Half-Life 2

What works

The installer works but only after you place the contents of the first disc in a folder on your hard drive and place all the .cab files of all other discs in the same folder. It seems that wine doesn't ask for the next discs and errors out when it can't find the next cab file to use. I played it once using a pre-built binaries of wine for Suse but the performance was extremely slow and the sound was really "choppy." I found that installing wine using my native compilers for gcc and g++ and then installing half-life 2 this way increased performance 10 fold. The graphics are not that great. For example, some of the characters have blue faces and objects that are far away can't be seen until you get closer. Don't know if it's something wrong with the objects or if there's suppose to be fog showing up. Another minor problem was with the audio. Setting my audio acceleration to basic under winecfg resolved the audio problem.

What does not

Apparently, installing from the discs doesn't work correctly. The first disc and all cab files from every other disc have to be placed in a folder on my hard drive. Also, to install, the installers have to be executed using "windows path" instead of a "unix path." For example, "c:\setup.exe" instead of "/media/HL2/setup.exe." Installing from "unix paths" gives an error stating that said cab files can not be located under the dos location for my disc drive, "j:\path\folder." I found this to be true for all games that contain multiple install discs.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Don't know what else to test.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Installing

First of all install Steam and make sure it's working properly. It is a simple and fast install. You don't want to go through all CDs installing HL2 to find-out that Steam is foo-bared.

Half-Life 2 can be installed from a) multiple CDs; b) DVD or c) downloaded from Steam. b) and c) should work as-is without any major problems.

For multi-CD install:
- Run winecfg and make sure that your cd-rom drive is mapped to a drive (d: for example).
- Start install from outside mount point ex: open CD-ROM in winefile then double click on hl2.exe

cd ~ && wine explorer d:\\

- When asked to change CD, in the separate terminal run

wine eject d:

- Insert next CD and mount it (browse to it with Window Manager's "file browser"). If CD isn't mounted Wine won't see it

Playing

General

In Steam -> File -> Settings -> In-game disable "Steam Community In-Game". Of left enabled Half-Life 2 will not crash on the startup.

Sound

Half-Life 2 doesn't work well/at all without sound. Use ALSA (recommended) or OSS (problematic on most hardware).

Video

On modern GPUs Half-Life 2 should be able to run in all dx-levels (70, 80, 81, 90). However there are might be some visual problems on higher dx-levels. Some drivers known to have problems:
- nVidia: recommended driver: 1.0-9631. Older 87xx drivers have number of bugs.
- ATI: Appears to have numerous problems with advanced features. Ok for dxlevel 70 & 80. Anything above won't work or will be exactly the same as 80.

For better graphics quality you might want to use "-dxlevel 90" command option (might be much slower then with -dxlevel 81)

To fix number of problems with "water in the sky" and lighting add this to the registry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D]
"OffscreenRenderingMode"="fbo"

Starting

You can start Half-Life 2 by double clicking on it in Steam. Also you can start it with:

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Progam\ Files/Steam
WINEDEBUG=-all wine steam.exe -applaunch 220 -novid -dxlevel 90 -width 1024 -height 768

Known problems

• Some objects are over-bright or too dark
• Shadows are broken
• Several areas with noticeable FPS slowdowns.