Lord of the Rings Online

What works

All i tested, execpt of switching from desktop back to the game.

What does not

Switching from desktop back to the gam, when i had minmize it

before.

Workarounds

What was not tested

raids and pvp

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

To improve the performce i had set ddr render to opengl and seted mulisampling to enabled. My graphic card is a Nvidia Geforce 9800GTX+ with nvidia driver ver 270.41.06.

NOTE: These instructions and the below script are now out of date and may need re-testing & updating­.

Installer Script

­The installer script is now at version 0.1.5 (updated May 20th, 2010).  This automates most of the process for installing LotRO, by correctly initializing your Wine environment. However, as of the Siege of Mirkwood release, the downloader/installer program from the lotro.com website no longer work­s in Wine (see ­related bug here).

EU Customers

The below script should work fine, although you'll have to manually unpack the installer files and run the setup yourself (that part isn't automated).

US Customers

The previous US installer program still works, but unfortunately, Turbine has removed it and it is no longer available for download.  At this time, these instructions lack a real working solution (check back soon for an update to this).  If you have access to a previous installation or the setup files (a setup program with the large .bin files) then you can still run that setup and then bring it up to date with the patcher.

­Running the Setup Script

Open a terminal window and run the following commands:

wget -O lotrosetup.tmp http://pastebin.com/download.php?i=i8QMv2K2
# pastebin always windows-izes your text files, so we have to convert them back
cat lotrosetup.tmp | tr -d '\r' > lotrosetup-0.1.5.sh &&
    rm lotrosetup.tmp
chmod u+x lotrosetup-0.1.5.sh
./lotrosetup-0.1.5.sh

Using the minimal patcher (US Customers)

As mentioned earlier, there is not yet a complete solution for US customers using a new install, but this will get part of the files if you can obtain the .dat files elsewhere.  You must download this file from rapidshare and save it to your home directory.  If you have never used rapidshare before, it's pretty much a pain.  Click on the "Free User" button and then you have to wait some odd number of seconds before it finally displays a "download now" button -- this is to try to force you to pay them money.  If somebody else wants to host this file, PLEASE do and post the new link!!! Once you have downloaded the file, run the following commands (presuming you saved it to your home directory):

export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-lotro
tar xf  ~/lotro-minimal-patcher.tbz2 -C ${WINEPREFIX}

You may now either run the launcher by clicking the "LOTRO Launcher" icon the setup script made on your desktop or run the following additional commands in the same terminal window:

cd "${WINEPREFIX}/drive_c/Program Files/Turbine/The Lord of the Rings Online"
./lotrolauncher.sh

Please read the following notes:

• In wine 1.1.21, towards the end of running the setup program, RegSvcs.exe crashes.  However, once you click OK, the setup continues and completes, so this may be a harmless error.  This doesn't happen in wine 1.1.20.
• When running the lotro setup program, it will prompt you that the target install directory already exists and ask if it should install files there anyway.  Select "Yes" as it only exists because the lotrosetup.sh script pre-populates it with the lotrolauncher.sh script.
• This script doesn't install the GUI launcher, which is also described below.
• Note the troubleshooting steps for European users listed in the "Regedit Settings" below, which have not been integrated into the script.
• This script configures a few default LOTRO rendering settings as work-arounds to known issues. If you change your video settings (and it's recommended that you click "Detect Optimal Settings" in-game) then you may need to revert some settings under "Advanced Graphics Settings" to resolve these issues: ­
  • Post Processing Effects = Enabled (checked) may cause in-game labels to be partially or fully obscured.  To resolve, either uncheck this box or go into "UI Settings" under the "Floating Information" section and enable "Floating Text Always On Top" option.
    
  • Landscape Shadow Quality > Low may cause large areas of land to be almost black (i.e., unlit).  To resolve, set to Low.  Update: this bug is fixed in 1.1.24!
    

Please submit feedback on how this script works for you. Thanks!

Performance Tweaks

When running on Linux, you should turn down the texture cache to something very small like zero to 5. Turbine added this functionality to make up for Window's exceedingly poor and intentionally crippled file caching (in hopes you'll upgrade to server I suppose).  But on Linux, it will only waste memory. (However, extensive tests on this haven't been run.)

­Manual Setup

Since Lord of the ­Rings Online Mines of Moria actually needs files that can break or prevent other installed apps from running, is better to create clean isolated wine prefix for MoM.

So lets get started

Open a terminal and write

export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-lotro

Ever on the same terminal that you have exported your WINEPREFIX, write the following commands:

wine cmd /c it worked # Should output "it worked"
wineserver -k
wget -nv http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
chmod u+x ./winetricks
./winetricks win2k
./winetricks gecko    
./winetricks vcrun2005    
./winetricks vcrun2005sp1

On the same terminal, write:

regedit

And add the keys from regedit section.

Just to keep it clear, I repeat, its very important that you are sure that you are running all these commands from a terminal that you have exported your target WINEPREFIX, otherwise you can end breaking your default .wine directory.

Installation

If you followed the previous steps, you have ready an environment to install MoM without problems.  At this time, the SoM installer does not work.  You can choose to:

• Install Lord of the Rings Online Mines of Moria from its original DVD
• Install any recent full game client (like Book 11, 13 or 14), and updating with standalone patches to MoM, latest wine versions has no problems installing any of these. European Links
  
• Update a previous install using the autopatcher from the GUI or CLI launcher scripts (this one is really slow)
  

Example, in a terminal, write:

­export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-lotro
wine lotrosetup.exe­

Launcher Script

Current version of command line launcher is v0.9.9c released 10 / April/ 2008, if you have a previous version please update to this one. ­

To launch the client on Linux you need to download this script and this support script (rename it to urlencode.sh). Extra details about the script can be found on the script developers site.

These scripts must be placed in directory containing the file lotroclient.exe

To run the script type either bash scriptname or ./scriptname if the scripts permissions allow for execute (where scriptname is the name of the downloaded script)

*NOTE: In some newer distros like Ubuntu 7.10 an maybe upper this command line script fails as newer versions of wget need a "--no-check-certificate" switch after every wget command to work properly, please uncomment (remove the leading #) the following line on lotrolauncher.script: #wgetNoCheckCertOption="--no-check-certificate"

An alternative to the CLI launcher is the GUI launcher, available here, note you need the mono compiler installed to compile (see README for additional information), once compiled place the run and ico files in your LOTRO directory and run using either ./LotROLinux.run or mono LotROLinux.run. It works with the EU and US version, actually it can patch the game via Tools->Patch. The GUI launcher is not affected by the wget related issue.

winecfg Settings

Windows Version: Windows 2000 or Windows XP

regedit Settings

From an exported terminal insert the following as string values:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D/VideoMemorySize = < amount of video memory ie 256 >
If you're using a European client you may need to use the following if your client is failing to update:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Uninstall/4f6dcc3b-179d-4b1b-80f0-b6083a0b3ce6_is1/
Inno Setup: App Path = C:\\Program Files\\The Lord of the Rings Online 

UserPreferences.ini settings

Note this file is found in the equivalent of your "My Documents\The Lord of the Rings" folder which defaults to ~/The Lord of the Rings

If you do not currently have a UserPreferences.ini file run the game using the script or gui it will crash with an error but will create a default UserPreferences.ini file

AllowFakeFullScreen=False
FullScreen=True

Those settings will enable you to start the game and log in as a character. If you change any settings via the graphics or advanced graphics tabs ensure that those setting are correct (ie choosing a new level of graphics via the graphics tab may alter some of these values)

Updating

If you have Book 11 or upper install the latest command line launcher script version v0.9.9 will update automatically your client via the patch servers.

Otherwise if you have an older than Book 11 install, you will need to update to Book 11 on a Windows system or VM as the command line launcher script does not support older patchclient.dll versions, and copy the entire client into your Linux box, ensuring that you are the owner of the resulting files and permissions for files, folders and subfolders are set to write and execute, from that point you can update normally using the command line launcher script.

Playing the game

You should use Wine 1.1.2 or upward, as from that point Wine includes a fix that easen worst lag scenarios on LOTRO.

For CLI launcher is better to have a small script that automates launch, copy the following in your favorite text editor and save it as lotro.sh:

#!/bin/sh
# Lotro prefix automated launcher
##
IFS=","
cd "$HOME/.wine-lotro/drive_c/Program Files/The Lord of the Rings Online"
export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-lotro
export WINEDEBUG=fixme-all
./lotrolauncher.sh
­­­# End of script

Save it and in a terminal do a:

chmod a+x lotro.sh

Then you can use it with ./lotro.sh or sh lotro.sh

For ­ GUI launcher add in the WINEPREFIX field under Options the following:

/home/your-username/.wine-lotro

With that you can start and update the game normally­

LOTRO isn't the easiest game to setup, installing LOTRO requires some level of understanding Linux and Wine commands, procedures shown below are valid for English systems, so other languages might need to change some paths.

If you are new to Linux or Wine please ask for help here first, it will be faster and more accurate for beginners.

If you still have problems that live support chat isn't capable of resolve, feel free of asking here.