Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

What works

• Raids work, at least 3 Groups were looking fine
• Customized UI (DroxUI) was working
• could play for hours
• Balanced, High Performance, Highest Performance
  

What does not

• Cursor is block-like
• occasional crashes, e.g. in Khal
• Performance about 30-50% compared to running under native Vista 64

Workarounds

What was not tested

• APW Raiding
• Highest Detail
  

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

I have to start the Launch-Pad 4-5 times, every time the Launcher takes you one step further into authenticating - and it seems that two instances of the launcher are running during VG. Being not deep enough into this, I can just say: try starting it multiple times and see if it works.

System Requirements:

• 24GB free hard disk space (yes huge)
• 1GB RAM (2GB recommended)
• Graphics card supporting pixel shaders 2.0 (shaders 3.0: NVIDIA GeForce­™ 6 series or ATI Radeon™X1300 or better recommended)
• glxinfo | grep direct # should say yes. If not, check your distro's docs for setting up accelerated video drivers. This test is no longer valid. You may need to run glxgears and see if you get satisfactory frame rate, oh, I don't know, 1000fps or better is a guess.
  
• Disable Compiz (GL Desktop, Desktop-effects) for better performance.
• Fairly clean system. At least 50% free CPU resources (run top and check).
• Fullscreen mode requires that your modes (or metamodes) be set up properly in xorg.conf (run xrandr to see if your X server can swtch to e.g. 800x600, 1024x768 or whatever you run the game in). "If the X server can't switch, the game will bitch."
  

Mouse Cursor Hacks

Mouse cursor should work fine now, so skip this section.

If for some reason you can't see your mouse cursor and you are familiar with git, you can get many of the latest wine hacks and fixes that are reported to work, including cursor hacks:

git fetch repo.or.cz/wine/hacks.git master:hacks
git checkout hacks

The following hack should no longer be necessary. It is included for posterity. If nothing else works, this will prevent wine from hiding the standard X cursor so you will at least have some kind of cursor to see where your mouse is. It won't be all fancy and it won't morph during mouse-overs but at least you will be able to see it!

File to change: wine-source/dlls/winex11.drv/mouse.c

void X11DRV_SetCursor( CURSORICONINFO *lpCursor )
{
if (!lpCursor) return; /* quick hack, until .ani cursors are supported */

Run "make" from within the wine-source/dlls/winex11.drv/ and it will build a new winex11.drv.so which you can copy to where you installed wine (usually /usr/lib/wine or /usr/local/lib/wine)

Wine >= 0.9.61 automatically runs wineprefixcreate so just omit this step. Otherwise, open a terminal as a user, preferably not sudo or root account as this would give wine unnecessary priviliges on your system. (If you accidentally ran "sudo wineprefixcreate" you may have to restore your user permissions to the hidden .wine folder: chown user:user -R .wine)

Configuration

$ winecfg

• Ignore winecfg errors, unless it's something you can fix.
• Under the Graphics tab, make sure "Allow Pixel Shaders" is checked.
  
• Fixed in cvs (0.9.59): You should no longer have to un-check the box that says "allow the window manager to control the windows" so try and see.
  
• Choose an audio driver and test it with the test button.
  

install wine_gecko component by browsing to a web site:

$ wine iexplore http://winehq.org # any web site will do. click yes to install wine_gecko

$ wine explorer /desktop=foo,1024x768 wine Vanguard

Perforamnce tweaks: Use regedit and add these keys under HKCU//Software//Wine//Direct3D:

• OffscreenRenderingMode = "pbuffer"
• You can also try "fbo" if your graphics card supports it.
• fbo seems broken. If you see no graphics, just names floating above their heads, try pbuffer or backbuffer instead. Some people run it this way regardless, for faster frame rates.
  
• Open your driver control panel, e.g. NVIDIA X Server Settings tool and turn off Antialiasing. Override Application Setting.
  

For more information, check the appdb for other Sony games, such as EverQuest II http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=358

Be sure to check http://www.station.sony.com/support/ for KNOWN ISSUES that affect Windows™ (and possibly Linux™)