Minor Success with Star Trek and Neverwinter Online

[Simon of Aragon]

My good friends over in Michigan worked on issues I have had with both these games since they dropped DirectX 9 and Windows XP. Both games are made by the same company. They now run well enough (playable) under Wine 2.15. However the graphics are incomplete. There are see through objects and some of your character's clothing and body parts are transparent.

Playable using Wine 2.15 but not pretty.

Odd thing is when the characters are being "drawn" I can see they look normal for a scant second. Then upon completion the model looks like crud and pieces go missing. I tried lowering and raising the graphic options without any results. Just glad Wine is progressing and hope to get back in the game by Winter.

[SquareAperture]

Hey. As a neverwinter junkie (including AOL's Neverwinter Nights oh so many years ago) ... what makes you think it's wine and not their crappy coding? Why do you think Atari bailed?

90 posts, you've been around awhile, but the fact you want to give Jack Emmert access to your hard drive scares the crap out of me. Maybe you think this is the way gaming "just is" these days, I don't know, I resist the concept every chance I get.

Having said that, why not just run that D&D but not D&D NWN but not NWN MMO but not MMO free but not free thing in a virtual machine? Then when the revenue model fails and Jack feels like he needs to spy on your browsing history and read your emails to build a marketable, actionable datamining revenue stream, you can be isolated from all that stupidity and pending invasion of privacy lawsuits, since you're only running the Cryptic stuff inside that VM and nothing else, doing normal tasks from your main OS.

Just saying. You don't HAVE to trust them. Nor do you have to wait for DX10 support.

[Simon of Aragon]

We are not here to debate or review programs or their content. I am just informing the WineHQ community of which version seems to be working best and how well. The question you posed, "what makes you think it's wine and not their crappy coding?" The game runs just fine on my friend's Windows 7 machine (which is the native OS). He prefers Windows and dabbles in Linux. As for poor coding, I am a medical doctor not programmer. However my friend in Michigan has some programming experience and has contributed to the development of Wine.

Your next statement makes one wonder why you would be even interested in my topic, let alone running any Windows based software in Linux. Also this statement "Jack feels like he needs to spy on your browsing history and read your emails" sounds like you fail to understand how the Wine overlay works. To the best of my knowledge there is no direct access or leaks between the wine server and Linux. I apologize, if I have misunderstood your remarks.

I do, in fact, prefer Star Trek Online to Neverwinter Online, I played this back when it was a subscription and fail to see the need to substitute other games to fill that void. I was hoping for some constructive statements as to what might be the problem with "invisible" graphics and maybe my friend will have the spare time to look into it.

[dimesio]

@SquareAperture: this is the Wine forum. Polite posts about how well or badly something works in Wine are always acceptable; rants about unrelated issues are not. Do not harass users over their software choices.

To the best of my knowledge there is no direct access or leaks between the wine server and Linux.

You need to read https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#How_good_is ... ws_apps.3F.

[Simon of Aragon]

Thank you for this information.

[SquareAperture]

Not ranting, honestly Di, and sorry if you feel that way - I may have been ranting about the software industry and the concept of micro-transactions, but hell, even Windows has ads if you don't pay to remove them. I guess I'll never accept such things and the urge to RESIST! at every opportunity is something I'll need to learn to control...

And honestly, I do know where I am. I was merely suggesting out beloved wine might not be the right tool for the job in this one instance. We know there are limitations, and while we're all confident they'll all be eventually solved, he may want to play his game(s) today, now, and a VM would allow this and not give up his desktop.

Sorry the message got lost in the preaching. I do apologize.

[Simon of Aragon]

Actually I have tried VM, the issue with Oracle Virtual Box is the following;
1. Currently I don't own a Windows license* and don't plan on buying it.
2. These games require DirectX 11 and the VM doesn't support it.
3. Even if 1 & 2 were not issues, max video memory only allows 128 MB.

*My PC came with Window 10, reformatted the HDD on day 1, installed Liniux. If I desired to, I could have just returned to dual boot but I haven't done that since 2011.

I do agree these two games are not very well made (for commercial software) and I do have others that run smoothly under WINE. I don't talk much about the other games that actually do work well, because they are not the issues. For example; Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, Black Desert, Dungeon and Dragons Online, and Champions Online all function well on my system under WINE. These MMO games still allow for DirectX 9 and have more entertainment value. I would like to return to Star Trek someday but it is not a high priority.

Thank you for your concern.

[SquareAperture]

Ahh, well to be fair, you never specified DX11, only that DX9 support was being deprecated. And yes we know no one supports it very well outside actual Windows yet, but wine may have the upper hand here, being that if the vendor-supplied or opensource driver stack supports OGL/OCL Compute Shaders under linux or OSX that's a bit of the workload done right there. But as you know wine dx11 support is still in the elementary stages, the fact you can run a dx11 game at all in wine-staging is no less than miraculous! Ahead of commercially supported VMs like Parallels & VMWare?

Hey being an nvidia guy, keep an eye on GRID. While apparently it's initially intended for OCL/CUDA farms and probably not consumer gaming cards, if it's going to allow native speed pass-through to the nvidia hardware underneath the hypervisors, and this will also help future-proof VMs some? I do love wine but if this works out? Host-OS-independence with direct access? We all may have new-found love for virtual machine images. Who knows? Maybe it'll turn out to be modular and portable and wine can utilize the same methods, wouldn't that rock.

re: dual booting in 2017 - yea I hate to suggest running Windows... but... I mean if it needs DX11/12 support... sometimes just doing the dual boot thing is the easiest. And yes you are on point with the "just works" mentality, we play GW2 and it never crosses our minds, because it never had an issue, just fire it up and play.

I AM concerned! We have to be prophets of PC gaming; there's so few left. Most end-user gpu sales are for cryptocurrency mining? I hope that's not accurate, because if so that's kind of depressing.

Good luck!

[Simon of Aragon]

For anyone following this thread or searching for news on these games. Here are examples of the current graphics of Neverwinter today using 2.18 build;

https://s5.postimg.org/4l61b0tif/current1.jpg
https://s5.postimg.org/dg6vljal3/current2.jpg
https://s5.postimg.org/pi29fpeon/current3.jpg
https://s5.postimg.org/mnz4294sn/current4.jpg
https://s5.postimg.org/y0bpk1sx3/current5.jpg
https://s5.postimg.org/irls69c3b/current6.jpg

All of these images are work safe.

Examples of the graphics under WINE 1.7.44 prior to the DirectX upgrade last year.

https://s5.postimg.org/l8xjdjquv/dymiral.jpg
https://s5.postimg.org/teflbnx3b/lady.jpg