Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

What works

- The introductory movie (nothing special)
- "Previously on Max Payne"
- playing the game (gameplay is perfect)
- commandline options (not that that's hard to do :P)
- Developer modes, including model changing, and progress indicators
- Custom modules
 

What does not

- Blending effects including hiding the HUD, getting shot/hurt, dying, flashback-style sequences, bullet-time visual effects and the story "player" between chapters
- Post-process effects must be disabled or the game is unplayable
- During Part 3, Prologue, at one point the screen goes entirely dark red. I suspect this is one of the blending effects. There is no way to get past this point AND see where you're going
- Surround sound mode (can't hear Max in-game)
- Mirror refections cause an apparent graphics lock-up. This is a regression that was last seen prior to Wine's 2005 May release.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Nothing I can think of.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Use the Loki installer.

If you can't hear voices, such as Max's, or other sounds appear to be missing, try turning off EAX environmental effects or multi-channel audio in the game's options dialog (before it loads the game).

If you have ati radeon card with fglrx driver installed disable 3d settings in A.C.C. (untick "override applications settings") If textures look weird disable catalist A.I. and AA (anti-aliasing).

Tab and backspace buttons wont work if you tic "allow windows keys" from the advanced settings in the game options dialog. If you cant use painkillers (default key is Tab and backspace) disable this option.

If you are launching the game from console you will have probably noticed many error reports such as problems with shaders. If you get this error: "fixme:d3d:swapchain_init The application requested more than one back buffer, this is not properly supported" disable triple screen buffer from game options dialog. For this error: "fixme:d3d_shader:print_glsl_info_log Error received from GLSL shader #" disable glsl by running winetricks in terminal (a GUI should pop up and you should check disable-glsl).

A lot of people using open-source / mesa OpenGL drivers seem to have trouble getting the game (or even the demo) running. After the intro movie the game quickly crashes at the loading screen.

This mostly affects the people with integrated Intel cards, but should also become a problem when opensource drivers for nVidia and Radeon hardware become more common. See bug: bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24276

If you're experiencing these crashes during the loading screen and you're using a open-source mesa driver then the chances are high that you have no S3TC compression/decompression library (libtxc_dxtn) installed and mesa is therefore disabling S3TC completly.

The Max Paxne 2 engine seems to rely on the S3TC texture formats being always available and can't handle the case when these formats are not advertised by the driver. There is a fix and a workaround for the problem.

* The fix is installing libtxc_dxtn on your system (keep in mind that you need a 32bit compile).
* The workaround is forcing mesa to advertise the texture formats even when the said library is not installed (the engine seems to be happy with this). You can do this e.g. with driconf. By default not installed see http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DriConf  for instructions. Launch this graphical config utility and select the tab 'Image Quality'. You should see an option "Enable S3TC texture compression even if software support is not
available" which is probably set to "off". Enable it and retry starting the game. It should work now, if not then you're probably facing a different problem.

It is recommended to set the OffscreenRenderingMode to "fbo" when playing Max Payne 2 (doesn't matter if full or the demo).

With the default setting of OffscreenRenderingMode ("auto", which maps to "backbuffer") wine hits some severe limitations, which are connected to the backbuffer dimensions.

When post-processing effects are enabled ingame (e.g. set to medium) the bullettime screen is cropped. Cropping is affected by the ingame resolution.
Also affected are motion blur effects during cutscenes.

For more information see this bug:
bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14686

If you REALLY need to use ORM="backbuffer", make sure you use a ingame resolution where at least on dimensions has a POT (power-of-two) size. This applies e.g. to 1024x768 or 1280x1024.

For best game experience use ORM="fbo". To set this open winetricks by typing "winetricks" in terminal and tick orm=fbo
All see: wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys