Freelancer

What works

I am already installed version. The game runs and operates.

What does not

Not "Escape" works with the laden level. It is impossible go to the main menu.

Sticking musical effects.

Workarounds

What was not tested

A long passage.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

If you are unable to start Freelancer due to a non-detected CD or debugger, use a no-cd version of Freelancer.exe.

If you are using a wine version earlier than 1.1.20 refer to http://freelancercommunity.net/viewtopic.php?p=2466#2466

For DirectPlay check this: http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectPlayGames

For intro videos: winetricks wmp9, amstream, devenum, quartz

Admin note: the following was taken from a user comment made on May 31st 2016 and may not be relevant to current Wine.

I've been able to play Freelancer multiplayer using the Discovery mod (4.88.1). I thought I'd share in case anyone's interested.

I think the key parts are installing directplay from Winetricks on a 32-bit Windows XP wineprefix. I'll go into more detail, though.

I'm on Arch Linux x86_64 with kernel 4.5.2-1-ck, but this should be doable with any Linux distro.

Here's how I did it:
- Set up a 32-bit Windows XP wineprefix (WINEARCH=win32, WINEPREFIX=/where/ever). Confirm it's Windows XP in winecfg.
-
Use Winetricks to install the following: d3dx9, directplay, dotnet20, dotnet30, dotnet40, mfc42, msls31, msvcirt, riched20, riched30, vcrun6, vcrun6sp6.
- Ensure you have the following DLL overrides (I think Winetricks will do this for you):
native: d3dx9_24 through _43, dplayxn, dpnet, dpnhpast, dpnsvr.exe, dpwsockx
native, builtin: riched20

By "d3dx9_24 through _43", I mean *every number* between 24 and 43.
I'm not sure if they're all necessary, but they're what I've got.

Then:
- Install Freelancer from disc, or copy an installed Freelancer directory.

If you copy a directory, you might not have the right fonts in-game. The ones you want are Agency FB and Arial Unicode MS, both in your Wineprefix's drive_c/windows/fonts directory. I think the game is fine
without them (it'll use your system fonts instead), but the UI might be weird.

- Install Discovery using its installer
- Run the Discovery launcher (DSLauncher.exe) to play the game.

At this point everything should work. It did for me. I was able to launch the game, start a singleplayer game, and find and connect to multiplayer servers in the server list. A friend of mine hosted a server
and we played multiplayer through Hamachi just fine.

I have *not* been able to host a server on this setup. It's probably possible, but the server crashes immediately for me and it was easier just to get my friend to host.

I also ran into a performance issue: Freelancer usually uses 100% of the CPU core it's on for me. This means the game hitches and freezes quite often -- e.g. opening the map freezes the game for several seconds on my PC (i5 2500 quad core @3.3GHz).

You can fix this with the "taskset" command (from package util-linux on Arch) to put Freelancer on its own CPU core, separate from Wine and whatever else.

e.g. `taskset -cp 3 666` will put PID 666 on the 4th cpu (the 1st core is 0).

It works impressively well to do this with Freelancer's PID. The game will just seamlessly move to that CPU core. You can get Freelancer's PID with `pgrep Freelancer`.

However, for some reason Freelancer will put itself back on the first CPU core whenever you enter or leave a station. To get around that I wrote a script and bound it to a hotkey in my window manager:

--- fix_freelancer.sh ---
#!/usr/bin/env sh
fpid=$(pgrep Freelancer | head -n 1)
fcpu=3
exec taskset -cp $fcpu $fpid
-------------------------

I bound that to Super+F1, so whenever I enter or leave a station I just press that key combination and I'm back to playing just fine.

Before I figured this out, the best suggestions I could find for multiplayer FL were to use Wine 1.1.20 or something, which I couldn't even get to work. Luckily, this setup lets me play FL with the latest Wine version just fine.

Hopefully this is helpful -- let me know if more info is needed. Cheers.