Hello!

I recently bought The Longest Journey and Dreamfall, and was going to play both of them, but a problem occurred: TLJ doesn't work well with Wine (character models are not rendered) and my attempt to run it in Virtualbox always end up with a crash at the end of the first video (with the tree).
I'm going to investigate into all this, but it will take time and I would like to jump into the adventure as soon as possible!

I was wondering: if I play Dreamfall first, then TLJ, will I spoil my pleasure in any way?

I don't mind the chronology (I've seen Star Wars IV, V & VI before I, II & III, and it caused no problem ^^), but I don't want to have great revelations in TLJ to become tasteless because they're assumed common knowledge when playing Dreamfall…

So, what do you think about it?

PS: No spoilers please!

I would definitely recommend playing in a chronological order starting with TLJ.
It so happened that I first played Dreamfall a couple years ago, but never finished it. And I can say that it was written with a strong assumption that it's a sequel. My experience with Dreamfall faded away a bit since the last time I played. Because of that my experience with TLJ wasn't spoiled big time for me, but it _did_ spoil it. And I can only guess how much of TLJ will be in Dreamfall. So my advice is to start with TLJ.

On a tech note, have you tried some of the options in the game's config? I had to enable 'Force single buffer' because some sprites flickered (character models themselves are 3D though).

Edit: tried disabling shadows?

Thank you for preserving my fun ;)
You've been clear enough: I won't start my playthrough with Dreamfall.

I tried quite a lot of different settings for TLJ, but never thought to disable shadows…
I'm going to give it a try !

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No, doesn't work…
If I skip the video, everything runs fine, but if I don't skip it there is an error and game stops.
(an error in binkw32.dll)

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You may call me stupid: reinstallation did the trick!
Too long since last time I used a Windows OS, I forgot the simplest way to fix most of the problems with it.

Okay, time to immerse myself in what sounds like a wonderful game!

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Forget what I said, the crash is still here, it just seems it doesn't appear at every time.
It always occurs under the same conditions: a video plays, everything is fine until the end of it, but the game freeze when the video should stop to switch back to game rendering.

Hmm... this file - binkw32.dll - is the BINK player module.
Does this happen regardless of whether or not the option for playing high-quality videos is set in the game's settings?

The version of binkw32.dll in TLJ is old. Perhaps replacing it with a newer version would help. Just don't download it from dll host sites or similar. Do you have other games installed in Wine that use BINK videos (many do)? Try the file from there.

I'm going to try with binkw32.dll from Arcanum or StarTopia, I will be back with the results!

Chronological order for Star Wars is not recommended. Release order is if someone insists on watching 1/2/3.

Yeah, I know the best watch order for Star Wars is IV - V - II - III - VI, but don't you think it is a bit off-topic here? ;)
Dreamfall has nothing to do with lightsabers and asthmatic knights…

You are right, it is off-topic. :)

I still never understood the reason for watching 1/2/3 at all though. Especially keeping 2 in any watch list.
4/5/2/3/6 is not a good order, and I understand the logic behind it. 2 is just a really bad movie. Worst of the 6.

Best to stick with 4/5/6 and watching the Clone Wars miniseries 2003 if you really need a PT fix.
KOTOR2 is always a must.

There is a modified version of Wine that you can download and use with PlayOnLinux. You should be able to spot the modified version because it has "-tlj" on the end of the version number, like this "1.some.wine.version-tlj". It still isn't perfect with the modified version, but the game is playable. Mouse clicks were a little glitchy for me, but otherwise the game runs fine with it. I hope this helps you.

I didn't notice the year on the original post lol. Well, hopefully it still helps or at least helps someone else out.

drakkar123,

I took your advice, got PlayonLinux installed, installed the *tlj and *tlj2 wine versions, and installed TLJ, all in 10 minutes. All of the problems I saw on Win7 (in vmware) are gone, cutscenes work, and the characters render correctly (they were just shadows in modern versions of wine).

The only glitch at this point is brining up the "eye/mouth/hand" menu on certain objects. If I click on exactly the right pixel, or just click as fast as I can, the menu comes up most of the time. It's probably too frustrating to play. Is this the mouse glitch you mentioned? There's a bug for it at https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31278

Otherwise, it looks *perfect*. I guess Linux runs more Windows software than Windows :)

Still helpful, thanks ;)
I didn’t know there were a WINE version specifically patched for TLJ, it will be my starting point next time I try to run it.

That is exactly the mouse glitch that I was referring to. It is the only issue that I have found, that prevents me from saying that it runs perfectly. Really though, all things considered, it seems fairly minor to me, and it is something you get used to fairly quickly, once you get into the game and start playing. You can check the latest version of Wine every now and then, to see if the TLJ patches ever make it into the main version of Wine, hopefully along with a fix for the mouse glitch as well. The patches for TLJ were made in 2008 and after 6 years, they still have not made it into the main release, so I would normally tell you not to hold your breath, but there actually seems to be increased interest recently in getting this game to run properly in Wine, with the Linux release of Dreamfall Chapters, so hopefully it will actually get fixed now.

Strangely, in my experience it does seem that most older games, though not all, do seem to run a lot better on Linux with Wine and have far fewer headaches than they do running on a newer version of Windows. I do generally do run almost all of my older games on Linux for this reason. One big difference between the two, is that if a game no longer runs properly on Windows, there is a very good chance that it never will again, but if it absolutely will not run properly on Linux, it is very likely that it will eventually run at a later date. Either way, It is certainly nice to have another option for trying to run problematic older games, other than just trying to run them on Windows.

I am very glad that I was still able to help you out, even after all this time. Hopefully you'll be able to play it on Linux now.

Bringing this topic back as I just realised I never posted a link the the WINE build playing well with TLJ, so there it is:
https://www.playonlinux.com/wine/binaries/linux-x86/PlayOnLinux-wine-1.3.32-tlj2-linux-x86.pol
Despite the .pol extension it is actually a .tar.bz2 archive, so you can extract it easily with tar.

Thanks again to drakkar123 without whom I’d have never found this specific WINE build ;)

TLJ is still a bit rough to play, given it's age. The interface was too clumsy for me, so I wound up watching an entire playthrough on youtube. Great story!