Games run, but i can always see desktop

DeusExM1 · Post by **DeusExM1** » Mon May 04, 2009 12:54 am

Hey everyone

I run warcaft 3 under wine and the game works. However i can always see the bottom and top taskbars. (im using Ubuntu 9.04). I have DISABLED the window mode, and the problem still persists.

How can i run something in wine so that the game would completely overlay the screen?

Gert van den Berg · Post by **Gert van den Berg** » Mon May 04, 2009 11:29 am

On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 07:54, DeusExM1 <[email protected]> wrote:

Hey everyone

I run warcaft 3 under wine and the game works. However i can always see the bottom and top taskbars. (im using Ubuntu 9.04). I have DISABLED the window mode, and the problem still persists.

How can i run something in wine so that the game would completely overlay the screen?

Forzen Throne working fine for me on Ubuntu 9.04 with Intel X3100 and
Warcraft 1.22 (1.23 has some issues under Wine... Battle.net works,
but it crashes when in menus for too long, and LAN is broken)

1. Graphics card? (nVidia seem to be recommended for use with Wine,
even though they do not help open-source drivers' development, their
drivers suck less (And/Or Wine seem to be better tested with and even
slightly targeted at their drivers...))

2. Have you followed the AppDb instructions on how to run it in OpenGL mode?

3. Have you disabled compiz? (Desktop effects)

Daemon · Post by **Daemon** » Mon May 04, 2009 1:10 pm

DeusExM1 wrote:Hey everyone

I run warcaft 3 under wine and the game works. However i can always see the bottom and top taskbars. (im using Ubuntu 9.04). I have DISABLED the window mode, and the problem still persists.

How can i run something in wine so that the game would completely overlay the screen?

Same thing was happening with Oblivion so I set the panels to autohide. With the new wine v1.1.20 it hasn't been a problem. Just one of those odd window manager things, I guess.

gamblor01 · Post by **gamblor01** » Mon May 04, 2009 3:30 pm

Are you running with compiz turned on or off? I have to wonder if you change it, would it make any difference? Go to System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects. If it's set to Normal or Extra, try setting it to none and then launching your game. It may or may not make any difference but it's worth a shot. I am running Ubuntu 8.10 with wine 1.1.20 and I don't have that problem with any HL2 based games.

I did have this problem at one point when I installed DirectX 9.0c and was trying to launch the games using DX9. If you have the official DX9 from Microsoft installed, I would suggest you get rid of it. It seemed to cause me nothing but trouble. :/

DeusExM1 · Post by **DeusExM1** » Mon May 04, 2009 3:46 pm

Thank you guys for such great responses. Im new to Ubuntu (but definitely here to stay).

I have resolved the issue by doing what you guys said; i went to system - appeareances - visual effects. I had it set on normal, which i changed to "none".

Now the game runs 100% perfect. If anyone was curious i have the 8600M GT with the 180.51 drivers installed. Im also running 64 Bit Ubuntu.

In any case thanks a lot for solving this issue, and hopefully other people can benefit from this post as well.

Daemon · Post by **Daemon** » Mon May 04, 2009 4:34 pm

On a related note , someone (meaning not me

) should write a little gtk/python Gnome thingymabob applet called 'Games Launcher' to add game programs to do an automatic 'metacity --replace / compiz --replace' when a certain program is launched.

gamblor01 · Post by **gamblor01** » Mon May 04, 2009 11:14 pm

I have resolved the issue by doing what you guys said; i went to system - appeareances - visual effects. I had it set on normal, which i changed to "none".

Glad to hear that it this worked for you. It does however have some consequences. For example, there are some animations that occur when you launch programs, open/close windows, and so forth that don't happen. Also, the alt+tab menu isn't nearly as cool. Quite possibly the most annoying thing for me though, transparency in terminal doesn't function the way I like. If you set the effects to none then a "transparent" terminal on top of a window (say, a web page) shows the desktop background instead of being truly transparent and displaying the web page underneath it (this DOES happen if you used the normal or extra option).

If you ask me, displaying the background instead of the window directly beneath it is undesirable. It makes it so that your desktop doesn't flow (ok so that's completely aesthetic) but I do things quite often where I am typing commands from one window into my terminal. I like to be able to place the terminal over that other window and still see the text through it so I don't have to keep switching back and forth and so on.

So just a head's up. You may want to write a script that launches your game. It could be something like:

metacity --replace && wine wc3.exe && compiz --replace

There are probably some other options you need to pass it but something along those lines should be sufficient.

On a related note , someone (meaning not me Smile) should write a little gtk/python Gnome thingymabob applet called 'Games Launcher' to add game programs to do an automatic 'metacity --replace / compiz --replace' when a certain program is launched.

Someone did write something similar to what you are asking for. You can get the script here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=699332

Basically what it does to start up another X server that is just about as vanilla as you can get. When you want to play a game you simply go to the secondary X server using ctrl+alt+F12 (or it will take you there automatically if you launch a game).

Or, as I mentioned above, you could just write a simple script that uses the && operator and performs all of the commands.