Black Mesa

What works

Everything

What does not

Nothing

Workarounds

What was not tested

Nothing

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Please follow these suggestions in order to make your tests results more relevant to other users of Wine:

• Detail your PC specifications in the Extra Comments section (e.g. your video card, processor, and system memory).
  
• It's also important to specify your video card driver version in this section.
  
• Specify if you installed the game into a fresh Wineprefix (or not).
• Specify what Windows programs you actually installed.
• Detail what version of the Windows have set your Wineprefix to
  (e.g. Windows XP, Windows 7, etc).
• Add detailed comment about what is not working.
• Specify if you made any changes to your game e.g. like installing any additional mods, patch(s) (official or unofficial) or any modification made to the  configuration files for the game.
• Please, don't send tests results with "Everything is working" or "Everything isn't working".
• Test results that are too vague will be rejected.

Thank you for taking some time to help make Wine easier to use!

You need:

• A recent version of Wine, it's generally recommended to use the latest development release.
• It's not necessary to install Black Mesa into a clean Wineprefix - but generally it's recommended.

Installing:

First download and install Steam following the steps at WineHQ AppDB Steam Official Release page.

Download the game from one of the mirrors specified at www.blackmesasource.com, you need to download two files:

• BlackMesa.7z
• BlackMesa-Setup.exe

Download both files to the same folder and then install the game using a terminal:

export WINEPREFIX=" ... " # set path to WINEPREFIX
export WINEARCH="win32"   # win64 for a 64-bit WINEPREFIX
cd ~/Downloads # change directory to path of downloaded Black Mesa installer
wine BlackMesa-Setup.exe

Then restart your Steam client and Black Mesa should appear in your Steam game list. Launching Black Mesa (via Steam menu) will automatically pull in the Source SDK 2007 dependency - which the mod requires.

For Steam related problems, please visit the Steam Official Release page.

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OpenGL Acceleration

The game should run with newer Intel integrated HD Graphics GPUs. AMD Radeon 4000+ GPUs (radeon driver is recommended). An Nvidia GPU and binary (proprietary) driver will most likely give the best performance.

If Black Mesa won't launch - then check that you have working OpenGL acceleration for your X session by entering (in a terminal):

glxinfo | grep "direct rendering:"
direct rendering: Yes

If the result is No then you will need ensure you have the graphics driver installed and then troubleshoot your (native UNIX) OpenGL acceleration.

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Poor Quality Font Rendering

This primarily effects the game menu font rendering - but will also effects in game subtitles. It is due to an open bug against Half-Life 2...

Bug 22912 - Half Life 2 and Portal subtitles unreadable

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Memory Leak (VRAM)
Playing on at a high resolution, on a low end graphics card, may lead to slow increasing usage of the graphics card on-board VRAM over time. This has been observed to lead to starvation of free VRAM space on an Nvidia 8800GTX - during a normal game play through a level - when playing @2560x1440 resolution. This lead the game to consistently crash when VRAM was sufficiently exhausted (DE dependent). Suspected to be caused by graphics driver bug(s) (discussion with Wine Developer in 2016).

This phenomena is restricted to play through Wine. On a Windows 7 playthrough of the game: inter-level loads tend to flush VRAM content. Under Wine inter-level loads lead did not reduce VRAM usage. Leading eventually to VRAM starvation.

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Installer Issues

Ensure that the BlackMesa-Setup.exe and BlackMesa.7z files are stored in the same directory. Ensure that your UNIX PWD (present working directory) is set to this directory - before launching the installer.

Check the md5 hash for your installer files:

md5sum BlackMesa-Setup.exe BlackMesa.7z

Compare the md5 file hashes to those stored in the BlackMesa.md5 file.

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Random crashes, low FPS and/or laggy game play

Typically these are due to deficiencies in the Wine translation layer. General workarounds are to:

• disable Multi-Core Rendering (if enabled)
• turn off Anti-Aliasing
• disable HDR (if enabled)
  
• add -novid and -nojoy to launch options
• disable In-Game Steam Overlay
  set gameoverlayrenderer.dll to disabled (using the winecfg tool).
  

If you still have problems post a comment or submit a bug report at WineHQ Bugzilla.

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Graphics glitches, pink eyes and/or general graphics bugs

• RHS mouse click on Black Mesa in your Steam Library
• ↳Set launch Option
• enter: -dxlevel 90

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Performance Tuning

If you get a lot of harsh freezing, especially when looking around and entering new rooms, try switching to the DirectX 8.1 renderer:

• RHS mouse click on Black Mesa in your Steam Library
• ↳Set launch Option
• enter: -dxlevel 81

If lowering your in-game resolution does not improve game performance... Black Mesa has main menu options in the tabs Black Mesa and Video that can be used to directly tune & improve your in-game performance (selectively turn off or lower additional video effects).