Overview
Fast guide to get almost everything working as it was native (network play is still off limits for a weird bug I’m not able to workaround netplay is real too).
Introduction
It seems that a lot of things lead this game to crash (usually on start). To make sure you get this game working don’t use an existing WINEPREFIX, refer to “Appendix: How To” on the bottom of this guide if you don’t know how to do that.
Also, I only tested this game with the latest 1.8rc3 (and rc2) wine version, if it doesn’t work after you went through this guide with your system’s version, consider updating wine.
This guide is not about setting-up wine or installing Steam for Windows through wine and it’s intended for medium-advanced users who already got to that part.
If you need to setup wine or Steam for Windows on your system you’ll find everything you need on the internet (helps being on linux since it seems there’s more linux love for those kind of things).
Baking the WINEPREFIX
Once you set up a win32 WINEPREFIX, move to the directory where you have your Steam.exe executable (usually C:Program FilesSteam inside the WINEPREFIX) and run it.
Now enter wine control panel
disable every joystick and confirm.
Then you need to install MS XACT to be able to control GGXrd audio
Make sure you enable CSMT on winecfg and if you have an nvidia card go get PhysX
Be careful installing or overriding other 3rd party libs because I tested thoroughly enough to say that a lot of things make this game crash on start (even crashes at start by its own quite often).
Running the game
If you don’t have/need a joystick, just run and enjoy, otherwise you will need some tool like joy2key to convert joystick inputs to keyboard ones.
Below you can see an example configuration line for my arcade stick:
The game will still crash on start like 2-3 times in a row, but once it starts, it keeps on at 60fps for hours (never crashed on my after start).
Starting the game fullscreen on a virtual desktop (read below) fixed the random crashes on start I was getting before but I got a whooping total of 2 mid-game crashes in ~10h playtime (still, probably something mainstream not related to wine).
As for game configuration options, I’m playing with everything at default except vsync which I turned off (enabled through __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=1).
I also noticed that running the game directly in Fullscreen leads to crashes more often than starting on window mode (maybe it’s just for me). Once you successfully loaded the game in windowed mode, you can press F11 to enter/exit Fullscreen mode.
The game crashes 100% if started fullscreen on 1366×768 (at least on wine). To workaround that you can load the game fullscreen in a virtual desktop set as 1280×720. If you previously set your screen resolution to 1280×720, you will at least get a proper 1280×720 borderless fullscreen resolution on game start:
Since for GGXrd Steam Overlay “fades” once the window loses focus, running the game in a virtual desktop works around that issue too.
You can also downsample through the nvidia “viewport” option (don’t know about AMD) from 1080p
Replace CRT-0 with your monitor code (may be DVI)
Finally Netplay seems to be able to work just fine because I was actually able to play some full 60 fps low latency games, but most of the times the fps are around 45~50 and the game is slowed down, anyway don’t be worried (too much) by the extremely low fps on lobbies, it doesn’t mean anything on actual netplay.
What doesn’t work ATM
- I was not able to get my joystick working “natively”
- Once I drop into a lobby FPS drop like crazy 60 > 8~25 (depends on the amount of people active in the lobby) and online play seems to be based on “luck” since like 70% of the times I get 45~50 fps¹
- I was not able to play on my native 1366×768 resolution on either windowed or fullscreen mode
¹ It seems that also people playing on MS Windows are getting similar issues, along with frequent low fps (and slowed down gameplay) playing online, so it cannot entirely blamed on wine. Most likely a combination of a mainstream bug and poor wine implementation of some functions.
Appendix: How to create a separate WINEPREFIX
To create a blank win32 WINEPREFIX you just need to point it to the directory you want it created to and specify the win32 attribute:
It is important that only “/path/of/your/” exists, because wine needs to create the prefix directory on its own.
Different WINEPREFIXES may run different wine versions, even at the same time, and sometimes this comes in handy.