Icewind Dale - 2nd Post - intel vga, 64-bit Linux

Recently I've revisited Icewind Dale part I., after a while. I was facing trouble starting the game copied from a previous installation to my new Arch Linux desktop. I was forced to reinstall, but this time I decided to install it on my laptop to make it easier to access whenever I feel so.

So the configuration of the laptop is something like a dual core Intel 64-bit with Intel GMA 965 driven by a freshly updated Arch Linux distro. The installation went nice with all the expansions (plus the Lure Master free to download expansion) along with the No-CD patch for the 1.43. This time I didnt even have to bother with symlinking devices. Just used Winecfg to add the CDROM as a drive - today's wine is handling these things very nicely, even the automounted devices.

To make things more interesting I'm running this on an AMD64 architecture. I have to use bin32-wine and lib32 packages to be able to run the 32 bit Windows executable. The wine is version 1.1.35 - it's important, because with a previous version it didnt want to start with GLX error, or another wine version crashed upon pressing Okay in the character generation's background story editor pane.

So to sum it up, even the weak Intel GMA 965 is able to handle things in 1024x768 with latest xf86-video-intel driver 2.9.1 and X.org 1.7.3. I did switch off some of the effects tho' to make it run smoother - a bit of a shame for a video chip from 2007, isn't it? Well, that's what you can expect from Intel vga, it's not for gaming certainly. Still this time it's a 'go' situation, it works well for a game made in 2001 + wine from 2009. :)

Neverwinter Nights 2

Neverwinter Nights 2 is another game of BioWare second in the Neverwinter Nights series. It's with D&D rules and the story plays in the Forgotten Realms near Neverwinter. It has decent 3D graphics, requires a strong GPU/CPU combo to play. Using this guide I could install and play NWN2 with wine 0.9.52 plus the additional native dlls of Windows (devenum, dxdiagn, d3dx9_30, imm32, ms vc80 dlls and such) and a little registry tailoring with wine's regedit. Tested it for some couple of hours, configuring 3D options and playing. Works good so far, slower than in Windows although but only a few drawbacks in the graphics with the similar look. One major problem is the small map is not working as you can see it on the shots. I will modify this post later if more things turn out. I have installed Mask of The Betrayer expansion and am playing it - as I've already finished the original one (under Windows).

I could easily patch the game in offline mode to the latest NWN2 final patch set. I only had to download the update zip files (around 240 MB). Combats and such work with good speed. I had to switch shadows off, bloom on, water reflections off, water refraction on. Without these I had some problems with the shaders of the game. Turning shadows off means a large cut on GPU stress and it made the game rather playable with medium look distance in 1280x1024 with my configuration.

I've found an open bug in wine's bug tracker. There's a workaround for non displaying maps in outdoor area: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9193#c15. ("Pressing ALT-ENTER twice...") No luck with indoor though.

The installation of the expansion was pretty straightforward without any errors. To apply the latest patches I had to rename the nwn2_pcx1_*.zip files to nwn2_pc_*.zip to make it work with the offline installation. I've started the campaign with my good old wizard/pale master combination, level 18. Playing the expansion I have not met any critical bug yet. I've patched the game to the latest expansion patch available. One mediocre problem I've found is the rest option getting stuck. I had to restart the game to be able to rest. (I remember that this happened once in plain NWN2 under Windows too.) This occurred only once so far in a gaming of 4-5 hours. Also going to the shadow plane once resulted in the gray shader blocking the view from above. (Restarting the game helped.) So far that's about the expansion.

Icewind Dale I. - 1st post

Currently I'm playing this title. It's one of those famous Black Isle games. Beautiful painted 2D graphics with AD&D set of rules in the Forgotten Realms.

I've stumbled upon it in a hypermarket's PC game shelf in the form of a 3 in 1 game set of Icewind Dale / Heart of Winter expansion and Icewind Dale 2 for about $12 which I counted as a bargain for such a cool combo. I jumped in and pushed the box between two packs of mineral water.

I was counting on it to work under Linux as previously I had messed with Baldur's Gate and wine some years ago. And I was right. It installed flawlessly with latest vanilla wine 0.9.52, I had to run not even winecfg. Of small importance but a bonus was that the base game was recorded in 1 DVD format. Symlinking the automounted /media/ICEWIND directory under dos devices of ~/.wine directory was a key thing to run it.

There's a small configuration tool sitting in the game's directory which gives many possibilities of configuration regarding game play and graphics too. One advice I can give you is to experiment with the resolution (I set it to 1024x768) and try to find out which gives the nicest interface experience. In some of the higher resolutions you may get magnified buttons and such. Look at my screenshot, it looks good I think. :-) The 1280 resolution had bigger buttons and not so nice UI compared to the 1024x768, although the higher resolution the bigger part of the levels you'll see. My compromise is to use 1024x768 on my 1280x1024 19" monitor. (I've added a screen shot with the "too big buttons" mode.)

If you have Heart of Winter expansion and patch set installed you'll have an option to use OpenGL rendering mode. It results in a much nicer fog of view effect yet I experienced crashes when quick saving rooting in the GL libraries of nvidia driver. So I go with normal engine settings.

So far the game is rather enjoyable. I have to root out some evil presence around Ten Towns and the Spine of The World. I set up a party of 3. Two multi class fighters (dwarf cleric, elven thief) and a gnome illusionist. They are around raw level 6-7 now. I'm deep in the game and experienced no crash at all after I found the right settings. There seems to be some minor lags with the sound system as far as I can tell it. When speaking with people sometimes the loading of the dialog takes some seconds.

All in all I much enjoy playing the game. You can have it for a few coins maybe around your location and the 2D graphics made in 2000 are just really nicely done. This game got nice reviews around the net, e.g. gamespot.com gave it a score of 8.6. If I'll finally finish it with no Linux related problems I'll recommend it for sure for the Linux gamers.