Fuzzy Logic

So, thanks to Jeff Nadeau, I got hooked on WoW recently.  Unfortunately, I had a problem–How would I play this completely addicting game without the ability to play it on my laptop?  After all, the inability to play CSS/TF2 on my laptop with Wine was one of the big reasons I didn’t fail out of Engineering last year.  Luckily, after hacking at this for a few hours I managed a fix so I can properly lose all of my social life.

Just for the record, my computer is running Ubuntu Gutsy on a T61 14.1″.  The graphics card is the Intel X3100, running the default Ubuntu drivers.  The wine version used was Wine 1.1.2.

First of all, Wine has always been a really big problem for me. I never seem to get anything working properly.  In fact, up until today I had been running a year old version of Wine because any newer version somehow wouldn’t let me run the few applications I still emulated with Wine (mainly MS Office 2003).  Well, today I decided that I would bite the bullet and attempt to install WoW under wine.  Installing it, at least for me, was not unique–Copy the Installer.mpq files from each of the four discs, run the installer under Wine, and go for it.  After the initial game was installed (at version 1.0) the game ran perfectly–well, at least it booted up and went to the login screen perfectly.  After a series of what seemed like endless patches, I finally ended up at version 2.4.3, which is the current version at the time of writing this.

Now, I did something stupid: I assumed.  I assumed that since WoW had started up initially (v1.0) that it would start up after patches (v2.4.3).  After all, I looked through patch notes and there was nothing about breaking wine compatibility (I completely stole that joke from Jeff.  Proper credit is due). But, when I started the program under default settings (DirectX), it didn’t want to work anymore.  It showed my screen slightly mangled and had a cursor, but nothing would work (not even killing the X server or attempting to SSH/VNC in) to stop it.  After a few hard reboots, I attempted to open it with the command

wine Wow.exe -opengl

I assumed that since I was running in Linux and OpenGL was native, that would be a much better solution.  What did I get for my assumption?

The OpenGL version of the WoW login screen

Yes, that’s correct.  A completely messed up version of WoW’s login screen.  Maybe, though, it’s just a problem with the login screen.  Sometimes various things in menus don’t work in games under Wine and it’s just a matter of getting into the game itself.  I assumed this was one of those cases, so I went for it.  My result?

A new graphical pack for WoW that Blizzard pushed just to me!

That’s right.  An AWESOME version of the WoW interface. Great. At this point, I was getting fairly frustrated.  I’m going to cut out the hour or two of me surfing the internet for any semblence of a solution and tell you the final setup I used to get it to work.

This is my solution.  Your results may vary.

• In the ‘winecfg’ program, uncheck the box that says “Allow Pixel Shader (if supported by hardware)“.
• Add the following lines to your Config.wtf (located in ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WTF/)

• SET UIFaster "2"

  SET ffxDeath "0"

  SET ffxGlow "0"

  SET gxWindow "1"

  SET SoundOutputSystem "1"

  SET SoundBufferSize "150"

• Keep the display on DirectX (wine Wow.exe -d3d) and remove any references to OpenGL in your Config.wtf file.  I could not get it to work with OpenGL, but DirectX worked.

I doubt this solution will work for everyone, but I thought I may as well put it up to keep others from the same headache I suffered through.  This is what I got in the end:

My final result after lots of hacking with Wine