Left 4 Dead 2

What works

After the Dec. 16th Steam update, the game is completely playable for me. -Purchased and installed through Steam. -Launch through Steam. -Play multiplayer and singleplayer. -In game settings, including video mode changes, work. -Listening to other players.

What does not

-Sound will drop every 30 min. or so. Workaround is to go to Options->Audio and switch to choose a mode that you don't use and switch back. For instance, 2-speaker->headphones->2-speaker reliably restores sound for me. -Not all video settings are available in-game vs. windows install. Specifically, the anti-aliasing settings are missing but there might be more I didn't see. -Sometimes it takes Steam like 5 minutes to launch the game while it thrashes my HDD. I'm assuming it is verifying files or something and is just really inefficient through Wine. -'Tabbing-out' to focus on other windows does not make L4D2 happy. I have to (ctrl-alt-F1) kill the process and restart most of the time.

Workarounds

What was not tested

-Some gameplay modes. -Using microphone to voice-chat.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Even though it is not perfect, I am rating this Platinum because I didn't make any changes to wine.cfg and it is completely playable out of the box.

- 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.