Application Details:
| Version: | Retail (32-bit) |
| License: | Retail |
| URL: | http://www.half-life2.com/ |
| Votes: | 46 |
| Latest Rating: | Silver |
| Latest Wine Version Tested: | 4.0.3 |
Maintainers: About Maintainership
What works
Most things
What does not
Intro and ending sequences - the screen is completely black during the G-Man bits, but sound works. White squares appear sometimes in the sky - they follow the view around, but get hidden behind buildings Horizon is messed up over water - seems to reflect the ground/water where sky should be Water is just a flat texture, you can see the texture repeat a lot if you're any distance above the water. It's also opaque and doesn't reflect. Screen goes black around special effects, e.g. steam
Workarounds
What was not tested
Not much, played the game from start to finish.
Hardware tested
Graphics:
Additional Comments
Didn't have to change any settings, but gave it gold instead of platinum because of the (fairly minor) bugs. Wine 0.9.28 is almost unplayably slow - 0.9.29 is MUCH faster.
| Operating system | Test date | Wine version | Installs? | Runs? | Used Workaround? | Rating | Submitter | ||
| Show | Linux Mint 5 "Elyssa" | Dec 31 2019 | 4.0.3 | Yes | Yes | No | Silver | Tristan | |
| Show | Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco" amd64 (+ variants like Kubuntu) | Sep 30 2019 | 4.0.2 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Bronze | Franco | |
| Show | Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic" amd64 (+variants like Kubuntu) | Jul 31 2019 | 4.0.1 | No | Not installable | No | Garbage | Dadu042 | |
| Show | Linux Mint Debian x86_64 | Jul 01 2014 | 1.7.21 | Yes | Yes | No | Platinum | Philipglo Joshua Opulencia | |
| Show | Arch Linux x86_64 | Jul 24 2013 | 1.6 | Yes | Yes | No | Platinum | Artur h0m3 |
| Bug # | Description | Status | Resolution | Other apps affected |
| 5159 | Microphone xmit in Half Life and HL:S games very harsh and goes in and out of "focus" | REOPENED | View | |
| 22912 | Half Life 2 and Portal subtitles unreadable | NEW | View | |
| 24684 | Multiple Source engine based games (Steam): out-of-order rendering, bloom effect and lights are visible through walls when multicore rendering is enabled | NEW | View | |
| 27453 | Lag when loading new sound in source games | NEW | View | |
| 34080 | Half-life 2 : Ammo doesn't display when loading game | UNCONFIRMED | View |
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
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
