This is going to be pretty long winded and full of thoughts/questions. If you have the patience to share any thoughts on the following I would very much appreciate it:

Hey folks. I've been playing now for a few days from a linux mint install using wine 1.4.1, winetricks to disable shader and fart with other dll options, and mono to bring enough .net support into play to get the portal application to work (sort of).

I tried many ways to get things working but there was finally success with some unusual order of setting things up, and running the portal updater with mono and dealing with some buggy behavior in the portal app itself that requires that the DAOC folder be located in "settings" every time the app is opened to prevent a crash. (no big deal)

What concerns me, is that, when I connect to the server, the Portal app gives an error that the server is requesting the 3 mods but they are not present (the craft/Taj/classic), the portal app then tries to auto load the mod manager, which crashes immediately, but upon closing that, and hitting "ok" in the dialogue boxes that are telling me that the server needs the mods, the game launches and connects just fine. The game seems to work semi-fine from what I can tell but I notice that armor items are "labeled" as weapons. They still work as armor items but the name in their info box will say something like "cloth weapon" or "chain weapon" when it should reach "chain armor." I am thinking perhaps this is related to the lack of craft patch? I have not yet tried crafting so am not sure if it is functioning or not at this time for me.

I believe I can "manually" install the mods (i can get modmanager to run separately with mono), but I don't want to unless the mod packs available from uthguard (here) are the same as what the Portal would auto-install anyway. Should I try to install the mod packs or assume that if i am able to connect that everything is fine?

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Finally.. I'm experiencing far-below expected performance. I have read about people running daoc on linux with typically better than windows performance. My current performance is fine in some places but choppy when facing certain directions in certain areas. video drivers are installed and seem to be working as intended. Hardware should be overkill. Athlon II 3.5GHZ (propus), 12GB DDR3 1666, GTX460-768MB. I believe the solution to the performance issue lies in gaining access to graphical configuration options that aren't displayed in-game. Is there a config file with more in-depth options? Also, What DX version would be best suited in this situation?

Thank You,
Eric

Do you see any bug dialog when the updater crashes?

I've got the mods patched in. Decided to go ahead and move forward on that. Seems like everything is fine with the mods, though, the items are still displaying with incorrect naming but work as intended.

Problem now is primarily performance. I've done some googling and basically know at this time that the performance problem is related to the fact that I had to disable the pixel shader in order for the game to run without crashing out. There are some fixes floating around and I'll try to report back if I am able to implement any of them. From what I can figure at this time, disabling the pixel shader seems to cause the game to revert to a software rendering mode of sorts.

Regards,
Eric

The problem is related to a wine "bug" that has gone unresolved for years. Wine reports "0" for "MaxVertexBlendMatrices" when it should report "4." There is a hack that requires compiling wine from source with a mod script that could resolve the problem but I believe it was likely written for an older version of wine that may not work with 'other' programs/games I would like to be able to run. I'm still holding out for a less complicated approach as I'd like to have a single wine prefix for all of my .exe needs. I don't like the idea of having to make settings changes every time I switch from gaming to work related programs. Still working on it... In the mean time I think i'll turn off the pixel shader so i can get my daily fix

Heya,

could I ask you for the favor to write down some of your installation steps? Tried to get this to run under ubuntu since last year...with dotnet35 installed Portal will encounter an error everytime I try to connect to a server and mono ( including 2.0 and 4.0 ) won't even start the Portal.exe here...would be much appreciated


Greetings

Hi Geriain,

I gave a sort of step by step for how i was able to finally get it up and running with good performance in this thread here: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=29609

When trying to run these programs make sure to do everything from a terminal, often a failure to launch will show up as an easy to solve error. Portal.exe calls on .net framework but the limited support of it or the mono option both lack the full set of functioning instructions needed to carry out the automated process's that Portal.exe now tries to carry out (like running the updater/modmanager)... These things have to be performed in a more manual way with clever little "helper shoves" along the way.. For example, the updater creates a series of files but they need to be flagged executable for the updater to finish what it is doing, this is something that would normally be done automatically in windows, but you have to do manually when trying to make it work in linux. Also, patching your installation is best done by running the modmanager separately with the mod files manually downloaded and placed in the proper location/s.

Best of luck

Eric

According to Metty, newest DaocPortal 2.8a works under linux (connect.exe).

Using wine, yes. The automated modding flow will most likely still not work completely by itself. Copying an existing windows DAoC installation, and using Connect.exe w/ wine should work fine.

Edit: I'll look into the whole auto-patch situation a bit more closely soon