WineHQ

Freelancer

The setting for this "space opera" game is the 23rd Century, which in a galactic time-frame can be roughly described as just before the insanity that was Buck Rogers and just after the Space Odyssey. A civil war has ripped Earth and our Solar System apart, with the losing faction, the Alliance, escaping to deep space to start over again.

Application Details:

Version: 1.x
License:
URL: http://www.microsoft.com/games...
Votes: 13
Latest Rating: Gold
Latest Wine Version Tested: 5.7-staging

Maintainers: About Maintainership

Test Results

Old test results
The test results for this version are very old, and as such they may not represent the current state of Wine. Please consider submitting a new test report.
Selected Test Results

What works

Everything (only tested singleplayer)

What does not

Intro videos do not work out of the box

Potential issues with game stuttering due to the audio module

Workarounds

winetricks wmp9, amstream, devenum, quartz for intro videos

winetricks msacm32 will fix issues with stuttering, especially on lower end hardware

What was not tested

Multiplayer

Hardware tested

Graphics:

  • GPU: Intel
  • Driver: open source

Additional Comments

selected in Test Results table below
Operating systemTest dateWine versionInstalls?Runs?Used
Workaround?
RatingSubmitter
CurrentLinux Mint 19.3 "Tricia"Apr 25 20205.7-stagingYes Yes YesGoldWinterSnowfall 
ShowFedora 31 x86_64Feb 17 20205.1-stagingYes Yes YesGoldRichie 
ShowFedora 30 x86_64Oct 22 20194.17-stagingYes Yes YesSilverRichard Marlton 
ShowArch Linux x86_64Dec 01 20183.21Yes Yes YesGoldTom B 
ShowLinux Mint 19.0 TaraSep 10 20183.0.2Yes Yes NoPlatinumRyan Lynch 

Known Bugs

Bug # Description Status Resolution Other apps affected
3698 Freelancer setup: Unhandled exception CLOSED WORKSFORME View
3853 Freelancer: music hangs CLOSED FIXED View
3933 Freelancer: Mousepointer invisible CLOSED FIXED View
4066 Online Play Doesn't Work (DirectPlay) NEW View
8249 Freelancer: hangs at start if freetype is installed CLOSED FIXED View
8251 Freelancer: unable to start CLOSED FIXED View
9701 Freelancer loses connection after undocking to space CLOSED ABANDONED View
12416 Deus Ex and Syberia2 both have corrupted graphics in 0.9.59 CLOSED FIXED View
17934 Freelancer will quit after splash screen CLOSED ABANDONED View
27260 Freelancer: Complains about debugger on amd64 and fails to start (32-bit service in shared wow64) CLOSED DUPLICATE View
40336 Freelancer: Background Texture for in-game "NavMap" spreads across entire screen (Intel only) CLOSED NOTOURBUG View
46072 Freelancer: Stutter when new NPC ships spawn UNCONFIRMED View
46845 Freelancer: character glitches in cutscenes after loading a saved game CLOSED FIXED View

Show open bugs

HowTo / Notes

HOWTO

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

Multiplayer

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.

Comments

Back