Left 4 Dead 2

What works

Everything seems to work... at first.

What does not

I can't actually use Wine to play this game reliably.  I can crank up the graphics settings and play for a random amount of time with no issues.  However, at some point bug 23286 is going to kick me out of the game (no issues when playing from separate Windows installation on same machine).  Complete re-format/re-install/redownload of both the game and Wine did nothing to change the symptoms.

This makes it infuriating when trying to complete campaign achievements or support friends in vs. modes.

Also, bug 23516 will randomly drop either all sound, or partial sound in the game at certain times.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Everything was tested.  Including installing my own server on another machine on my local network to ensure that bug 23286 had nothing to do with the server side.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

System: Kubuntu 10.10 (2.6.35-20-generic #29-Ubuntu SMP), Intel X58 w/6GB DDR3-1600 + Intel Core i7 980X + nVidia GTX 465 w/1GB using 256.53-0ubuntu2 drivers (same results when tested with nVidia 9800GTX+ and older 195 video drivers). I cannot give this game higher than a silver because multiplayer is severely crippled by the bugs mentioned above. It's so frustrating that I use Windows to play the game, and I absolutely hate doing that.

- To get past the "Incomplete Installation" error:

Use Wine-1.1.35 or later

- To get past crashing at the MOTD display when joining a multiplayer game:

Either: Use native urlmon.dll (can be limited to just left4dead2.exe),
Or: Use wine-1.1.27 or earlier.

- To improve the performance

1. Enable multicore rendering.  This increases performance by 10-15 fps in most places for me.
2. Use the following patch:
http://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=24812
   This increases performance by 50-60 fps in most places for me.  Note that you may need to minimise/restore or otherwise lose and regain focus of the game to fix the flashlight and some textures if using this patch.
   The performance is so much better in wine-1.1.33 that this doesn't seem to be needed any more.  The framerate with this in wine-1.1.32 was still higher than the framerate without this in wine-1.1.33 though.

- To get past the crashing/restarting/broken game files which occurs every few minutes during gameplay

Add -lv to the launch options in Steam.  This enables low gore mode, which for some reason fixes the problem.  Low gore mode doesn't look as great, but it's worth it for the stability.