Dark Age Of Camelot

What works

Installing, Launcher, Patching, Character Creation, Gameplay - even the Cursor

What does not

Game Crashes if Pixel Shaders are activated in Wine!

Workarounds

What was not tested

RVR

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

2013-05-04 Admin note: the instructions below are old and may not apply to current Wine. 

The only thing you might want a patch for is the annoying disappearing cursor. If you can live with that then there is no longer any need to compile from source.

Dependencies: This game shouldn't need any dependencies for actual play, but I still recommend installing the wine version of Firefox, with flash 9, just in case you want to click on the links... Do not install internet explorer. Use wine's built-in version. Make sure it works with wine iexplore http://winehq.org

Install the mscorefonts and copy them to the ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts folder for a better browsing experience.

The game is supposed to have a 32 bit cursor but it's probably still under development.  If you don't see a cursor in game, or if it flashes alot, you can use the following hack to substitute the X11 cursor instead... However, don't hold me liable if it breaks other apps. ((It will make some games look as though you have a double cursor!~)). Please don't file bug reports against this hack.

--- ./dlls/winex11.drv/mouse.c.orig 2006-11-24 17:57:56.000000000 -0900
+++ ./dlls/winex11.drv/mouse.c 2006-11-26 23:33:32.000000000 -0900
@@ -648,7 +648,15 @@
*/
void X11DRV_SetCursor( CURSORICONINFO *lpCursor )
{
- Cursor cursor;
+/* Hack: prevent annoying blinking mouse pointer in (Dark Age of Camelot) */
+static int lastCursor; /* store state of previous cursor */
+if (!lpCursor) /* prevent drawing a blank cursor every other time */
+ {
+ if (lastCursor) {lastCursor=0; return;} /* return from function if cursor is blank */
+ } /* unless cursor is blank twice in a row, in which case we can let it be blank */
+lastCursor=lpCursor;
+/* End Hack */
+Cursor cursor;

if (root_window != DefaultRootWindow(gdi_display))
{

Hacking wine:

1. cd ~/install/wine # (or wherever wine sources are on your box)
   
2. vi wine-daoc.patch # paste aboove patch :w (save) :q (quit)
   
3. Patch wine: $ patch -p0 < wine-daoc.patch
   
4. Look up the dependencies for compiling wine on your distro on http://winehq.org
   
5. Install wine*: $ su -c "make install"
   
6. $ rm -rf ~/.wine
7. $ winecfg
8. Set Audio=ALSA
9. Use "emulation" (not driver emulation) or the game will crash on most soundboards.
   
10. Turn pixel shaders OFF or the game will give a GLX error.
    
11. Install game or copy C:\Mythic\Darkness from your windows partition to your .wine/drive_c.
12. Put in your Minotaur Expansion CD and run the executable.
    
13. The Expansion CD asks for location of Darkness folder. Select it and install.
    
14. Click icon or, in a terminal: $ wine camelot (or to skip the patcher, wine login.dll)

*If you are worried about the cursor hack messing up other programs you can run wine directly from the source tree without installing (may require SELinux context changes of wine executables):

$ /opt/sources/wine/wine camelot

Wine segfaults on Fedora 6 / Ubuntu Breezy: export CFLAGS="-fno-stack-protector" Fedora users also have the option of rebuilding the wine-0.9.25-1.fc6.src.rpm, which is a better option, since it prompts you to download any missing dependencies.

There is another segfault issue. This one happens if you are using a Geforce 4. The Geforce 440 MX (and many other types of cards of this genre) fails utterly to run this game on all 4 of my systems and drivers from 1.0.77xx to 1.0.97xx (and possibly beyond). It's a crappy card and if you have it, you'll likely have to upgrade. I imagine I might get it "sorta" working on legacy drivers by disabling some of the GLX extensions (ugh!). On the other hand, the nVidia Verto GeForce 6800 works great in the exact same machines with the exact same drivers and everything!

There may be other cards that work with this game, as well as other cards that don't work. Before submitting a wine bug, make sure you try a "known-working" video card.

Memory Leak: There is currently a memory leak of ~1.2MBytes/sec. I have only tested on Nvidia 6800 since that's the only card I have that this game will run on. There have been memory leaks before using nVidia cards, so it could be a driver issue.

Tips and tricks: Running the game with a niceness of 19 works well if you suffer from choppy audio. This also has the advantage of making the game "play nice" with your system and not hog so many resources (you can do other things while playing the game). I typically make a shortcut with a command like WINEDEBUG="-all" nice -n 19 wine "C:\Program Files\EA Games\Minotaur\(name of executable)" and a work path like /var/shared/EAGames/Minotaur (or wherever)