Left 4 Dead 2

What works

• Installation
• Gameplay (all modes, including multiplayer online)
• Voice

What does not

Multicore rendering must be disabled.  If you play without turning off the debugs, you'll see a constant stream of "fixme:d3d:IWineD3DOcclusionQueryImpl_GetData 0x416a6920 Wrong thread, returning 1." when it's enabled.

Sound will randomly drop out almost every campaign you play.  You can use the snd_restart command to restart it from the developer console (~ key), but once in a while that may make the game crash (extremely irritating if you were near the end of a campaign).

Sometimes sound will drop out for just specific items, such as gunfire or the sounds the special infected make.

Sound also seems incorrect on the opening movie.  The music works, but the dialog can barely be heard.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Nothing was left untested.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

It doesn't seem to work "flawlessly" with any settings, but I now consider this game closer to Gold than silver, since all features do work to some extent. System: Kubuntu 10.10 (2.6.35-22-generic #33-Ubuntu SMP), Intel X58 w/6GB DDR3-1600 + Intel Core i7 980X + nVidia GTX 465 w/1GB using nVidia 260.19.06 drivers.

- 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.