Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned

What works

Installation, playing, saving, etc

The only problem is already known on MS Windows : it's the fact that movies clips do not load during some SYDNEY interactions inside the game and also for the sierra logo at start.

In fact every time the game need to load an avi movie (encoded in MS RLE), the program seems to load the file in a very small black window and you can see the main cursor flickering red (like normally during speechs) but it never ends and the only solution is to quit (with alt+f4) 

But there is an existing workaround  (see next paragraph)

What does not

The SIDNEY movie problem exist also on MS Windows but desinstalling all existing movie codecs (like K-lite and so on) seem to let the program deal with the faulty movies files.

Workarounds

The problem here is that contrary to MS Windows, even with no codecs packs addition, the program can't manage the faulty file for SIDNEY investigation.

After trying a lot of things (like Virtual Machine, native msrle and video dll ...) I found a (quite) simple workaround even if it need a bit of manipulation.

The main idea is "use a wine version that can't manage at all ms RLE movie clip in order to make the program jump just after the problematic clip and then go back to normal version"

So let's go :

1. First get Gabriel Knight 3 
2. Install Gabriel Knight 3 normally into a clean prefix (and find some NOCDPATCH, copying the brn files from CDs to the Data directory if needed)
3. You have a good running version that will be OK for everything --except SYDNEY-- so let's call it the OK version
4. Inside the game you can just disable the incremental rendering option
5. Preferably using PlayOnLinux install a second time the game into a clean prefix using a (very) old WINE version. For example I use the wine version 1.3.32-tlj2 inside PlayOnLinux (because it was the one that was already install, but I know also that the 0.9.98 works and I think everything under 2.0 => lets call it the DEBUG version
6. use winetricks quartz AND winetricks devenum into the DEBUG wine directory
7. launch the OK version and plays smoothly until the infamous SIDNEY movie bug occurs (for me it was on day 2 with Grace) . Think to save just before any SYDNEY investigation.
8. At this time copy (or better make a --soft-- link using the ln program) between OK save games directory and DEBUG one's for your savegame (fastsave.gk3 in my example)
9. Launch the DEBUG game using software renderer (use the -secondary option or change it into regedit from "detect" to "software" in order to let the game running)
10. Load your savegame into the DEBUG version and make your SYDNEY investigation. The softxare will complain that there is no way to play the movie clip and that Gabriel Knight installation must be damaged but you can just continue and even if you can't see the movie clip, you jump just after the problem : hourrah !
11. Save again and copy it (or using links it's already done !) to the OK installation "save games"
12. Continue this way and do it again next time you will need it !

I know, it's not that simple but thanks to this tricks I manage to go throught the bug that stop me playing this part of the wonderfull Gabriel Knight Trilogy !

Another thing, reading this you can wonder why I did not stay into the "DEBUG" version for all the game ... it's because into the DEBUG version, you will not have hardware 3D acceleration, the cinematics will be boggous and there is a lot a graphics buggs ... as expected in very old wine versions :)

Just for addition, I use a french version made for automatic installation on new computers windows so not sure it's the 1.0 version but it's definitly not the GOG one nor the demo. 

You can also find some information into this website : Sierra Help (GK3)

What was not tested

Playing to the end because I was so happy to find this tricks that I wanted to share it before ending completely the game

Nevertheless I manage to finish the part where the buggs occurs and use this workaround to go through 6 o 7 bugs of the same kind.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: AMD
• Driver: open source

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