Gothic 3

What works

Kind of everything: Loading, saving, sound (excellent), videos, casting spells, attacking, speaking, trading, using teleports (slooow (5-20 secs), but also on windows it's not that fast)...

What does not

When enabling shadows, or setting Low-Sight to a value greater than zero, the game's unplayable cause of graphic glitches (large parts of the screen appear black and / or there are giant textured objects around).

Without the dll-mouse-patch mentioned below, the game is unplayable, cause the mouse pointer leaves the window - so you can't turn more than once around ^^

Graphics problem: When looking at a surface with an angle of below about 5°, the surface appears black / with black dots on it. Looks ugly sometimes, but isn't *that* bad, but it would be _really_ nice if that problem could be fixed :)

The only real problem: Sometimes, there are... well, I don't know, black "planes" somewhere... they aren't everywhere, mostly at places where many objects are (an example is Mora Sul in Varant, its full of these things). Sometimes they are (buggily) textured, sometimes they just appear black. If you look in their direction, large parts of the screen appear black, and the more of them i see, the more performance decrease i experience. While keeping away from these places, the game is quite playable, performance is OK (I can't compare how it would be on windows, but with low settings, I can play quite fluently, I guess about 25-30 fps). Sometimes there are also pink, light-green or deepblue dashed/dotted strips, but they don't seem to have any influence on performance. They also aren't that frequent (and thus not really bad).

Some spells (e.g. Fireball) create a bit of lag (5 seconds), but only the first time you cast them.

The game crashes sometimes (GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY), but with my 2 GB of ram, these crashes are rare (about once in 2 hours or so) and easily visible (shortly before, many objects begin appearing black, so then just save and restart the game).

In SaveGame menu, the letters of the day or time (I don't recall, I believe it was time) are jumbled (for "17:00", the 7 is above the 1) - but who cares :)

Workarounds

What was not tested

Dunno if I forgot anything, I think I tested quite everything. Before writing this report, I played about 3-4 hours in all areas (desert, ice and forrest).

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

* This report is based on my experiences with a NVIDIA 7600 GT graphics card (current closed-source drivers by NVIDIA) and an Intel Core2Duo 2x2.16 Ghz CPU. My X screen resolution is 1920x1200, but I set the game resolution to 1024x768. I'm running Sabayon Linux 4.0 (based on Gentoo) with KDE3, and compiled wine-1.1.15 myself (but I also tried with the binary version shipped with Sabayon, no difference visible). I noticed wine-1.1.16 *not* to work correctly, but I'm not sure if that is a problem of my system configuration or not. * Try to set all options to the lowest value possible in ge3.ini in order to make the game work. Most important is setting low sightrange to 0 (else large parts of the screen will be black / garbled) and shadows to off - and probably shader_version to 1.4. You can set vegetation value higher, I experienced no problem with this. AFAIK enabling post-processing heavily decreases performance. Don't forget the mouse patch, and don't forget to set this registry key mentioned below to "fbo". Use WINEFORCEMOUSEWARP wine Gothic3.exe to start. Remember you can't do "wine '~/.wine/drive_c/Gothic III/Gothic3.exe', you have to navigate to the Gothic directory using "cd" and then start the game as mentioned above; else it will crash with an error saying "cannot find config file". Without installing *both* the official patch and the community patch of the game, it won't work anyway. If you have a large screen (like me) and want to play in windowed mode in order to increase sharpness: * Enable windowed mode in ge3.ini, and play around a bit with the mouse warp settings * You got to move the window *exactly* to the upper left edge of the screen (cutting the window decorations!) in order to make mouse work correctly * There will be a mouse pointer visible all the time, but you'll get used to it ^^

Installation:

- install the game

- patch the game with your favorite patch (version 1.75.14 recommended)

- use native d3dx9_40.dll (native d3dx9_36.dll seems to work fine, too) - see d3dx9 installation

Tuning options:

- you may set "Timer.ThreadSafe=false" in "Ini/ge3.ini" if the game has low frames

- you may enable "Automatically capture the mouse in full-screen windows" in winecfg's graphics tab if you are using "Emulate virtual desktop", otherwise the mouse will leave the window

Wine version:

- wine-1.5.11

Bugs:

- 7991: Try a newer graphics card (>= geforce 8)

- 10264: Copy protection is removed with Gothic 3 patch 1.5.2 or newer

- 31643: The game is shipped with vcomp.dll, so you likely will not notice this one

- 33479: Please use wine 1.5.28 (last known working version)

System:

- tested with GeForce GTX 570/PCI/SSE2 and proprietary nvidia drivers (4.1.0 NVIDIA 280.11)

- tested with radeon HD 4350 and open source drivers (2.1 Mesa 8.0.3, Gallium 0.4 on AMD RV710)

FAQ - Useful Registry Keys - Applying Patches - git