Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3

What works

Movies, animation, sound, game play, game save and restore. Highest details in graphics run smoothly.

What does not

Workarounds

What was not tested

Network (co-op) or Internet play.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Had to override with native d3dcompiler and d3dx9 otherwise graphics and movies are not displayed. I'd never imagined I'd see the day this game can be played in highest details (it's been 5 years I last ran this game) without any slowdown. This is the last of my Windows/DOS games I've been moving to Linux, and it's quite a finale!

How to get the game running

Wine 1.1.10

Although the game runs without problems in 1.1.10 and installs fine in either 1.1.8 or 1.1.10, it is not able to register with the license server the first time you start the game in 1.1.10. To get around this:

 -Downgrade Wine to 1.1.8
 -Set winhttp dll override to 'builtin'
 -Run game (It will crash immediately after the splash screen)
 -Upgrade Wine back to 1.1.10

Wine 1.1.8

If you want animated cursors, follow this guide (currently for Wine 1.1.8)

There are two ways to get it running: patching Wine manually with only the patches that are needed, or use a Wine version which includes a collection of Wine hacks that may (or may not) improve the gameplay experience. PLEASE DON'T SUBMIT TEST RESULTS IF YOU USE THE WINE HACKS METHOD! This is because it doesn't reflect the current state of Wine

Click here if you are using a 64 bit system

Patching Wine manually

• Download Wine 1.1.8 and the cursor patch to the same directory
• Unpack Wine through your file manager or with tar -xvjf wine-1.1.8.tar.bz2 in a console
  
• Enter the Wine directory with cd wine-1.1.8
• Apply the cursor patch with patch -p1 < ../cursor-patches-1.1.8.patch
• Update wineserver with tools/make_requests
• Configure Wine with ./configure --prefix=$HOME/wine-ra3, where you can choose another install path if you want to. If it displays any errors and you are unable to fix them yourself, post the error message here, without the full console output
• Build Wine with make
• Install with make install
• Delete the Wine source with cd ..; rm -rf wine-1.1.8
  
• Open winecfg and add a DLL override so winhttp is set to builtin
  
• Now you can run the game by substituting the wine commandd with $HOME/wine-ra3/bin/wine

 

1. git clone git://repo.or.cz/wine/hacks.git
   
2. cd hacks
3. ./configure --prefix=$HOME/wine-ra3   #you can set it to wtvr you want.
   
4. make && make install #this will install wine + some wine patches (including the animated cursor patch) to your home directory only...
5. start the game with $HOME/wine-ra3/bin/wine /patch/to/your/RA3.exe
6. thats it :)
   

The wine hacks.git is a collection of many patches that sitll didn't got to the mainline tree.

From hacks.git:

No patch in this repository is supposed to break other things. Hacks that might do that have some switch that is default to off.

Troubleshooting

Starting the game

The game says it's unable to connect to the licence server
Open winecfg and add a DLL override so winhttp is set to builtin

In-game issues

When starting a map, the game lags horribly and/or is covered by black squares
Go to Options -> Settings on the main menu and set Shadow detail to Low

Large, single-coloured shapes appear in the game
Go to Options -> Settings on the main menu and set VFX detail to Low

There is no cursor
Apply the cursor patch; read the how-to