gooberking: After getting a new vid card I was hoping to get TW2 up and running on my linux box. Reports on it were positive, and I was feeling rather confident it could be done. I was a bit frustrated when things didn't quite go as easily as click click play, but I eventually got it to run. I like to report all my GOG wine successes and failures so here is one for TW2

The solution isn't all that complicated, but I found the several appdb reports suggesting there are no additional things to install is a bit misleading when doing a truly clean install on a new system, or via clean prefix be it from the command line or using Play On Linux like I did. I am of the opinion that perhaps some of these people had already installed some of the more common helper items and therefore did not run into the same issues I had.

You will additionally need 2 items to get the game to run at all, and 1 more to make it “right.” Xact will need to be installed and so will d3dcompiler_43. Without the compiler the game will show you a splash screen, hang for awhile, then crash failing to compile HLSL shaders. The game should run at this point but the third item, d3dx9 will also need to be installed to clear up various graphical glitches, including the failure to render some textures correctly (like your shirt) There may be an option to selectively install a d3dx9 file or two instead, but I didn't go through the trouble of identifying which ones would be needed.

The game should run fairly well at this point.

***notes on wine versions and Play on Linux install
Reports go that the game works well all the way back to wine 1.3 (I did have issues with a 1.5 variant). However, I'm going to recommend the use of 1.6 since the newer GOG installer causes issues with wine that are cleared up in 1.6. One can always use the /nogui option on the installers, but that creates a problem if you are trying to use POL since you can't pass the parameter.

In addition POL also lacks a GOG install script and will attempt to use version 1.3 which, again, isn't compatible with our GOG installer. Instead download 1.6, install non-listed program, use another wine version, use 1.6, and install the additional packages. That should make quick work of it.

waltc: Just out of curiosity, since you definitely want "things to go as easy as click click play," why not just buy yourself a copy of Win7/8 and throw it on another partition? You could keep your Linux partition as your main working partition but you'd you essentially have a hassle-free gaming experience. It just seems a shame to go to all that trouble just to install and get the game to "run," but then wind up in the end with an emulation which under the best conditions will not run as well as it would run under its native OS.

I run many very old games, myself, though and use an emulator, too--DOSbox. But it's so easy to setup and runs so well I have trouble calling it an "emulator" although that's what it is...;) But those old DOS games require next to nothing in the way of hardware resources compared to much more recent D3d games. TW2 is a lot more demanding that you might think when it is setup properly, and that's especially true if you bought your new vid card to get a major improvement in game graphics. Throwing Wine in the middle of everything just seems like tossing a big monkey wrench into the midst of things, though, and really sort almost defeats the purpose of that new 3d card. Whether it's nVidia or AMD, their Windows drivers are far better than their Linux drivers, imo. If you have the money for a new vid card, you've got the cash lying around somewhere for a copy of Win7 or 8 (I'm running 8x64 currently with the normal Explorer-based UI)--and I know you've got the smarts enough to setup the secondary boot partition because if you didn't you wouldn't go anywhere near a Linux installation in the first place...;) OK, I'll shut up now. Best of luck to you!

gooberking: This post is part of a thing I do where I make a point to post my success and failures for each GOG game I own under wine. It's meant to be more of a helpful guide or fyi for the other Linux users that might interested in knowing how the game is fairing in Linux.

Gydion: Please keep up the good work as it's a useful reference. I don't currently use Linux for gaming, but it's helpful for others now. I'm considering switching myself for my next machine.

Gydion: I was going to respond to waltc's post yersterday, but didn't have the time. It is a fairly useless post which could be reduced to a single sentence, use Windows for gaming.Gydion: Please keep up the good work as it's a useful reference. I don't currently use Linux for gaming, but it's helpful for others now. I'm considering switching myself for my next machine.

gooberking: This post is part of a thing I do where I make a point to post my success and failures for each GOG game I own under wine. It's meant to be more of a helpful guide or fyi for the other Linux users that might interested in knowing how the game is fairing in Linux. It's not intended to be me complaining about how tough it is to shoehorn a game into a working state in an environment it wasn't created to operate in.

In this specific case I was a little annoyed with the rarely helpful winehq appdb suggesting it should be an easy game to get running (and it is if you know the steps) but something being off in my specific case. After ironing out the details for our gog version my hope is that when someone searches for "Two Worlds II Linux [GOG] wine installation" that they will end up here instead of just at the appdb reading old entries, and not understanding why their 1.5.x version of wine isn't working on the GOG installer when the standard version was for others. I guess it's my PSA of sorts.

waltc: Although I find your response to also be useless...;)...

Arkose: Note that Wine doesn't support DirectX 10+ yet so if you like playing the latest shiny multi-platform games you'll have to keep Windows around since so many new releases are dropping support for anything earlier and this will become totally standard for ports of next-gen-only games;

Arkose: Have you considered telling the Play on Linux developers about the installer incompatibility? GOG uploaded another wave of 2.x installers just last week so this is going to become an increasing problem. The single-file installers can be bypassed by extracting with innoextract but I don't know whether that works with the multi-part installers.