Entropia Universe

What works

All game mechanics work, but controlling the interaction is problematic (see below). The work on shaders in wine3d has brought texture to avatars and other objects for the first time, but it's not perfect...

What does not

Some shaders fail, making some objects (e.g. avatar parts or entirety) invisible. In fact, the avatars and mobs are only visible "indoors"! This is obviously a serious issue.

Mouse control is severely limited due to its tendency to leave the game window. This is not affected by setting wine to prevent the same from happening.

 Installation program still hangs.

Workarounds

What was not tested

n/a

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

The work on shaders in wine is really paying off for EU. The graphics are a bit funky right now, but a whole lot better than before. Except when they don't show up at all. heh

The game does run on wine, but it will require some libraries to be installed. Fortunately, this process is simplified greatly by the Winetricks script.

I am testing using Kubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) on two systems: a dual processor Pentium III/Geforce 4200 desktop (running an x86 compiled system) and a Core2/Geforce 9600 desktop (with the AMD64 compilation). Both systems can run Entropia Universe reasonably well on wine.

I will leave the old instructions for those who prefer to know exactly what is going on and complete control over what is installed on your system. If you just want fast&easy, follow the italicized instructions. Taking that route, you should be up and running in less than 15 minutes if you already have an installation of EU on a partition somewhere.

Instructions:

1. Setup DirectX 9.0C
   • Install and test DirectX 9.0C following the guide on Wine Review or the more robust and elegant but slightly less well documented guide on Lone-Wolf Scripts. Note: You must change your windows version to w2k for this step to work!
     Download this script and run it (sh winetricks). Select DirectX from the menu that pops up. Follow the directions. Watch the output closely as it may warn that you need to install a de-cabbing program. If so, cancel and install that utility first.
     
   • When you run dxdiag, it may indicate that ddrawex.dll is not properly installed. Copy it from the WINDOWS/system32 folder of an existing windows install or download it from the 'Net to your wine windows/system32 directory.
     The same applies. Run dxdiag (wine dxdiag) in the .wine/drive_c/windows/system32 directory and let it test directX. ddrawex.dll is usually not installed automatically so copy it manually if you see that it's missing.
     
2. Install the Visual C runtime files
   • Winetricks can simplify this process (this applies, do the same). Save this script to your drive and then type: sh winetricks vcrun2005sp1
   • Copy WMVcore.dll and its dependencies (wmasf.dll, wmasf.dll) from the windows partition (in windows/system32) to the ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32 directory and set wine to use these native DLLs as you did in the DirectX 9.0C installation or download the files from the 'Net and do the same.
     Install Windows Media Player 9 using winetricks. The rest of the instructions apply to all installs.
     
3. Install Entropia Universe:
   • Simplest: If you have installed Entropia on a windows partition, make sure that partition is mounted. You can run EU directly from that directory.
   • At your own risk: If no previous installation exists, you can get a friend to send you the contents of Windows/Program Files/Mindark/Project Entropia/ (leaving out the /data subdirectory, which is huge) and run wine CLDLLPatcher.exe to download the data and update the install. However, this method seems to corrupt the VC runtime setup on wine, so backup the contents of ~/.wine and overwrite it after updating fully via CLDLLPatcher.exe.
4. Run Entropia Universe
   • cd into the EU directory of the windows partition and type:
     wine Entropia.exe
   • To update the installation after VUs, run CLDLLPatcher.exe with wine. It was previously possible to pass parameters to Entropia.exe as the client loader would, but that seems to cause a version error now. If someone discovers how to specify settings, please let me know. These settings were:
     • -df (full screen)
     • -k? (language, where ?=1 is English)
     • etc.

With the recent wine versions, mobs and avatars are not visible unless indoors. This seems to be the result of a patch that changed the nature of blitting, but that's just a guess.

A workaround for this is to go into the wine configuration and uncheck the box on the graphics tab that enables pixel shaders. That will bring back mobs, but as claymation objects (flat grey).