I bought this game and played it on my last computer, running Win 7. My current one runs Linux Mint 18.3, and I have a Wine setup with POL for some applications. POL won't install this game properly at all, but I did it in plain Wine and it worked.
Problem is it doesn't actually play. The .exe 'starts' but it doesn't 'run'. I get a transparent window and a freezeframe of whatever was on the screen when the program started. And it just stays there like that, permanently.

I've not had great success with Wine, ever, and I'm not even sure if there *are* settings I can fiddle with to fix this, let alone what settings I would need to change.

I know there are people who run it, but there's no dedicated thread to it, so any help here would be hot.

Thank you.

Hi,

firstly, I use playonlinux as a launcher and build wine from sources directly from wine repository. I also use proprietary nVidia drivers for my dedicated GPU. For some games, I use dxvk which I download precompiled from github.

For WiC, I currently use wine 4.0 (my own build without any patches, just as it were in git repo). I believe it ran with some older versions too.
In my wine settings, I use Windows 7 as version.
And according to library overrides, I seem to have installed:
- d3dx10
- d3dx9
- d3dx9_* (all the numbers on place of the asterisk '*')
These are installed through playonlinux in my case, although I believe you can just use winetricks.

The game runs well, but only with DirectX 9 graphics. (I think it crashes when set to DX10 and then resets to DX9 on next start, so it's ok to try. I tried more than once.)

For this particular game, DXVK is useless. The game is older than DX11 and so you won't get nothing.


Finally, I'd prefer to keep this topic in this discussion, so I'll be silent in the other one.

When I install it with POL, I now get a runtime error (at 69:1358).
But it insists that it installed correctly.

And it spits out this:
[04/24/19 20:30:38] - Running wine- wic.exe (Working directory : /home/USERNAME/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/WiC/drive_c/GOG Games/World in Conflict - Complete Edition)
0009:fixme:win:EnumDisplayDevicesW ((null),0,0x32e784,0x00000000), stub!
0009:fixme:win:EnumDisplayDevicesW ((null),1,0x32e784,0x00000000), stub!
0009:fixme:win:EnumDisplayDevicesW ((null),0,0x32e4a4,0x00000000), stub!
0009:fixme:winediag:wined3d_select_feature_level None of the requested D3D feature levels is supported on this GPU with the current shader backend.
0009:fixme:wbemprox:wbem_services_CreateInstanceEnum unsupported flags 0x00000030
0009:fixme:wbemprox:enum_class_object_Next timeout not supported
0009:fixme:win:EnumDisplayDevicesW ((null),0,0x32d264,0x00000000), stub!
0009:fixme:win:EnumDisplayDevicesW ((null),0,0x32d094,0x00000000), stub!
0009:fixme:ddraw:ddraw7_Initialize Ignoring guid {aeb2cdd4-6e41-43ea-941c-8361cc760781}.

I've got current drivers and the 560Ti does run other DX9 games just fine. Is this game special or something? It ran on the old computer with an R7 260X.

Ok, seems to me you used playonlinux to install it using their script. I don't use these lately, as with rapid wine development of late I was generally more successful with plain clean wineprefix.


Here's what I'd do (have PoL 4.2.12):

First, try getting the newest wine possible (playonlinux menu Tools -> Manage Wine versions and add newest 32 or 64 bit version (the one you use, feel free to add both)).

Then, go to PoL (playonlinux) settings for the game (click on WiC item in PoL menu, then 'Configure' button in PoL toolbar).
Once there, you should see 'Virtual drive' with value 'WiC'. Select 'Wine version' to the latest.
Then change tab to 'Wine' and select 'Configure Wine'. There select 'Windows version' to be 'Windows 7'. Confirm with 'OK'.
Then change tab to 'Install components', select 'd3dx10', click 'Install', repeat for 'd3dx9', 'd3dx_29', d3dx_35', 'd3dx_36', ... each of the 'd3dx_xx' (xx being numerals).
Then, just for sure, you might go back to tab 'Wine' and run 'Windows reboot'.
Finally, just close the PoL configuration window and try running the game.


Now, if it still won't run, you can go two ways:
1. Try to use PoL configuration window to create brand new clean wine prefix, install it there, try running the game, if it runs, fine, if it doesn't, repeat the installations above and try again.
2. Try to hunt the problem. First step to do this is to run the game through PoL 'Debug'. If you select WiC in PoL menu, there are actions on the left. (Run, Close, Debug, Configure, ...). Select 'Debug' there. The game will be run with wine set to spit a lot of debug info. That is the info which may be helpful. Basic messages you posted are usually useless for hunting down the cause.

I'm reinstalling it and putting all this in again.
It's still putting out the runtime error at 69:1358.


And it's still spitting out the same errors.
I'm thinking the layer between the GPU and Wine doesn't like this card.
I have other dx9 games run just fine, but this one seems not to like it.

1) You can always try to run the game in wine debug mode to get more information. It will make a logfile of all the output.

2) AFAIK, the layers are something like this:

Application (game engine)
------- (Here is the emulated D3D API)
Wine libraries translating D3D to OpenGL (and eventually DXVK translatink D3D11 to Vulkan)
------- (Here is the native OpenGL and Vulkan API)
GPU driver - userspace libraries part
-------
GPU driver - kernel part
-------
GPU (hardware)

Therefore, the layers that can cause problems in most cases would be: Wine, GPU driver (the userspace part).

You stated you already have latest nVidia drivers, so you may skip the next column.

For nVidia GPU I'd suggest installing latest stable driver release directly by their installer, and allow it to install 32b compatibility libraries. This is the way I do it. It has some disadvantages - for example when you update your system through your package manager, it might overwrite some files which are provided by distro packages as well as by the drivers. In that case you simply need to rerun the installer and reinstall the driver, so it will overwrite those libraries with its own version.

My nVidia drivers are version 418.43 btw.

So, it seems the trouble are caused by wine. To be honest, I don't know much about internal structure of windows/wine, so my primary advice would be to try different combinations of wine version and DirectX native libs installation. (Note: If you install things like DirectX, you can always go to wine config and select on 2nd tab which DLLs should be used from wine and which should be overriden by the installed ones.)

At this point I've exhausted my options. This GPU may just be incompatible. It runs other games of this era in DX9, but maybe WiC needs some special things.
I'll try again with the information you've shared if I ever get a new graphics card.
Thanks for your help in trying.