For the past few weeks (one could say MONTHS) I’ve had a lack of motivation to really work on my computers and technology.   By the time I get home from work my resolve and desire to work on things has dwindled and I mostly want to sit and do nothing.  This is likewise true of the weekends, which always seem to be filled with some project or another that keeps me busy.  The end result is that I’ve simply not done much with tech for a while. 

Friday night,  after spending a few hours playing rock band and call of duty: world at war with Trevor, I decided to install Ubuntu on the second hard disk on my workstation at home.  I had downloaded the X64 version of their 8.10 version a couple weeks ago but never got around to installing it.

I was pleased to note that installation was just as easy as it always has been, and it seems even easier to get up and running than it used to be. This could be a result of actually knowing all of the steps I need to take now (whereas with some previous versions I had to do some digging first).  

Saturday I took the time to get  World of Warcraft (including Wrath of the Lich King) up and running under wine.  That proved easy, as I had a guide to follow (that I wrote after the last time I did it).  

I also decided to see if I could get VALVe’s Steam service to run in Linux, as recently I picked up the Half-Life 2 episode pack (for $10) and wanted to see if I could play those in Linux as well (hint: yes, yes you can). 

Steam prooved to be easy to install.  I had to search for SteamInstall.exe (the steam website has a .msi, which will NOT work).   Just run the installer in Wine and poof, Steam is installed.   It was pretty easy. 

Since I already had the episode pack for HL2 associated with my Steam account, once I had Steam installed I simply had to select the game (the one I tested was HL2: Episode 1) and tell it to install.  Steam handled the rest, and handled it beautifully. 

When the time came and the game was installed,  I went to play it and…… success.    Sort of. 

It played all the way through until just after the beginning of the second chapter – direct intervention – and then began stuttering and the performance dropped dramatically.   At first I thought it was just the game acting up, so I saved and exited (which was a monumental feat by itself).   Upon re-entering the saved game it was still messed up. 

After doing some digging I found that the following registry entries resolved the issue for me completely, and gameplay has been awesome ever since.

Navigate to:  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D  (if the Direct3D key doesn’t exist in the Wine folder, as was the case for me, add it).

Under the Direct3D key, add the following String Values

OffscreenRenderingMode, value: fbo
PixelShaderMode, value: enabled
UseGLSL, value: enabled
VideoMemorySize, value: ammount of video ram your card has, in megabytes.  Mine was 256.

These settings in the registry have most certainly fixed the issue I had and I have not had any since.  The game is 100% playable (and quite enjoyable too). 

I’m happy that, for me anyways, the games I want to play I can do so via Wine and Linux.  It’s certainly not for everybody, and it’s still much easier to simply play these games in Windows.  I’m a geek, though, and oddly enough I enjoy getting things to work on platforms they were not really intended for.

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