 7th 2010, 12:18
Does anybody play it ? The new CM10.10 works only with the 64bit version of HL2 but i can play it in normal 32bit wine. Would a 64bit wine build increase Performance ? The problem is CM10.10 need 4+ GB, I have 8GB but the 32bit wine is limited there :(
HL2 performance:
Game slowdowns at 1fps while G-man is on screen. Also when Freeman is transportated the first time to the office of the Administrator. Flashlight illuminate the objets and creatures but not the environment (walls). Yellow fonts too big for the display. Playable.
HL2 ep1 performance:
The same with HL2. Also there are some crescients squaregrids over the fires (like an alpha channel texture map without the texture). Platforms are translucents looked from downside (ie, soldiers passing through a bridge look like walking through the air). Hardly playable.
Keeps resetting my X server
by Steve on Tuesday June 23rd 2009, 16:09
For no apparent reason this game keeps resetting my X server. It did so when I hit the Citadel after being thrown by Dog, once it was auto-saving it restarted. It then restarted once I tried to change resolutions... I'm not sure what's going on.
I haven't tried the other games in the series with Jaunty (running Jaunty-64 on an AMD 3700, Nvidia 7200GS using the latest drivers).
Regression
by JFMR on Sunday November 2nd 2008, 4:08
I just verified there is a regression somewhere between wine version 1.10 and 1.16. In Ubuntu 8.10 (Ibex) running under 1.16 and 1.17 results in a crash (same that was reported by Night Nord on June 23rd, 2008:)
""'Urban flight' crash" (at first seconds of second location in this level - after combine barricade) is back. No workaround was found. Same crash, on same place with the same errors (many of "*** ERROR *** Excessive sizelevel (...) for element" and than 'page fault' glibc error). "
Console output below (from version 1.16 & 1.17):
*** ERROR *** Excessive sizelevel (41) for element
*** ERROR *** Excessive sizelevel (42) for element
*** ERROR *** Excessive sizelevel (43) for element
*** ERROR *** Excessive sizelevel (44) for element
*** ERROR *** Excessive sizelevel (45) for element
*** ERROR *** Excessive sizelevel (46) for element
*** ERROR *** Excessive sizelevel (47) for element
Win32 MiniDump Helper version 1.0.0.0 (c) Copyright 2000-2003 Valve Corporation All rights reserved.
Again, reverting to 1.10 fixes this issue, I'll test 1.11 - 1.15 to see where it first crops up.
When running any Source based game such as HL2 or TF2, I now have to force it into -dxlevel 81 otherwise it will not load (I.e. after the valve-in-the-eye-guy). Strangely enough, it was working in 0.9.6.1 but now I've updated to rc1 and DX9 wont work. It does work flawlessly otherwise, which is why I haven't filed a bug report. I'm just trying to justify spending £45 on a DX10 enabled graphics card which, at present, is not being used to its full potential.
Reactor room
by Brian Tubb on Sunday March 23rd 2008, 2:15
Reactor room is still messed up and unplayable in both Dx9 8.1 with .9.58, but there is some good news. I seem to be getting much better speeds as well as a much smoother experience in DirectX 8.1. My card is too slow to handle the overhead that Dx9 brings, but there is also some improvement there.
What I find interesting is that the voices get very patchy and annoying in Dx9. The speed may be a factor (I only get 10-30 fps), but I don't think that is the problem. The voices seem to "run up" on each other, compounding an entire sentence into a second. If anyone else can confirm this it would be appreciated.
Explosion Crashes HL2
by ryanbarnes on Sunday December 23rd 2007, 23:25
After about 5 hours of searching and fussing with settings I've figured out what causes HL2 to crash.
When joining a HL2:DM server, everything goes well as long as nobody blows up a barrel. I've isolated it down to just this one particular event after adjusting so many settings it made my head spin.
At first, I thought it was a sound stutter issue, but I switched to ALSA (vice OSS) and had the same issue. I would join a server and it would start stutter crashing.
I can load the HL2:DM just fine, but can not play. I adjusted the video settings to the lowest possible it would let me. Same issue.
I then changed the directX version to force it to use version 7, and much to my surprise it works just fine. Did not crash... at first. But then I realized I was playing on a map that had no barrels. Grenades work fine, combine balls work fine. Rockets work fine.
Next map loads up, and I watch somebody shoot a barrel and voila! Stutter crash!
So I reset all my settings in game back to what they were and left wine alone.
I tried the whole "set wine to Win98" trick, but steam says "This version is no longer supported" and never loads HL2.
So now that I know what is causing the issue, I really hope somebody has some answers because I'm so lost here.
Oh, here's my stats btw:
Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10
Intel
nVidia Corporation GeForce Go 7900 GS
I still seem to be getting the unplayable slowdown (about 0.5 FPS or so) in the reactor room, making that section totally unplayable.
This persists with -dxlevel 80, 81 and 90, and regardless of the Windows compatibility mode chosen.
Way to get it started (ver 0.9.49)
by Brent Bowman on Friday November 9th 2007, 22:17
I had trouble even starting it. normally I would start Steam as Windows XP (since it doesn't support 98) but HL2 would not run under wine unless it was Win98. So in winecfg, I designated hl2.exe as a win98 executable. After starting Steam normally (as Win XP), I go into the steamapps directory (in the Steam directory) to the hl2.exe file in the episode 1 directory and run:
Loading
by Michael on Tuesday November 6th 2007, 22:22
Hey guys. I installed Steam fine and HL2-Ep 1 fine but when I try to play it it loads all the way to the last notch and then stops. I don't know what is up with this.
RE: Loading by Steve on
Friday November 9th 2007, 11:33
Installer Demands DirectX 9.0c
by Pink Floyd on Thursday October 18th 2007, 8:37
Having heaps of trouble installing Half Life 2 Episode One.
Every time I try to install the install enphaticaly insists that I don't have DirectX 9.0c.
Consistent Crash
by Flounder on Thursday September 20th 2007, 23:39
Game crashes every time time during certain events. For example: In chapter one, soon after you crash into the citadel in the car and as you begin walking down the short corridor there's an explosion and the game grinds down to 1 FPS and crashes soon after with:
Unhandled page fault on read access to 0x00000024 at address 0xd45b423 (thread 005f), starting debugger...
Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0x00000024 in 32-bit code (0x0d45b423)
This happens without fail with the same exact error whenever theres an explosion. Otherwise the game works flawlessly with great frame rates, settings maxed out. On system:
Now I've spent a good part of a day researching and troubleshooting this. Trying just about everything:
Turning all graphics settings down.
Setting all suggested winecfg option combinations.
Re-writing my xorg.conf with different Nvidia driver options.
(Not running it on compiz even though it works flawleslly on it otherwise)
Lot's more...
It's seems to me that it's a hardware and/or software issue on valve's and/or nvidia's side, exasperated by emulation. Or anything for that matter, I don't know. I'm at my wits end with this. Unless I can engage in some more esoteric debugging methods to pin this problem down. I'm open to suggestions.
Slow down in reactor room
by David Conde on Sunday August 5th 2007, 15:10
I also have the problem of slowdown in the reactor room. The same stuttering also happens when the valve logo appears on game startup so they're likely to be related. Are other people seeing this or does someone have a fix? The game plays fine apart from this and not being able to load the episode 2 preview after the credits on completing episode 1.
Episode One plays well with 0.9.32
by Ed Welbon on Monday March 12th 2007, 0:42
Fedora core 6 with kernel 2.6.19-1.2911.6.5.fc6. It played all the way through at 1792x1344 resolution with frame rates consistently over 60. No save game crashes or severe stuttering issues, it just worked. Nice to not have to futz with the system whilst playing.
