Gothic II

What works

• Installation.
• Sound.
• Saving.
• Loading.

What does not

• Playing the game: It crashes after the video, when a new game is started.
• Music.
• Running the game in Wine's full-screen mode, causes the game window to get automatically paused when the workspace is changed. (Bug #37937).

Workarounds

• Disabling music makes the game play without problems. To do it, in file `system/gothic.ini', under the `[SOUND]' section, set `musicEnabled=0'
• To prevent the game from getting paused when the workspace is changed, run it under Wine's virtual-desktop mode.

What was not tested

• Playing the game for a long time.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Intel
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

• Bug #37087 no longer exists!
• Bug #37937 exists. However, since the game draws the window in a special way, the game window does not get minimized, but gets paused instead. There are no problems though, not even a crash when switching back to the paused window.

If you want to start Gothic II with music enabled, you have to use the following native dlls: dmband.dll,
dmime.dll,
dmloader.dll,
dmstyle.dll,
dmsynth.dll,
dmusic.dll and
dmcompos.dll.

The easiest way is to use winetricks:

$ wget http://winetricks.org/winetricks

$ sh winetricks directmusic

WARNING: winetricks sets more DLL overrides than necessary. In my case I had to remove the override for 'dsound' (winecfg -> Libraries) or the game would crash at the main menu: "C: failed to initialize sound, MSS reported: Broken waveOut driver 'buffer done' flag never set".

Otherwise if you don't want to use native dlls, you can explicitly disable music by setting 'musicEnabled=0' in [Gothic_2_Path]/system/gothic.ini, but you shouldn't have to.

It is possible to run Gothic II using the open source graphics stack, at least with Intel and Radeon cards. The "i965" (Intel GMA X3100) and "r300" (ATi Radeon 9500 - X1950) drivers are reported to work, others will probably work as well, so please test it and leave a comment below.

What you need is S3 Texture Compression (S3TC), a technology covered by a patent which makes things complicated.

 What you have to do:

- Get the GUI tool 'driconf'. For examle: 'sudo apt-get install driconf'

- Start 'driconf', either from the console or from an entry in your application menu.

- Find the entry "Enable S3TC texture compression even if software support is not available" and set it to "yes"

- Start Gothic normally and hope that it works flawlessly.

Since mesa-7.11 this should also work with gallium drivers without having a libtxc_dxtn.so.

There are issues, for example, the floor might be invisible. Leave a comment :)

Azerty layout has numbers accessible with the shift key so switching weapons was broken and there is nothing in the settings to change that.
The workaround was to switch to another layout using : setxkbmap us
Changing it in the Gnome 3.22 menu didn't work.