World in Conflict

What works

Everything.

What does not

When on higher pixel shaders there are one or two small graphics glitches (minor).

Workarounds

What was not tested

Multiplayer.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Unknown
• Driver: unknown

Additional Comments

To get past the opening crashing bug on Mac OS X, tell Wine to run in emulated desktop mode.

Also, use the DLL workarounds.

This is an attempt to summarize the steps needed to run World In Conflict and to compile a list of tweaks to make the game run as smootly as possible, if you have any additions, please make a reply with the subject "Extra tips for WiC!" and it will be tested, and if verified, added to this howto.

1. Read this before starting

Creating a seperate wine configuration directory for this game is recommended if you do not want to affect the environment of other applications/games that you run under Wine. This can be done for any of your other games, and it is an effective way to assure that your wine settings match those in this HowTo. It is however not strictly required.

World in Conflict should be run with Wine version 1.1.4 or later as it provides best performance, includes several bugs fixes relevant to the game, and support for copy protection.

2. Installing the game

Insert the disk, navigate to it's directory and enter this:

Observe that we set the variable WINEPREFIX at the beginning of the line. This will determine which directory Wine should work with. If the directory does not exist yet and/or has not been initialized by Wine, it will be automatically created and initialized before Setup.exe is run. If WINEPREFIX is not specified, your default Wine directory will be '$HOME/.wine/'.

Using the setup program, install the game to it's default directory and choose not to run the game after install - we're not done yet. In addition to the files copied automatically during installation, you'll have to copy over several files from the DVD to the directory the game was installed to. Usually, this should be 'drive_c/Program Files/Sierra Entertainment/World in Conflict' inside your Wine directory. The files to copy are:

binkw32.dll, dbghelp.dll, mss32.dll(From the 'bin' directory on the DVD)

wicloc11.sdf and wicloc12.sdf (From ldata/English, ldata/French, ldata/German, ldata/Italian, ldata/Spanish, or ldata/All depending on language)

Previously, it was necessary to install a crack for this game. Beginning with recent versions of Wine (~1.1 and later), this is no longer required. However, if we attempted to start the game now, it would crash right away. This is because World In Conflict comes with optional support for DirectX 10. As DirectX 10 is currently not supported in Wine, we need to disable it.

In addition, due to a few missing functions in Wine, the game would currently not be able to detect the hardware of your computer properly. Until these functions are supported in Wine, we will use Microsoft's original DLL to do the job for us. Therefore, get the file dxdiagn.dll from dlldump and save it to the 'drive_c/windows/system32' folder in your Wine directory:

www.dlldump.com/download-dll-files_new.php/dllfiles/D/dxdiagn.dll/5.03.2600.2180/download.html

Now let's instruct Wine about DirectX 10 and the dxdiagn.dll. Open a console and enter:

Click the Libraries tab, type in d3d10 under New override for library and click Add. You'll now see "d3d10 (native,builtin), hit Edit and select Disabled and hit OK. Then again under New override for library, type in dxdiagn and click Add. You'll now see "dxdiagn (native,builtin)" added to the list, so hit Apply and then OK to exit.

The game might still complain about its inability to detect your computer's hardware but you should now be able to set textures and other effects to "high" which was impossible before. Just hit "Cancel" whenever you see the warning dialogue in order to start the game.

3. Configuring the game

By changing registry values in Wine's registry, the performance of the game can be increased with the downside of a slightly decreased visual quality during gameplay.

The values you might want to set are as follows:

To make applying these values easier, copy the text in the box to an editor and save it to a file called 'wic-tweaks.reg'. When that's done, navigate to the file in a terminal and type this to import the contents into the registry:

This will adjust sound settings a little for a minor speed boost but most noteably, disabling GLSL has a great impact on performance while it won't really degrade the visual quality much.

Furthermore, you might want to run the game in your screens native resolution!With Wine the performance benefits from having a lower resolution are near none so there's absolutely no reason not to.

4. What works by now?

The entire single player campaign should work with only minor glitches in the last cutscene.

If you want to play multiplayer, the game will ask you for permission to automatically install the latest version of the game. This works fine under Wine and due to Wine's support for the game's copy protection, you will not have to re-apply a crack after updating. Overall, multiplayer works very well, including support for VoIP chat if you have your system set up correctly.

5. Issues

If you have problems displaying the ingame text properly (i.e blurry text / no text at all) make sure you installed the Microsoft TrueType Core Fonts ( msttcorefonts package found in the multiverse repository for Ubuntu users). Alternatively you can download or get from Windows the files tahoma.ttf and/or arial.ttf and copy them to your $HOME/.wine-wic/drive_c/windows/fonts folder.

Getting an error dialogue on game start-up complaining about your hardware. If you've followed this guide, you'll have overwritten dxdiagn.dll and hitting cancel will allow you not only to start the game (as it always will) but you can also turn settings to high if you want :) Skim trough the installation part of the guide for instructions on how to override dxdiagn.dll

The game crashes on start-up. Again this is covered in the guide. In short you need to disable the use of d3d10 so that the game won't try to use DirectX 10.0 rendering. Skim through the installation part of the guide for instructions on how to do this.

Acknowledgements: This guide is by no means a one-man show. It's comprised of information mainly from Cpt. Chaos, Hoodedman, kde and others. A big thank you to all who helped get this game working under Wine!