Half-Life 2: Episode Two is the second installment in Valve Corporation's series of episodes for the computer game Half-Life 2. It introduce new kind of gameplay, new backgrounds and improve the Source engine from previous versions.
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
All major features.
What does not
1) Video settings saving
2) Somethings very strange happens with sound volume - voices has much lesser volume then they must be (game settings are correct), also volume varies (greatly) from direction to speaker abnormaly (for example - direct and from behind directions sounds quite normal, while sides just not understandable (with the same range to sound source)), other strange effects (like sometimes fire-effects sounds like from great distance (while actually it is near)). It happens quite all the game (I noticed this first in caves, while ant-lions attacks - sometimes you just can't hear what your allies speaks). Both ALSA and OSS (emulation through ALSA) has this bug.
3) Game won't start without virtual desktop (see HL2)
4) Sound dissapears randomly ( until game restart ) if hardware acceleration level more than Emulation or "Emulate driver" option is on.
5) HDR seems to not work.
6) I'm not sure, but physics in game quite different from than in windows (It was really different on some pre-1.0 version, so some physical "quests" was really hard to complete), while sometimes you car flies like a bird from single blast or straider kick (actually one time it flies over the building (in end-battle valley), so it is quite abnormal, I think =)). In other things I didn't noticed big difference or abnormal situations, so this actually not changing game process (just makes it more funny =)).
7) Forgot to add in other versions, I wonder: do NOT use OffscreenRenderingMode='fbo'. or you wiil see some strange things while in-game non-playable scenes (eg, G-Man-scenes).
What was not tested
1) dxversion 91 - from previous games it may have many crashes and actually my hardware can't handle it with GLSL together under wine with normal FPS.
2) Resolutions other than 1280x1024
Additional Comments
Kernel 2.6.25-gentoo-r4, CPU AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+, GPU Nvidia 7600GT 256Mb, nvidia-drivers-173.14.05. Runs with -novid, 1Gb heapsize, no dll overrides, VD with size same as resolution and no wm's control or decorations. GLSL enabled, OffscreenRenderingMode is the default one. Gold, because all issues has no effect on gameplay (except sound, but you mustn't listen what they chat, you must fight =)) (or even on graphics, dx91 without GLSL looks quite ugly, while adds some unseen quality for shaders), and requires only a few very simple configuration changes.
HL2EP2 won't start up
by Roland Haeder on Wednesday July 7th 2010, 3:30
I have trouble starting EP2 up. When I hit "Start Game" the window with the startup messages comes but remains. Usually the "Cancel" button must be grayed out and the three dots right of the start-up message should start displaying. But it simply freezes there. I have already tried many settings, especially without any parameter and different sizes for the heap-parameter.
This behavior showed up in recent 1.2-RCx releases (I have GIT) but the game did work in 1.1.xx versions. Sorry not to be more specific, but I cannot recall the exact last working version number.
As suggested somewhere here at winehq.org I have already checked the cached game data and defragmented it, but it doesn't help.
Control issues.
by Steve on Saturday October 17th 2009, 13:35
I think this is actually across the board with Wine lately.
Outside of the mouse escaping the window, causing lack of pointer control, I seem to have this ongoing issue with moving the mouse + a combination of keys... I can't quite figure out whether it is just a mouse and a single keypress, or two and the mouse. I know it tends to screw up with sprint, but also forward-strafing. What happens is that everything just shuts down and I have to often push the movement buttons one or two times to get it to work again.
It is actually causing me to die repeatedly in the hunter-strider battle at White Forest, and is getting frustrating. Anybody know of a workaround for this?
Ingame status bar and gun pointer absents
by vago on Sunday August 16th 2009, 16:45
Hello, is anybody experiencing the following problem? During game the health status bar all the usual in game bars and the gun pointer are absents; everything runs fine in Episode 1 and in HL2 classic.
Wine version i the defaul debian lenny one 1.0.1 and the latest drivers from Nvidia.
black textures...
by Ty on Sunday May 10th 2009, 2:24
in anything based on the new source engine, gmod, tf2, ep2... After playing for a bit. I got odly colored textures. black and rainbow and stuff like that.
HL2 with Intel 3100 (965 chipset)
by Bryan Duff on Wednesday April 15th 2009, 9:16
I've been attempting to get this working under wine with the Intel 965 chipset.
I get an error (from the game - not wine) that pixel shader 1.1 is required. I know that technically this card supports shader 3.0 (or 4.0), so I wonder if I'm overlooking some sort of setting.
I'm running mesa/Xorg from git head, and 2.6.30-rc2 kernel. UT2004 works well (with the Linux binaries). As well as openarena. Not sure if those are comparable, but that's what works. Under Wine, Steam works just fine.
Black UI sprites
by Rob Whalley on Thursday September 25th 2008, 6:38
I have experienced the black UI sprites reported by other users on both HL2:EP2 and Portal. For me, the issue resolved itself when I added -dxlevel 81 to the launch properties and loaded the game. This is probably not news to many people. What is useful to know though, is that when I removed -dxlevel 81 from the launch properties, the UI sprites appeared properly when using the default (DX9) settings. It's almost as though the sprites have to load successfully once under DX8 and then will work properly under DX9. The behaviour occured for me on both HL2:EP2 and Portal.
For reference, am using Wine 1.1.5 from the WineHQ APT Repository on Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit. Graphics card is an Nvidia 8600GT, CPU is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core 5600+, 4GB RAM. Wine is set to use Vista as the Windows version.
does anyone else have this problem???
by Shawn Vega on Wednesday July 2nd 2008, 19:25
after I quit out of halflife 2 episode 2 hl2.exe stays running. and if I try to restart hl2:e2 it says you can only have one instance of the game running at a time.
HDR mode speed improvements
by FeepingCreature on Sunday April 27th 2008, 15:57
In dlls/wined3d/texture.c; if you comment out line 111 - 115 (the one that starts with "else if (GL_SUPPORT(EXT_TEXTURE_SRGB)", HDR speed goes up to nicely playable levels.
Graphics look a bit gray, so I presume that code is something important :) but it still looks nicer than DX8 mode, imnsho.
Black squares instead of translucent sprites.
by Brett on Wednesday April 16th 2008, 15:59
This would be the only thing holding me back from delicious Linux-based HL2ep2 action. Basically, anywhere there are 2D graphics overlays (eg, the HUD when selecting weapons, etc), I get black boxes. The same happens in Portal, incidentally... very annoying. I've tried using the dxlevel flag, but since both Portal and hl2ep2 are DX9 games, I didn't expect it to do much, and it lived up to those expectations.
Any thoughts? Or, at least a bug number (so I don't duplicate an existing bug, should I opt to submit one)?
New wine allows HDR!
by Gavin on Sunday December 2nd 2007, 11:47
In the newest version of wine [whatever].50, Half life 2 episode 2 supports full HDR! It works great. The problem is only one fixme and one error that slow down the game to about 7 fps on my computer:
fixme:d3d_texture:IWineD3DTextureImpl_PreLoad Texture (0x2578e1f0) has been reloaded at least 20 times due to WINED3DSAMP_SRGBTEXTURE changes on it's sampler
err:d3d_surface:fb_copy_to_texture_direct Texture filtering not supported in direct blit
I'll see if I can fool around and get it even better, but this is what happens in directx 9 mode (8 still works fine, but no HDR).
Gutsy latest wine
by Gavin on Saturday December 1st 2007, 0:05
I have played through the entire game in direct x 8 mode and everything works fine. No problems whatsoever.
Switching to direct x 9 slows it down a lot, and doesn't seem worth it (yet). I believe it is certain areas that slow the game down in 9 mode, probably due to new graphics that aren't supported yet.
Going to try again when the ubuntu version of wine [...]50 is available in the wine ubuntu repos (tomorrow?)
We'll see how it goes, but it works terrificly.
I have an NVIDIA geforce 7600+ ... highest settings work perfectly.
RE: vtf error by Blitz moo on
Thursday January 3rd 2008, 15:09
use winecfg on hl2.exe
by JD Powell on Monday October 29th 2007, 0:10
Just to clarify, do not set steam or all of wine to use win98. Only setup an override for hl2.exe for win98.
------- Comment #86 From Milan Troller 2007-06-22 09:51:47 -------
The ending usability of Win98 on steam is no problem. Just use winecfg and set
win98 in the settings for hl2.exe. You can set windows XP as default. Steam will
boot, and work normally. When you start any vale game as Counter Strike or
half-life2, it will run under imaginar win98 :)
No more crashes
by Taras on Sunday October 21st 2007, 3:11
It was posted that changing windows version to 98 prevents from crashing(In comments for bug 10033)
It's working! No more crashes in ep2 or portal in dx8 or dx9 mode(but it doesn't fix the color problem)
PS.I'm not playing Steam version
by Nikolay Kukushkin on Thursday October 18th 2007, 10:44
Yesterday I've playing about three hours with dxlevel80 and GLSL enabled on Gentoo,wine 0.9.47. But now the X-server crashes after 1-2 minute of working application (even in loading process). Something strange...
Game runs fine on Ubuntu 7.10
by Dan O'Connell on Tuesday October 16th 2007, 21:09
I played for roughly 1-2 hours without a hitch.
It was a little sluggish, especially when dealing with a pack of striders and other guys blowing up stuff all around, but not bad for a 6800GT. :-P
Oh, and btw, Tahoma fonts are no longer an issue with the latest release (0.9.47) (Oct. 12 2007).
I'm running Ubuntu-64 Gutsy Gibbon 7.10. (yes, 64bit)
6800GT
HL2 Ran in DX8.1 hardware and DX9 Software.
Bloom enabled, motion blur was not an available (likely due to software DX9). HDR was also not available.
I played the last 2 levels, as I had already finished the earlier ones in another OS and just copied them over to Ubuntu.
