Half-Life 2

What works

Everything

What does not

Nothing

High framerates

Workarounds

What was not tested

Playing the game completely.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Since the game works almost flawlessly, I'm tempted to give it Platinum. But the framerate is still way too low. On my computer, it should be playable on highest setting with an FPS of around 60. But it never gets above 20. Note that this is not dependent on the settings. Even with everything on low, the framerate still stays low. Changing the OffScreeenRenderingMode help a little but not enough. The performance of this game has increased enormously in Wine, but we're still not completely there yet. Please Wine-Team, make this game work and completely remove my need for dual-booting.

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.