28 Dec 2013

I've been trying to run World of Warcraft 5.4 (Cataclysm/Mists of Pandaria trial) on my Ubuntu desktop "dop". Although it has Platinum status on wine, I still have some issues with it.

I haven't played in quite some years, but I did used to play on Ubuntu and I mainly had sound issues. I have upgraded my hardware since, and I can say sounds works and graphics perform surprisingly well with my CPU's integrated graphics (Intel Core i7 4770S "Haswell" with Intel HD 4600 GT2). I have about 50fps just running around with medium settings on 1920x1080.

To get to this point:

  • First of all it didn't work at all, so I checked the Ubuntu help article on WoW. There it is suggested to run "glxinfo | grep rendering" and this already suggested to install a missing library. After installing this library the game would already start.
  • I had to modify the Config.WTF, set gxApi to OpenGL
  • I have a script that starts the game with "wine Wow.exe", but I first do "export WINEDEBUG=-all" to prevent wine from logging all kinds of debug info. This is said to improve performance, although I don't really notice a difference.

Sound wasn't working at this point so I referred back to the Ubuntu help article on WoW. Under "audio" it is suggested to look in the winecfg under the Audio tab, but there was not even a driver selected in my case. It is also mentioned that it might be caused by an old wine installation. This was definitely possible, because I copied my home dir from my old installation. So I followed this instruction to delete the Audio entry inside the [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Drivers] registry key with regedit. Now the winealsa.drv driver was available in winecfg and sound works fine in the game.

I also had the problem that my secondary monitor would turn off when starting the game and I had to do this:

  • In the game, set to Windowed, non full screen.
  • I have to run winecfg and under graphics select "emulate a virtual desktop", with desktop size set to 1920x1148 (accounting for the Ubuntu task bar)
  • Everytime I would change the desktop size setttings, the game would not scale properly, but this was easily fixed by clearing the Config.wtf as much as possible.

What's still not working is updating. It might be my own doing by copying my Windows installation to prevent the huge download a second time. I can start the launcher/updater, but it will just hang and log something about nog being able to write to a system directory. I have solved it so far by just copying my Windows installation again after an update (or at least the modified files).