Empire Total War Problems...

[alexinexile]

I know that I am not the first to ask about this on here but the thread I found wasnt of any help!

I am new to linux. Vista started taking 15 minutes to start up so I killed it and installed Ubuntu. So far its been great. I installed Wine and Steam then Empire Total War.

So far all good. Empire takes awhile to start but I expected problems, after a while it starts the video which is fine, sound is fine, menu appears and I start a campaign.

It gets to 98% loaded... and nothing happens! Thank god that ctrl+alt+escape works in linux otherwise it would have been a force shutdown.

Any suggestions on what to do? I think steam downloaded/installed directx. Everything is on default settings.

I am by no means an IT whizz, I have built a few windows based PC's and would say I am above average for a windows user (I know most Linux users are well above that standard!) but programming isnt my thing.

I dont play a lot of games any more but Empire is one of the few I do.

[alexinexile]

I did make some progress (not that I did anything) and it got to 100% and gave me this error message:

"Empire - Fatal Error"
"Insufficient video memory to run game, terminating."

How do I change the video memory? And why out of five tries has it only got that far once?

[Dorfwine]

I have Empire successfully running, and it plays quite nicely, even on ultra settings.

I haven't had pre-campaign crashes as you've described, but if it's throwing up an "Insufficient video memory" error, you might be able to fix it by setting VideoMemorySize in the wine registry (e.g. wine regedit). See here - http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys

If not for this bug - http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18490 - I would rate Empire platinum, but unfortunately it's a game-ender that causes crashes when loading a battle map. There's a workaround patch, but it requires you to patch wine and then compile wine from source.

Also unfortunately (short term), the one file that requires patching (/dlls/wineX11.drv/opengl.c) seems to be getting an extensive rewrite, so there's no patch that works for the 1.5.x development branch.

So... if you're feeling energetic:

- kill all wine processes
- download the stable wine 1.4.1 source
- edit the source code (/dlls/wineX11.drv/opengl.c) using this diff - http://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?i ... ction=diff
- compile the source (you'll need all the necessary compile tools installed; can't remember which ones offhand). Basically open a terminal in the directory with the patched wine source, enter "./configure", then "make depend && make", and then "sudo make install"
- "wine --version" to check the version
- "winecfg" to initialize (? not sure if needed)
- "wine regedit" to edit the VideoMemorySize (you can also set this via winetricks)
- "wineboot" to restart wine
- start steam, empire
Ta-da!

As mentioned above, 1.5 is overhauling quite a bit, so hopefully by the time it's stable this patch won't be necessary anymore (it might actually be fixed in 1.5.10, but doesn't look like it).

If Empire begins to work, the same settings/patch should also work for Napoleon (also affected by the above bug).

Also to note: you can install Empire mods (e.g. DMUC) by adding the mod installer.exe as a non-Steam game and running it, then adding the DMUC.exe as a non-Steam game and running it.

That's all I can think of for now. Good luck.

[alexinexile]

Right...

Looks like wine is a waste of time for me then!

This really isnt very straight forward...