Duke Nukem Forever Demo (Steam) not launching

[Quix0r]

Got someone this demo working? 50,- EUR is a lot money to me so I like to play the demo first. But it seems to be impossible?

I have latest Wine from GIT and did the required winetricks steps (dinput8, xinput, removed asterisk from dinput8 user.reg line, added xinput1_3 (with native only) to winecfg, corefonts, tahoma installed; all done in a new wine bottle aka. WINEPREFIX). A +d3d logfile turned up that Wine detected my video RAM size wrong (it detected 256 MB, but I have 512 MB), I set HKCU->Software->Wine->Direct3D->VideoMemorySize to 512 (string) but still it keeps crashing. I tried opengl as DirectDrawRenderer value, no luck. I set BreakOnFirstChance to 0, no luck.

Please speak up (not just that it works, how you did it) if you know how to get the demo working.

[DaVince]

A wineprefix is not a bottle, unless you're using Winebottler. Then you'll have to get rid of Winebottler or ask the Winebottler community instead, because this forum is for plain Wine.

50,- EUR is a lot money to me so I like to play the demo first.

It won't help solve your problem, but let me just state right now that apparently the demo is really not representative to the final game. Check out a Let's Play on YouTube instead.

As for your problem... What's the terminal output? Do other 3D applications work?

[Quix0r]

Okay, correction. I use WINEPREFIX with plain wine.

And yes, other 3D games work fine. So the most crashes are because the demo exe is in bad shape? Gearbox should fix that then. Here is an except from the console output:

wine: Unhandled exception 0x80000003 at address 0x5ebc4a (thread 002f), starting debugger...
fixme:dbghelp_dwarf:compute_location Only supporting one breg (edx/19 -> edx/19)
0x005ebc4a: int $3
Modules:
Module Address Debug info Name (170 modules)
PE 340000- 41d000 Export dncommon
PE 420000- 427000 Deferred 3drdebuglib
PE 430000- 5dd000 Deferred meqon
PE 5e0000- 102f000 Export engine
PE 1030000- 1046000 Deferred xinput1_3
PE 3bc0000- 3be1000 Deferred cserhelper
PE 3d00000- 3d91000 Deferred gameoverlayrenderer
[...]
More lines ...
[...]
Backtrace:
=>0 0x005ebc4a in engine (+0xbc4a) (0x0031d250)
1 0x00355f4c in dncommon (+0x15f4b) (0x0033d264)
2 0x0088c90d in engine (+0x2ac90c) (0x0033d2c8)
3 0x007fe67a in engine (+0x21e679) (0x0033f3fc)
4 0x00818fb4 in engine (+0x238fb3) (0x0033f92c)
5 0x1090e49f in dukeforeverdemo (+0xe49e) (0x0033fe10)
6 0x1090fe7a in dukeforeverdemo (+0xfe79) (0x0033fea0)
7 0x7ed6c18c call_process_entry+0xb() in kernel32 (0x0033feb8)
8 0x7ed6d190 start_process+0x5f(peb=0x7ffdf000) [/home/quix0r/git/build/wine/dlls/kernel32/../../../../wine/dlls/kernel32/process.c:1087] in kernel32 (0x0033fef8)
9 0x7efa1c98 call_thread_func+0xb() in ntdll (0x0033fef8)
10 0x7efa64db call_thread_entry_point+0x6a(entry=0x7ed6d130, arg=0x7ffdf000) [/home/quix0r/git/build/wine/dlls/ntdll/../../../../wine/dlls/ntdll/signal_i386.c:2499] in ntdll (0x00000000)

I still have the +d3d logfile, shall I upload it to the bug tracker (which ticket)?

[Quix0r]

I have it finally working, but with a lot flickers (I already tried all tips from across YouTube to the bug tracker) and slow animation. I was a bit able to play it (until my eyes got to much flickers ... )

Here are my settings for lesser (but still many) flickers:

Code: Select all

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D]

"DirectDrawRenderer"="opengl"
"RenderTargetLockMode"="disabled"
"StrictDrawOrdering"="enabled"
"VideoMemorySize"="512"

The last one is to tell Wine the correct VRAM size. The second one nearly eliminates all flickers (sometimes they came back, e.g. when you are close to a broken light in first demo map). And it is still slow FPS...

[Quix0r]

Disable Shader Language UseGLSL=disabled with regedit to get more FPS and lower flickers (still they come back here and there with low to moderate, sometimes heavy flickers).

[Quix0r]

And try to re-nice the wineserver/Steam.exe processes, enter:

Code: Select all

renice 19 `pidof wineserver Steam.exe`

... in separate terminal window. This should give you a little more FPS and Steam more quiet.

[Quix0r]

Okay, now I cannot continue to play because of that flickers. Of course, native DLLs are not supported by WINE team, so I tried some override lines:

Code: Select all

[Software\\Wine\\DllOverrides] 1312622391
"d3dcompiler_43"="builtin"
"d3dx9"="native"
"d3dx9_36"="native"
"d3dx9_37"="native"
"dinput8"="native"
"xinput1_3"="native"

These lines allows me to play but when I'm closing in to the Duke Dome, the flickers are all over the rendered scene and make the game unplayable. Also setting d3dcompiler_43 to native doesn't help here.

If I set all d3dx9-lines to builtin, the game crashes at loading the save game which renders the game unplayable, too.

And every time I launch the game, one installation step fails, I had to hit "Cancel" and launch DNF again to make it run (then it works but comes back after next restart of WINE).

[Quix0r]

With newer unstable wine (1.5.6) you don't need dinput overrides anymore. Nice fixing!

So, only the flickering all over the scene (sometimes you can see background, sometimes models, somtimes walls) is left. I have limited that flickering a little by using windowed-mode (disable fullscreen from game) + using desktop at my screen's size + VSYNC disabled (from game). Still there is so much flickering that I cannot play it.

[Quix0r]

To those who don't know: this fliggering origins from native DLLs. With built-in DLLs I have a crash with latest GIT, see bug #33707 for details.