Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War

What works

Version: 1.10

- Gameplay

What does not

- Configuration in the settings menu (you must setup DoW in the local.ini)

- The sound is terrible

- DoW crashes when you leave it

- fullscreen (you must tell wine to emulate a Desktop; then DoW runs fine)

Workarounds

What was not tested

- Multiplay

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

How to play DoW: ==================== - Use winecfg to tell wine to emulate a virtual desktop - Run GraphicsConfig.exe. - Select Optimal settings - Don't run the rendering test - Open the local.ini file - Set up your preferred settings - Run DoW: wine W40k - On my PC it takes 10 minutes to load DoW but when it's loaded it runs fine - If you use KDE, you can tell KDE in the Control Center to hide the window decoration of the DoW window; then it looks like fullscreen. Sorry for my bad english; maybe somebody could correct the grammar in this howto.

After you installed the game you may get a performance boost if you use the latest version of DirectX 9.

The easiest way to do so, is using winetricks:

winetricks directx9

Read more about winetricks, here:

http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks

1.0: Installer crashes with "Fatal Error 1603"

 This happens if you install from the CD version. The installer crashes when you need to enter the next CD.

The solution is to copy all contents from CD1, 2 and 3 to a folder on your disk and run wine setup.exe from there.

The installer will ask for CD1 at the end of the installation. Just press OK and everything will be fine.

Run these steps if you want to copy CD content to a "dow"-called folder in your home folder:

mkdir ~/dow

run this for all 3 CDs:

cp -r /path/to/your/mounted/cd/* ~/dow/

change to the folder and run the installer:

cd ~/dow && wine setup.exe

1.1: Installer crashes

The installer may crash for you when you attempt to install the game. If this happens, try changing your windows version. It seems that if wine reports a high windows version, more advanced, and unsupported(!) functionality is being used which causes the installer to crash.

Tests have been conducted and setting the windows version to "windows 2.0" yielded a install

1.2: Using offline patches isn't working!

Symptoms encountered: installer crashes or takes over the entire session with a dark background.

Again. Using windows version 2.0 seems to make the installers only request much needed functionality which wine already supports. This should fix the crashing. To avoid having the patch installer taking up the entire screen which can stall the patching process for some, one must run the patch within an emulated desktop.
You need not create this in your wine config, a shorter way of having an emulated desktop is to launch the patch installers like so:

wine explorer /desktop=foo,1024,768 dow-patch.exe

1.3: "DawnOfWar - InstallShield Wizard" does not close properly

This is a known bug but does not affect the installation/ gameplay. Just kill the process after installation like this:

pkill IDriver.exe

1.4: Game says my CD isn't inserted, or it's the wrong disc!

This is because wine cannot handle commercial grade copy protection, which is actually something that cedega supports, since Transgaming agreed to pay the fees required and include code which they cannot reveal to any other project.
However, this is only an issue until version 1.50 of the game. Install the offline patches and you are fine.

1.5: I didn't get asked for a serial (CD Key) and can't play online therefore, what to do?

You have to edit a registry key with wine. Open the tool "regedit" and search for this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\THQ\Dawn of War\CDKEY

There is also a key "CDKEY_WXP" for the extension "Winter Assault".

1.6: "System Initialization Failed! Errors: Could not find required data. Make sure you are running this utility from your Dawn of War directory."

The installer has a bug that occurs from time to time. This is not a wine bug, it happens under windows as well. The problem is that some directories do not get created. These are empty but neccessary.

Create them by hand in the installation path (e.g. cd to ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/THQ/Dawn Of War/) like this:

mkdir -p Profile

mkdir -p Engine/Data/

mkdir -p GraphicsOptions/Data/

If you plan to install the extension pack "Soulstorm" you should do this before applying patches to Dawn Of War.

Soulstorm is not a stand-alone and will get installed directly into your DoW folder. Patches applied by Soulstorm will downgrade your DoW installation.

Note: This is not a wine issue, the patches just suck.

1.0: How to determine version number?

Have a look in your W40k.ini which you can find at the path you installed Dawn of War.

For the lazy guys:

grep "gameVersion" W40k.ini

 1.1: How to enable anti-aliasing (this is not wine specific)?

Run GraphicsConfiguration.exe at least once. This will create a Local.ini in your DoW folder.

Open this Local.ini and change this entry:

screenantialias = 0

to:

screenantialias = 1

If you have problems with completely corrupted textures the problem might be that your systems lacks a library that is used for texture compression in Dawn of War.

Under Debian based system install the package "libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0" and try again.