Half-Life 2

What works

Tested all of the following:

 

GAMEPLAY:

• Movement - default keymappings work, custom keymappings work.  No noticable deviances from normal Win32 operation.
  
• Mouse - Mouse is appropriately trapped to fullscreen and window mode when HL2 has focus.  Mouse functions properly and does not suffer from common bugs associated with other WINE applications such as Swat 4 and Unreal engine games.
• Game runs stable over extended gameplay

GRAPHICS:

Tested on a BFG Tech GeForce 9800 OC the following works with the latest driver compiled against stock kernel:

• Anisotropic_filtering setting up to maximum allowed in increments.  Higher settings resulted in expected slowdowns but these are consistent with Windows version within reasonable deviances.
• Anti-aliasing setting: engine would not allow enabling of anti-aliasing in any configuration.
• Aspect ratios: game ran fine in both normal and 16:9 widescreen aspect ratios.
• Resolutions: game ran fine in all allowable resolutions up to the maximum of 1366x768 allowed by my display.

Note: Some strange rendering errors result in the broken glass textures "flickering"  or water surfaces flickering between translucent/opaque.  Not sure if this is WINE related, OpenGL related, or related to the graphics card.  Unable to reproduce in normal Win32 environment with Windows XP however.

SOUND:

• ALSA and PulseAudio worked just fine.
• Some music does not loop when it should, however, this behaviour was reproduced on Win32 environment as well.
  

What does not

Game runs fine in normal operation, see above.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Tested all aspects and configurations I could think of, see above.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Works almost perfectly outside of the box. Rendering errors do not appear to be Wine related, however, they are very minor in nature and do not detract from gameplay.

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.