Gothic II

What works

(used the Gothic 2 Gold Edition, that is Gothic 2 version 1.30 and the addon on version 2.60, wine version 0.9.30 on Ubuntu 6.06)

installation works like a charm for Gothic 2 if you use Gothic2-Setup.exe and if you copy the files from cd 2 and 3 *beforehand* to harddisk (preferable ~/.wine/drive_c/CDX where X stands for the number) because I could not eject the CD, even if the installer asked for a new CD

installation for the Addon works like a charm, if you use Gothic2-Addon-Setup.exe

the launcher links to the game are placed on the desktop and in the menu

What does not

for both, Gothic 2 and its Addon, the AutoRun.exe files result in an fatal error:
title bar reads: "autorun.exe - Fata Error"
text below reads: "the file ./autorun.ini does not exist"
However, the autorun.ini file itself is there, it has just different capitals AutoRun.ini is beeing used.

the game; running
cd ~/.wine/drive_c/games/gothic2/system
wine gothic2.exe
leads to a 100% CPU-load for about 3 seconds, then fall back to normal. However, the game will not start or will anything else (like changing screen resolution). It will not give out any error messages on the console with the above command, just a new prompt. Even setting "musicEnabled=0" in $gothic2/System/Gothic.INI will not let the game start.

Workarounds

What was not tested

N/A

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

there are reports that Gothic 2 and even the addon will run fine with musicEnabled=0 (see gothic2 appdb entry v 1.30)

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 have to disable music by setting 'musicEnabled=0' in [Gothic_2_Path]/system/gothic.ini .

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