ARMA2/OA/CO/Demo/Free/TOH on WINE/Linux!

[crckdns 1]

I guess there can be nothing done about the 64bit incompatibility right? I mean while running the server-install script and compiling wine x86 on a 64bit system~

[Kindling 1]

LkFp: That's actually pretty promising, the missing textures is something I saw under WINE even with GeForce cards and the nvidia blob until recently. Up until version ~1.3.30 of WINE, textures refused to draw no matter what overrides or in-game configuration settings were used. For a time after that, disabling anti-aliasing and/or anisotropic filtering caused the issue. You seem to be having a similar level of performance to my Radeon 6990 with fglrx blob, too. Loading does seem pretty slow, usually I get 20-30s load times - this might be the NTFS kernel module (which isn't exactly optimized for fast file access if I remember correctly). Try removing/adding dll overrides for individual components of DirectX or playing with registry settings, maybe we can resolve the texture issues.

crckdns: What incompatibility? That's exactly what the script does - it compiles 32bit WINE binaries on a 64bit system. It uses the 32bit version of WINE because it's generally more compatible and stable (especially with dotnet40 for ARMA2NET, which provides the extensions that are the reason you would want to use WINE over the native Linux server application, presumably) and the ARMA II server application doesn't use over 2.5GB or so of memory, anyway.

[DualJoe 10]

Couple of issues I'm still having with the most recent wine-release and nvidia-blob.

On certain distances textures are drawn black (I think it may be the specularity map), weird thing is that it doesn't happen at all distances. While not as irritating as white/gray textures I was hoping someone may have found a workaround.

Has anyone managed to install the DLC's from sprocket in wine? Not only does the sprocket downloader not work, I also can't get the DLC's themselves to install.

Apart from that performance seems to be pretty impressive actually. Loading times are amazing, even on my old rotary disks loading maps is about as fast as from a ssd on windows.

Also is it just me or have other people noticed that AI seems to work a lot better in wine than on windows? AI drivers now really put the pedal to the metal. I've done a few quick tests with civilians and vehicles turned on and letting AI drive me across Chernarus. Not only do they seem to drive (a lot) faster, but they also seem to get stuck less as well. One particular impressive example was in the center of a town with buildings and fences blocking the left, two vehicles on the right and one vehicle parked sideways in the middle of the road ahead. Not only did the ai-driver not get stuck, it actually found a way around the situation rather quickly. Not as quick as a human player, but still in one fluid slow moving weaving go, instead of the usual unending forward and reversing while crashing into things until either the vehicle is damaged or the surroundings have been flattened enough drive across.

Similarly I found the AI in general to be a lot more responsive and challenging than what I get in windows. Could that be related to the lower framerates somehow, leaving more time and power to the cpu for AI-pathfinding and such? If so, is there a way to get the same effect in windows? I wouldn't mind dropping below 60 fps to get an AI-improvement.

[Kindling 1]

DualJoe: The DLCs work fine for me when downloaded directly (at least ACR does, that's the only DLC I have via the BiS store). Loading times will be due to the greatness of BTRFS and ext4, I bet :) and as for AI, that's interesting - are you sure it's not due to some AI configuration under your Wine-installed ARMA that you didn't do for your Windows-installed version? If not, that's very interesting. Do you dual-boot? If so, perhaps you could provide comparison videos?

I'd invite you all to check the first post and have a look at the tickets I've linked - if you get the same issue, upvote and confirm them. If not, comment on them with your specs so we can narrow the issues down to specific hardware. If you get a different issue, submit a new ticket and let me know - I'll add it to the thread.

One recent issue I've heard about is that BattlEye may be having issues >1.176, preventing multiplayer play. Lots more information here - I've simply not got the time (or likely the skill) to patch this functionality into Wine, but I'm sure that somebody will be happy to do so if one of you guys could repro the bug. I'll do so myself when I have the time, but that may be a while.

Edited October 9, 2012 by Kindling

[Blechreiz 0]

Here is how it looks like in current state

Loading time was quite slow this time. Maybe because of video recording, I didn't investigate further.

Actual game is loaded in 3:00.

Maybe it's issue with S3TC, I'll also try to disable various d3dx overrides in winecfg.

Turn on Anti-Aliasing and these texture problems should be gone.

Iam using Mac OSX 10.8.2 with Crossover 12 and this uses Wine 1.5.15. With the newest Arrowhead copied from my Win7 disk and the game starts. With turned on AA I can see textures and move in the world. The loading times are really fast and the performance is very very good. Something killing the ability of normal playing is a limited mouse area. I can only turn myself for 270° sometimes 180° and then the turning stops. I guess its when the mouse courser in the background reaches the edge of my screen in the background. But its a lot better than the old raw input problem. Playing around with the graphic options worked great. The only remaining problem that doesn't go away are popping LODs like bushes. I could imagine to start playing with OSX if there wasnt the problem that stops my mouse at some point and forces me to turn quickly around the other direction.

Greets

[fraczek 4]

Blechreiz, could you share your wine config? Or crossover config? What winetricks does it use for it or something? I am currently dualbooting into Win from my OS X machine to run Arma2, which is quite a chore. Last time I tried it under wine I gave up because of the rawinput. BTW, for OS X, you might try the Smoothmouse driver beta, it's a complete mouse driver rewrite to eliminate the mouse lag. It's probably not gonna help with the limited mouse movement (I guess that's more from XQuartz not capturing the mouse properly, when it leaves the virtual desktop but there are XQuartz settings for mouse that might help, or a more recent version than I tried last time), but if we manage to run Arma properly it might help with input lag a lot.

[LkFp 10]

Turn on Anti-Aliasing and these texture problems should be gone.

...

Unfortunately no luck with that. I tried various graphic options but no easy solution seems to be there for linux FOSS drivers. I tried forcing AA by GALLIUM_MSAA=2, but with that Arma didn't start at all.

I'm regularly trying master branch of mesa, but no change for Arma so far. Log always states:

EE r600_shader.c:155 r600_pipe_shader_create - translation from TGSI failed !
EE r600_state_common.c:737 r600_shader_select - Failed to build shader variant (type=1) -1

This leads to that GLSL shaders (I think they were all fragment shaders) use too many temporary registers than hw and/or gallium is capable to use. Even when using experimental patch from Vadim Girlin to optimize bank swizzle didn't help. It only started to produce more informative messages about too many registers to handle.

Its interesting that AMD's Catalyst drivers can cope with this, so it is definitely solvable. Either in Wine's HLSL->GLSL translation layer or directly in Gallium.

Currently I'm trying to figure out if LLVM is working for optimizations and how to use that there (R600_LLVM=1/0 makes no visual difference).

Btw. good news is that d3d9_36.dll Wine override is no longer needed to start and "play" (aka walk aroung in editor) (as of Wine 1.5.22). But when changing graphics settings Arma crashes.

[Blechreiz 0]

Blechreiz, could you share your wine config? Or crossover config? What winetricks does it use for it or something? I am currently dualbooting into Win from my OS X machine to run Arma2, which is quite a chore. Last time I tried it under wine I gave up because of the rawinput. BTW, for OS X, you might try the Smoothmouse driver beta, it's a complete mouse driver rewrite to eliminate the mouse lag. It's probably not gonna help with the limited mouse movement (I guess that's more from XQuartz not capturing the mouse properly, when it leaves the virtual desktop but there are XQuartz settings for mouse that might help, or a more recent version than I tried last time), but if we manage to run Arma properly it might help with input lag a lot.

I didnt change anything at all. Only used a Nocd-Patch since the CD wasnt recognized. Later I copied my fully patched OA from the Windows HDD. I think dualbooting is yet the way to go. Even with the eliminated mouse area some bushes are popping up and some textures become dark from time to time.

I didn't test it long enough due to the low mouse movement area. Ill research on that smoothmouse driver beta and how to insert it into crossover. Removing the limited mouse area is the first step to go. The object and texture problems should be easier to resolve. The FPS were very high and satisfying.

btw: Im using a free Crossover(12) 14 Days trial for my test with OSX 10.8.2 and my machine is a hackintosh based on an Intel I5 and AMD HD5870.

http://s14.postimage.org/hraumk7bl/Foto.jpg (241 kB) <- You can see some bushes missing here, too. But the overall quality and FPS are as good as in windows or better.

---------- Post added at 17:25 ---------- Previous post was at 17:23 ----------

Unfortunately no luck with that.

Sad. I had the same texture problems and with Antialiasing=Medium or higher they were completely gone. But you shouldn't forget that we use different systems. You could give the newest OA a try where you have more graphic settings.

Edited January 23, 2013 by Blechreiz

[Blechreiz 0]

Ill research on that smoothmouse driver beta and how to insert it into crossover.

No success on the limited mouse area with these drivers. On an Island with more buildings the FPS were pretty low this time. Ill wait and hope.

Im no longer using Mac OSX and have quit my research.

Edited January 27, 2013 by Blechreiz

[DualJoe 10]

I got stuck with the sprocket installers of the DLC's. Been a while since I've tested, but I couldn't figure out what I needed to install for those to start working. Then recently my windows 7 decided to disable all usb-devices, with no option to turn them back on, which for me was the last straw and I wiped it completely. Unfortunately I can't leave arma2 so I've found an alternative for wine in the form of virtual machines.

I've removed windows and repartitioned my system with the objective of using virtual machines. My system supports IOMMU and I've gotten vga-passthrough to work both in Qemu-KVM as in XEN. 3D performance in KVM on my system is horrible, but I've seen reports on the internet of people with great results. XEN however works absolutely brilliantly. I only got it working this afternoon, but I'm allready blown away with the results sofar.

One thing I don't understand is why I'm getting better performance in Arma2CO on a couple of old HDD's in a virtual machine with 6 of the 8 cpu-cores, compared to what I was getting in windows native with the game on a ssd and 8 cores at a slightly higher clock. To be fair though I was running a nvidia GTX560TI and I added an 7950 just for vga-passthrough in the virtual machines, but if anything that should've only increased cpu and hdd-load, not the other way around.

Anyway if your system supports it and you've got an AMD videocard, I can highly recommend XEN for windows7 (gaming).

[LkFp 10]

I'm glad this config works for you well. That's exactly my target config for A3. :) I was just thinking about passing through NVidia card for PhysX. I didn't do any research on this so far, so I'm not sure if this will work but I can't imagine why not.

[DualJoe 10]

Actually nvidia cards are less likely to work than AMD/ATI ones. Something to do with vga-bios and drivers. Apparently NVIDIA Quadro have no issues, but those things aren't cheap.

That doesn't mean it's impossible, but from what I've seen it requires compiling your own xen-version with built in bios. Vga-bios seem to be listed online or you can extract it yourself, but I haven't gotten to that point yet. That's why I was hoping to get kvm working, because now I have to run the nouveau driver when running xen. The plan for me was to have linux and windows running simultaneously with full 3d, but hadn't counted on the nvidia-driver ruining things.

For those interested, I did some more tests in Xen today and it really does work eventhough my PSU and/or cooling is too weak for stable overclocking. I'm running a fx8120 at stock speed with a Nvidia GTX560TI and an AMD7950 passed through for windows running on 4 cores. I'm running arma2 on higher settings at a higher framerate (1920x1200 with most settings on Very High except terrain, hdr and postpro, sofar between 48 and 60 fps) then when I was running windows on the bare metal on all cores and overclocked to 4GHz with the Nvidia card.

I don't understand why I'm getting so much more performance from Arma running in a virtual machine compared to native. Looking at the graphs the 4 cores are not being maxed out at all, so I might try some different malloc and exthread settings. I haven't even begun tweaking windows7 yet. I find this performance increase really, really odd.

[DualJoe 10]

I have to correct myself about the horrible performance of KVM I mentioned above.

I did some more experimenting with KVM today and it looks like the bad performance results were my fault. Eventhough I'm still using lower ingame settings than under xen and with considerably lower framerates, Arma2 is however perfectly playable under linux-KVM with 4 cores on a fx8120 cpu at factory clockspeed.

Looks like I've still got some wrong settings resulting in low IO-speed and probably the ondemand-cpu-governor, but I got an average of 32 fps on benchmark 8, with Vsync turned on and simultaneously running the Farcry3 installer in the background on the same virtual machine. I had to lower the harddisk-bandwidth stuff like texture- and objectdetail, viewdistance to around 1200 and turn hdr to the highest setting, but framerates now don't seem to go below 28 fps. Because of the need to increase hdr and seemingly no effect of the extra cpu-work in the background, I suspect that running just the game may not be enough cpu-load to trigger the higher clocks of the ondemand cpu-governor.

[Coati 1]

First, thx for the script and the effort. I tried starting arma using your server script on a headless server without using a full x installation. I get the directx x3d problem but dont know a way to fix that without using vnc to override this in winecfg as you wrote in the bug list.

Is there any option to fix this without using vnc or a full x11 installation?

err:module:import_dll Library X3DAudio1_6.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\arma2oa\\arma2oaserver.exe") not found
err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for L"C:\\arma2oa\\arma2oaserver.exe" failed, status c0000135
armawine@debian:~$ XIO:  fatal IO error 2 (Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden) on X server ":99.0"
     after 8 requests (7 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

EDIT:

The installer didn't install winetricks xact properly, after doing this manually everything works like a charm, thx

Edited January 31, 2013 by Coati
solution found

[fraczek 4]

Strange behaviour on OS X 10.8.2 and Wine 1.3.36 versus 1.5.23 (or earlier 1.5.x) -

Wine 1.3.x the game loads and works average speed (with rawinput patch), although LOD & text. issues.

Wine 1.5.x game loads, but runs at an abysmal speed never fully loading the scene (like, frames per MINUTE almost). The only scene that loaded reasonably quickly (minutes) was the '-world=empty' sea.

Any clue to the abysmal performance of Wine 1.5.x?

As per the mouse getting stuck (Blechreiz's and mine problem on OS X), it's probably due to way Wine captures mouse on OS X - it centers the cursor every time and reads relative movement only. Or something like that. So until Wine changes that in OS X branch there is probably no luck in trying Arma2 under Wine in OS X. There is a ticket about it on XQuartz support, which mentions it's probably Wine bug.

Guess it's back to BootCamp for me :(

Edited February 3, 2013 by fraczek

[FortyBot 1]

Thanks for this tutorial; it has really helped me out. I now have the game running, but I have a problem: when I load any mission, the graphics are completely white, with occasional completely black props. I have tried adjusting settings, but nothing seems to work. However, when I restart the vid to apply settings, it restarts as normal, before fading to white again over the course of 1-2 seconds. I have googled for the issue, but I have not found anything on the topic. Has anyone here experienced the same problem? How should I go about troubleshooting this?

[Kindling 1]

Hi FortyBot,

Which graphics module are you using? If you have the open source nouveau or radeon drivers they may be missing features needed for rendering the scene. Try installing the proprietary driver for your card model (eg. nvidia or fglrx).

I saw this problem myself under early versions of WINE. Have you been sure to use the latest version? Use wine --version to ensure you are running version 1.5.25.

Also try enabling/disabling antialiasing. This is the feature that previously caused this issue.

[FortyBot 1]

Hi FortyBot,

Which graphics module are you using? If you have the open source nouveau or radeon drivers they may be missing features needed for rendering the scene. Try installing the proprietary driver for your card model (eg. nvidia or fglrx).

I saw this problem myself under early versions of WINE. Have you been sure to use the latest version? Use wine --version to ensure you are running version 1.5.25.

Also try enabling/disabling antialiasing. This is the feature that previously caused this issue.

Ok, so I upgrade my drivers, but also had to do some updates before it would install. I did the updates and rebooted with the new drivers, but now I can't launch playonlinux. I'm using Fedora 17 x86_64. Here is what playonlinux outputs:

[sean@DeepThought python]$ playonlinux
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "mainwindow.py", line 33, in <module>
   import wx, wx.aui
 File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/wx-2.8-gtk2-unicode/wx/__init__.py", line 45, in <module>
   from wx._core import *
 File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/wx-2.8-gtk2-unicode/wx/_core.py", line 4, in <module>
   import _core_
ImportError: /usr/lib64/libEGL.so.1: undefined symbol: wl_display_sync
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "mainwindow.py", line 33, in <module>
   import wx, wx.aui
 File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/wx-2.8-gtk2-unicode/wx/__init__.py", line 45, in <module>
   from wx._core import *
 File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/wx-2.8-gtk2-unicode/wx/_core.py", line 4, in <module>
   import _core_
ImportError: /usr/lib64/libEGL.so.1: undefined symbol: wl_display_sync

[Kindling 1]

Which graphics card, and which driver are you using? If it's NVIDIA, make sure you've done this or, if it's AMD, this. What does the 'glxinfo' command give you?

[FortyBot 1]

Which graphics card, and which driver are you using? If it's NVIDIA, make sure you've done this or, if it's AMD, this. What does the 'glxinfo' command give you?

Here is the glxinfo. I am running intel integrated graphics (sandybridge). I used this graphics installer.

[Kindling 1]

I'm not particularly familiar with Intel graphics, but your glxinfo output looks fine. Have you installed the 32bit Mesa drivers? I believe Fedora requires 'mesa-dri-drivers.i686' on 32bit/multiarch WINE. What's the output of 'rpm -q mesa'?

[FortyBot 1]

I'm not particularly familiar with Intel graphics, but your glxinfo output looks fine. Have you installed the 32bit Mesa drivers? I believe Fedora requires 'mesa-dri-drivers.i686' on 32bit/multiarch WINE. What's the output of 'rpm -q mesa'?

Did you mistype? I'm on a 64 bit distro, so I'm not sure I should install the 32 bit drivers...

Also, there is no 'mesa' package.

[SpreadTheBlood 1]

Thanks so much for this tutorial. I thought getting Arma to run on linux was hopeless..hope I can get it working :bounce3:

[Kindling 1]

Though I'm not primarily a Fedora user, I believe that the 32bit libraries are required for WINE as I don't think the 32bit libs are automatically installed on 64bit systems running 32bit WINE.

And sorry, I meant 'rpm -q mesa-libGLU'.

[FortyBot 1]

Ok. I've talke to people in #fedora and they say that my hard drive is most likely corrupted (which would explain a lot), so I'm going to reinstall fedora from scratch, and hopefully stuff will work again.