Gothic II

What works

game works fine if you follow the workarounds in the extra comments

What does not

The music with plain Wine, see the workarounds in the extra comments(need winetricks)

Workarounds

What was not tested

The music, as I didn't want to use winetricks for this game, but it is mentionned to be working in other versions

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

There are several bugs plus one game issue you need to work around to play this game without problems. Bug 7425 needs to be worked around or the game does NOT start. It is about the music, either disable it in Gothic.ini or use winetricks. See the global explanation of the game for the details Bug 37892 the program Vdfs32e.exe crashes at start up, you can dismiss the crash, it does no harm Bug 30984 if you're using a french keyboard, the key '2' will NOT draw the bow, you need to use an US keyboard or to revert the commit described in the bug and build wine The game bug is about the animations and subtitles during the extension specific parts, the DVD does provide the files, but with the wrong names. They need to be renamed. In JoWooD Productions Software AG/Gothic II Gold/_work/Data/Scripts/CONTENT/CUTSCENE rename OU.BIN to Ou.dat rename OU.CSL to Ou.lsc

If you want to start Gothic II with music enabled, you have to use the following native dlls: dmband.dll,
dmime.dll,
dmloader.dll,
dmstyle.dll,
dmsynth.dll,
dmusic.dll and
dmcompos.dll.

The easiest way is to use winetricks:

$ wget http://winetricks.org/winetricks

$ sh winetricks directmusic

WARNING: winetricks sets more DLL overrides than necessary. In my case I had to remove the override for 'dsound' (winecfg -> Libraries) or the game would crash at the main menu: "C: failed to initialize sound, MSS reported: Broken waveOut driver 'buffer done' flag never set".

Otherwise if you don't want to use native dlls, you can explicitly disable music by setting 'musicEnabled=0' in [Gothic_2_Path]/system/gothic.ini, but you shouldn't have to.

It is possible to run Gothic II using the open source graphics stack, at least with Intel and Radeon cards. The "i965" (Intel GMA X3100) and "r300" (ATi Radeon 9500 - X1950) drivers are reported to work, others will probably work as well, so please test it and leave a comment below.

What you need is S3 Texture Compression (S3TC), a technology covered by a patent which makes things complicated.

 What you have to do:

- Get the GUI tool 'driconf'. For examle: 'sudo apt-get install driconf'

- Start 'driconf', either from the console or from an entry in your application menu.

- Find the entry "Enable S3TC texture compression even if software support is not available" and set it to "yes"

- Start Gothic normally and hope that it works flawlessly.

Since mesa-7.11 this should also work with gallium drivers without having a libtxc_dxtn.so.

There are issues, for example, the floor might be invisible. Leave a comment :)

Azerty layout has numbers accessible with the shift key so switching weapons was broken and there is nothing in the settings to change that.
The workaround was to switch to another layout using : setxkbmap us
Changing it in the Gnome 3.22 menu didn't work.

When using SPINE to get HD textures and DirectX 11 rendering you might have to download SHW32.dll and vdfs32g.dll and copy them to C:\Windows\System32