Age of Empires II

What works

Installing and running through steam works, but workarounds are required to prevent it from crashing on start, and for multiplayer to work.

The steps I followed are similar to the Nov 15, 2019 report.

My setup details:

• nvidia proprietary drivers on GTX 1060
• installed in its own wine prefix with wine 5.7
  • (gentoo package: app-emulation/wine-vanilla-5.7[vulkan] 
  • - vulkan use flag + dxvk is required or the game will not play)
• I did not use playonlinux.

(Gentoo specific) Here are my use flags and versions for wine-vanilla, wine-mono, winetricks, nvidia-drivers:

[ebuild R ~] app-emulation/wine-mono-5.0.0:5.0.0::gentoo 0 KiB
[ebuild R ~] app-emulation/winetricks-20200412::gentoo USE="gtk -kde -rar -test" 0 KiB
[ebuild R ~] app-emulation/wine-vanilla-5.7:5.7::gentoo USE="X alsa cups faudio fontconfig gecko gstreamer jpeg lcms mono mp3 ncurses nls opencl opengl perl png pulseaudio realtime run-exes sdl ssl threads truetype udev udisks unwind vulkan xcomposite xml -capi -custom-cflags -dos -gphoto2 -gsm -gssapi -kerberos -ldap -netapi -odbc -openal -osmesa -oss -pcap -prelink -samba -scanner (-selinux) -test -v4l -vkd3d -xinerama" ABI_X86="32 64 (-x32)" 0 KiB
[ebuild R ~] x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-440.82-r3:0/440::gentoo USE="X acpi driver gtk3 kms libglvnd multilib tools uvm -compat -static-libs -wayland" ABI_X86="32 (64) (-x32)" 0 KiB

Note that you will see errors after the dxvk step if you do not have +vulkan on app-emulation/wine-vanilla

I am using `$HOME/Games/aoe2_de` as my wine prefix directory, if you want to use a different directory replace occurrences of that with your directory.

Steps:

1. `mkdir -p $HOME/Games/aoe2_de`
2. `WINEPREFIX=$HOME/Games/aoe2_de winetricks --no-isolate steam`, then log in to steam, download and install Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition (optional: create a desktop shortcut), run it for the first time to force steam to run "first run steps", wait for it to crash, then exit steam.
3. `WINEPREFIX=$HOME/Games/aoe2_de wine uninstaller` and then uninstall the two "Visual studio 2017" lines that steam installed in the "first run steps".
4. Reinstall "Visual studio 2017" using winetricks: `WINEPREFIX=$HOME/Games/aoe2_de winetricks vcrun2017`
5. Set windows version to 10 with `WINEPREFIX=$HOME/Games/aoe2_de winetricks win10`
6. Download a release of dxvk (github: doitsujin/dxvk) - I used https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases/tag/v1.6.1 - and run:
   export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/Games/aoe2_de
   ./setup_dxvk.sh install
   
   This may also launch steam.
7. At this point, the game will launch (it gives me an error message saying "The program BattleServer.exe has encountered a serious problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience", but if I click close on that everything seems to run fine afterwards) and single player should work, but multiplayer will desync you within a few seconds (see this reddit thread). If you want multiplayer to work, run these commands:
   cd $HOME/Games/aoe2_de/drive_c/windows/system32
   wget "https://aka.ms/vs/16/release/vc_redist.x64.exe"
   # if you want you can take a checksum and compare with mine
   # I have sha512 of 0c373b06ffe84f3e803831e90f22d7d73304e47a47839db614f63399ff1b7fcf33153bf3d23998877c96d2a75e316291a219fdd12358ca48928526284b802591
   cabextract vc_redist.x64.exe
   cabextract a10
8. (Probably unnecessary step, I recommend skipping and seeing if things work): I tried `WINEPREFIX=$HOME/Games/aoe2_de winetricks directplay` per the instructions in https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/4vfa4c/age_of_empires_2_multiplayer_problems_on_arch/ and https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=167047, but this did not work for me. I believe that running this is probably also unnecessary to get multiplayer working if you have followed the cabextract instructions in the previous step, but I am documenting this here just in case.
9. If you want to have a single command that will just run the game, create a desktop shortcut if you haven't already, then look at the desktop file and copy the "Exec" line.
   For me, I can do this by running the following after replacing  with my actual username:
   
   cat "$HOME/Games/aoe2_de/drive_c/users//Desktop/Age of Empires II Definitive Edition.desktop"

I didn't test to see whether uninstalling and reinstalling vcrun2017 is still necessary on this version of wine, so it is possible that your install will succeed if you skip that step.

What does not

Multiplayer (does not work out of the box with installation workaround, but does work with cabextract workaround)

There is also an error that pops up on game launch that says that "The program BattleServer.exe has encountered a serious problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience" - the game seems to work fine for me after I click "Close" on the error message.

Workarounds

• Uninstall steam-installed vcrun2017 and install vcrun2017 through winetricks
• Install dxvk in the wineprefix (dxvk v1.6.1 worked for me)
• (For multiplayer) Download https://aka.ms/vs/16/release/vc_redist.x64.exe and cabextract vc_redist.x64.exe, then cabextract a10 in windows/system32 in the wineprefix

What was not tested

• Installing mods
• Higher resolutions that 1080p with graphics DLC

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Nvidia
• Driver: proprietary

Additional Comments

This is a known problem with older Intel GPUs. Try to use Wine 2.1. In most of case solve Direct3D glitch.

If you get only a black screen upon starting a game

• after wine 2.13, fix it with winetricks ddr=gdi (see https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43627)
• after wine 3.2, fix it with winetricks csmt=off (see https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44796)

Hit each direction key in succession while holding Ctrl. For instance:

1. Ctrl+Up
2. Ctrl+Left
3. Ctrl+Down
4. Ctrl+Right