MechWarrior 4: Vengeance

What works

Single player:

- training mode

- campaign mode

- mech customization

- mouse/keyboard controls

- rebinding keys

- videos, except the intro

- audio

What does not

- Game is not playable in full screen, only windowed

- Only certain resolutions seem to work. 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768 work; however, any others seem to cause the game to crash

- The intro video does not play on launching the game, although it can be played through the in-game menu

Workarounds

What was not tested

- Multiplayer

- Georg Hennig's WIne patch to allow fullscreen

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Nvidia
• Driver: proprietary

Additional Comments

Installed and ran the game following the instructions in the admin note. The process went smoothly, except for the issues mentioned above. I used the suggested options.ini and it worked fine. The game seems quite 'sensitive' to those settings though - if I change the resolution or increase LOD, the game will crash.

Otherwise, the game seems playable with those settings. I gave a Silver rating because the fullscreen and resolution issues are quite annoying and the Wine patch seems like quite an involved workaround.

2015-02-22 Admin note: the following was extracted from a user comment made in 2008 and may not be relevant to current Wine.

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How to proceed to get the game working:

- Install it (should work fine; choose complete installation)

- Patch it, if you want to (for later patches, e.g. 3.0 you'll need to set your windows version to win98, because the Cdac14ba.dll creates an executable CDAC14BA.EXE inside windows/system32/drivers directory, which hangs, and you had to kill it several times, when you're inside game menu. For win98 it tries to load something like CDAC14BA.vxd which silently fails)

- Get a NoCD-crack from somewhere

- Sometimes, you'll have to have CD 2 inserted in your drive (or image mounted). The location of the CD must be set as CDRom-drive in winecfg, and in system.reg CDPath has to point to this location, e.g.
[Software\\Microsoft\\Microsoft Games\\MechWarrior Vengeance]
"CDPath"="D:\\"

- Create a file "options.ini" inside your game directory, containing this (modify it for your needs, these are high detail settings. screenwidth/screenheight settings might be interesting): Make sure options.ini has DOS file format (newline character is \r\n, not only \n). The easiest way is to create the file with a text editor of your choice, and then use the tool "unix2dos options.ini" (or "todos options.ini" for ubuntu users). For MW4 Black Knight, the options file is called "optionsx.ini."

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[graphics options]
videodriverindex=0
detailtexture=true
multitexture=true
lightmaps=true
culturals=true
footsteps=true
missionmusic=true
noblend=false
antialias=false
vertexlighting=true
simplelighting=false
mipbias=0
shadowmode=1
fontsmall=-2
fontmedium=-2
fontlarge=-2
fontlarge2=-2
fontlarge3=-2
screenwidth=1024
screenheight=768
bitdepth=32
fancywater=true
movietextures=true
maxlights=8
compositing=3
effectlod=0.000000
lod=0.000000
loadradius=4
HideSky=false

[sound options]
lowendsound=false
radius=1.000000
hardwaremixing=false

[special commands]
killgame=false
AutoTorsoCenter=0
HudDamageMode=false
HudTargetDamageMode=false

[server]
allowdecaltransfer=0

[network options]
ConnectionType=lan
ConnectionSpeed=10000
PacketSize=512
PlayerIcon=Content\Textures\stockdecals\decal_00.tga
TeamIcon=Content\Textures\stockdecals\decal_00.tga

[joystick]
BiThrottleCenter=0.300000
BiThrottleLow=0.250000
BiThrottleHigh=0.060000
OneThrottleCenter=0.300000
OneThrottleHigh=0.060000
OneWayThrottle=false

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The only critical key seems to be "shadowmode=1". Don't set it to "shadowmode=2", the game will crash whenever you see a Mech (including your own one on 3rd person view)

- Run the game with

wine MW4.exe -noautoconfig -window /gosnoblade /gosusehw /gosnodialogs /gosnovideo

Explanation:
noautoconfig / gosnoblade options:
Everything blade.dll related doesn't work; autoconfig uses blade.dll.

window option:
is optional, but as fullscreen doesn't work, this seems to prevent it from trying to go to fullscreen mode.

gosusehw option:
Without it I get an error dialog saying that my hardware doesn't fit to MW4 :-)

gosnodialogs option:
optional. suppresses error dialogs, where we would have to click "continue".

gosnovideo option:
With enabled videos, game doesn't even start. I tried to recompress the videos, without success. Also native amstream.dll doesn't work (with native amstream.dll game complains about getfiltergraph, before crashing, but that seems to be a non-critical error)