America's Army 3

What works

Game installs without any problems and can be started after installing additional software - ­Visual Studio 2005 runtime and double starting the game after Punkbuster had crushed.

What does not

­Game doesn't start until you install ­Visual Studio 2005 runtime.

Punkbuster - it crushes when you try start the game for the first time after turning on your PC, you have to kill game process and start it again.

In-game mouse control - mouse doesn't run smoothly and often hangs.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Multiplayer

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

With this mouse bug precise aiming is hard, often impossible because mouse would lock-in and doesn't allow you to turn into direction when target is.

A large number of errors such as the following may be seen when launched from a terminal:

 err:module:import_dll Library MSVCP80.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Steam\\steamapps\\common\\america's army 3\\Binaries\\wxmsw28u_vc_custom.dll") not found
err:module:import_dll Library MSVCR80.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Steam\\steamapps\\common\\america's army 3\\Binaries\\wxmsw28u_vc_custom.dll") not found

This suggests that the Visual Studio 2005 runtime is not installed. The easiest way to work around this is 'winetricks vcrun2005'.

If a similar error for d3dx10_35.dll is seen, the DirectX installer (in steamapps/common/america's army 3/DirectX) should be rerun. (In my case it hung during the Steam-started install and had to be rerun manually after Steam had finished its setup procedure). This does not seem to be needed with wine-1.2rc7.

http://www.leenukes.co.uk/?p=109

Similar problem has been discussed:
appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=5444

A patch may be downloaded at fxlegrand.free.fr/index.php?page=patches. Decompress and copy to /usr/lib/wine/ or /usr/lib32/wine (on amd64 installs). It is crucial that you make a copy of the original dinput.dll.so before replacing it.

Unfortunately, this patch also prevents use of the menus. The best option I have seen to date is to play training missions unpatched. To play online, open the game unpatched, open the server browser, and find a server you like. Write down the IP address, then close AA and apply the patch. Open AA, then pull up the console using the tilde (~) key and run "open (ip address)". You will not be able to use the in-game menus for class selection but keyboard shortcuts (tab/space/arrow keys, etc) provide most functionality. Restore the original dinput.dll.so  when done playing.