Asheron's Call

What works

Asheron's Call, latest download from Turbine as of Nov 2010. Running on Ubuntu 10.10, Wine 1.3.5 Nvidia Proprietary Graphics Drivers OSS4 Sound Drivers for SB audigy 2.

What does not

ALSA Drivers for Audigy 2 , Full Screen Mode in any resolution WITHOUT emulated Desktop.

Workarounds

What was not tested

N/A

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Installation was smooth, I followed the instructions here (at wine-hq) listed for an earlier version. *Needed setting change to get functional performance -I experienced either a complete system lock-up or a crash to gnome login screen when I attempted to play this game in full screen without emulating a desktop via the winecfg video options. The issue happens when Asheron's Call would attempt a resolution change. Using the desktop emulation in wine was the only way I could get this problem to cease. *Needed alternative sound drivers for SB Audigy 2 ** On-Board (intel I believe) worked fine -Asheron's Call did not give any sound when using the ALSA driver settings in Wine. Changing Wine to OSS will provide sound. If you have an Audigy 2 sound card, using OSS4 as the primary driver was the only way I was able to hear sound from Asheron's Call.

System requirements

• Hardware accelerated opengl (test with glxinfo | grep direct)
• At least 256MB RAM (free -m) with swap, more without it.
  
• Min. 1GB available disk space plus another 1.5G for download, extraction (df -h)
• To use on pulseaudio distros like Fedora, install alsa-plugins-pulseaudio (64 bit computers will need the i686 version of this as well).
  

Recommended Setup

• export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.games
• mkdir -p $HOME/.games/docs
• winecfg (sound defaults to ALSA) (try others if it doesn't work)
  

Firewall setup: Forward UDP port 9000

Asheron's Call came out before the era when Plug 'n Play routers were commonplace. I have heard that some routers work out of the box, but mine had to be set up manually.

• If the network is behind a firewall or router, use Firefox to browse to the gateway router's configuration page. (Use the route command to learn the address of the router's default gateway.)
• Look around for something like Virtual Server, Port Forwarding or NAT where traffic can be forwarded.
• Forward inbound UDP traffic on port 9000 to the game computer's IP address, as reported by ifconfig.
• If installing more than 1 client on a LAN:
• Copy the .games folder to each client.
• Edit the $HOME/.games/docs/Asheron's\ Call/UserPreferences.ini
• Change UserSpecifiedPort to (example, 9000 for first client, 9001 for second client, etc.)
• Open the above port on the firewall of each computer (iptables).
• Go to your router's configuration page.
• Forward traffic on that port to the computer you just set up.

Installation

1. Starting with the above wine configuration:
2. Download installer from http://trial.ac.turbine.com/
3. Install game, or copy from Windows partition.
4. Run winecfg and change My Documents folder (recommended).
   
1. Click on Desktop Integration tab
2. Under Folder, click on My Documents
3. Change link to $HOME/.games/docs
5. Full screen mode update: Proprietary video drivers like nVidia still need matching modes in xorg.conf (e.g. put in a line for 1024x768 and 800x600) because they use the old way of doing things and do not support the new kernel mode switching (KMS) that all the free video drivers use these days to switch fullscreen modes. "If xorg.conf has the mode, the game might even load."
   
6. If editing xorg.conf is out of the question, just launch the game in a window:
1. wine explorer /desktop=ac,1024x768 aclauncher.exe
2. or edit $HOME/.games/docs/Asheron's\ Call/UserPreferences.ini and set FullScreen=False
   
7. Some wine versions may encounter an encryption error during patch. Run it again.

Known bugs (not wine-specific):

1. When you map any of the keys UIOJK using custom keybindings the game will fail to load your custom keymap after that. You'll have to delete $HOME/.games/docs/Asheron's\ Call/acclient.keymap and start over re-defining your keys.
2. Sometimes when you perform two actions at once (i.e. turning and casting) you will get stuck performing the action, (you will get stuck spinning around). To fix this, cast a spell, drink a potion or perform some other action.
   

If you enjoy playing your games on Linux, consider contributing to the wine project.

Report problems: Attach logs of debug output to Bugzilla. Do NOT post them here.