Heroes of the storm black images

[giaco79]

Hi everyone,

I've been a Wine user for a long time, and I follow its development, but this is my first post.
I've been playing Heroes of the Storm recently, until a couple of weeks ago on Ubuntu 16.04 and it was working ok.
Since I upgraded to Artful 17.10 I have the problem you can see in the attachment.
Images are just black, including the loading screen when I first launch the game from the Blizzard App.

It happens both on Xorg and on Xwayland, and I tried on Wine Staging version 2.19, 2.20 and 2.21.
As it's only happening on this new Ubuntu version it could be a bug in a library not a bug in Wine.
Should I file a bug anyway?
Is anyone else experiencing this issue?

Thanks!

[jkfloris]

Did you try -dx9 in
Settings -> Game Settings -> Additional command line arguments

[giaco79]

Sorry I should have mentioned it, I always run it using the -dx9 option, otherwise it doen't start at all, which is a known bug:
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43775

I also checked the option to run the 32 bits client.

I have the following in winecfg:
- disabled all of the configurable staging features
- disabled dx dlls: d3dx10, d3dx11 as I'm using dx9
- disabled some nv* dlls as I don't have an NVidia card.
- in the Graphics tab I tried different combinations

[jkfloris]

as I don't have an NVidia card.

I do have a NVidia card and I doesn't get the black images. What kind of GPU do you have?
I tested in a clean wineprefix
-wine-staging 2.21
-no dll's overrides or other settings
-use -dx9

Also, maybe there is a hint in de terminal output

[giaco79]

Are you also on Ubuntu 17.10?
This problem started happening since I upgraded Ubuntu to 17.10, doesn't seem related to the wine version, which is why I haven't opened a bug on Wine yet.

I'm on a Dell Latitude with Intel i7-6600U CPU and integrated graphics. Hardly a gaming laptop, but it was enough to play HOTS at low settings.

I tried re-enabling those dlls, but it didn't make a difference.
The only thing I haven't tried is a fresh install of HOTS, but I wanted to avoid to redownload 10 GB, potentially for nothing.
It looks like I might have to try that.

[giaco79]

I found the problem!
I had a look at the debug logs before, but found them quite verbose and unhelpful to my inexpert eyes.
However I had another go and spotted this:

fixme:d3d:wined3d_dxtn_init Wine cannot find the txc_dxtn library, DXTn software support unavailable.

So I searched if I could install such library, found it and:

Code: Select all

sudo apt install libtxc-dxtn-s2tc libtxc-dxtn-s2tc:i386

Fixed!

I didn't even know that library existed.
If I understand correctly that library is only used by the Mesa driver, which you don't use if you use the Nvidia graphics driver.
However that library is only recommended by the libgl1-mesa-dri package, instead of being a dependency.

Other people have been stung by this issue on Ubuntu/Debian:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Dota-2/issues/1213
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1684755

It looks like it's a Ubuntu package dependency problem rather than a Wine one, it was a good call to not file a bug on Wine