Champions Online Forum

the game is currently n beta... but I tried to get it to work using Crossover Games and Crossover Mac as well as Wine...

IE7 is required... IE6 wont work right, and the whole log in and patcher uses IE. Newer versions of Wine are not working right with IE on this game, and loads screens wrong.

I've found it runs the best using Crossover mac 8.0, where the Wine version (1.1.18) is old enough that IE7 stuff in it runs right (seems to run right in up to 1.1.21). In Crossover Mac 8, with IE7 installed, I can get it to run all the way through an install and log in and patching, but upon launching the game, it shows the first intro logo just crashes... no sound either... have messed around with window and full screen and virtual desktop and played around with different combos of basically every setting under Wine\Direct3D in the registry.... as well as installing many other things such as DirectX9... but basically still a no go

on a similar note, I'm not sure this is something easily fixed as I tried running the game in VMware on Vista, and it crashed in the exact same way...

The video drivers in vmware aren't exactly that capable (under
linux at least)...but, the comparison of results between COG
and using vmware (with a vista install), I've also come across,
that is I have tried to run titles problematic with COG/wine
in vmware (using XP actually), and to date I think the score
is 8 for 'it didn't work in either', and 2 for 'it works in
vmware but not in wine'... but I try not to draw parallels
between the two, because as software they're two completely
different animals...

This game looks interesting though...(says the man who grew up
on comic books for a decade before his parents bought a teevee),
and the artwork really appeals to my childhood memories, so I
will likely check this title once it's released into the wild...

I am anxiously anticipating this title. It looks like everything that the Cryptic guys wanted to implement with City of Heroes, but didn't have the funding to do it. Hopefully it will be a good execution.

Pre-ordered and playing Open Beta at the moment.
Tried installing the client using CXG.
Installs ok but crashes trying to launch the patcher.

However this is based on minimal testing so far due to time constraints. Will try more this weekend when I have more time.

Reading their forums it sounds like they had some problems with the patcher that the pre-order folks got. Not sure if you already were aware of this.

...and, has anyone checked if this is using gameguard or not? If it
is, abandon ye all hope...

edit: actually, I was just chatting with some windows users, and
apparently it doesn't use gameguard, but the general consensus of
opinion seems to be that the beta displayed 'very poor performance'...

I've gotten it working the furthest in Wine, but its possible to get this far in Crossover too...

this should work, this is all from testing I've done on OSX leopard, XQuartz 2.3.3.2 and 2.4, Wine 1.1.18-27 .... also CX Games and CX Mac many versions including betas

do not install Wine Gecko (or remove the html rendering for crossover).
Install IE6 and msxml3 with Winetricks for Wine.
Use CX Mac/Linux to install IE6 for Crossover, then copy the bottle over into CX Games
at this point the installer and launcher/patcher should all work fine... but it will still crash later on while loading...

in either Wine or Crossover you need to add in the Wine\Direct3D reg entry...
"UseGLSL"="enabled"

there might be more needed than that, but Crossover likes to disable that, but that wont work at all with this game, and if its disabled it crashes even sooner than with it enabled.... mainly Wine needs it for games that use 3.0 shaders

msxml3 is an installation target in COG..so I'm not sure if you
need use the winetricks/copy method...did you try that? The beta
run of champions online ends in a few days, and so considering all
the forum reports/issues/magic_mushrooms and other problems, I'm
going to revisit this next month sometime...after COG 8.0 is final
that is, and perhaps champions online will be officially in the wild
by then too ; I'm hopeful the planets and all their moons will be
better aligned by then (-B

I got the game installed and the patcher working. I installed IE6 (which installs msxml 3.0) from CXpro 8-> copy bottle into CXgames dir-> winecfg change to winxp->run installer for Champions. I then ran regedit enabled GLSL and attempted to launch the game, which ended in a crash with out any logos or anything being displayed.

The authentication is all done via IE, so that is a requirement. Not sure what the actual game requires after that, but they are supporting DirectX 9. There doesn't appear to be any copy protection garbage on it. So, all very good news.

Having run it on the same system via XP it indeed is running like a dog. Even with all the setting turned down it's pretty choppy on my machine. It's usable, but for an action game it is unacceptable. One of the biggest boosts I found was removing the Framerate Stabilization setting in the troubleshooting options. I think this will be a very nice title in about 6months/1year. ;)

sorry for any confusion in my posts.. I've been trying it in Wine latest builds as well as in Crossover... I prefer using Crossover when it works, but sometimes things work better using a newer version of Wine. I make my own GUI tools and launchers and bundle up Wine inside of .apps to make it easy.. its a Mac I shouldnt have to use command line 😛... but Crossover rules a lot more just cuz their bundled X11 server is so much better for games than Xquartz.

I'm going to compile up a version of Wine 1.1.28 since it has some fixes with d3d and try it out, but I don't think its going to fix it.. and if it does, it might be awhile til CX games uses that.. the CX games 8 doesnt run CO any better than 7.2.2.. which is disappointing.

When testing with Wine 1.1.27 the furthest i can get is after the patcher... Cryptic logo, then an Atari Logo while loading, and crashes before the games main menu screen.

EDIT
Wine 1.1.28 isn't working any better than previous versions...

Linux user.

Tried installing IE6 in a bottle over the weekend and tried installing/running CO from there.
Unfortunately the results are still not any better.

I'll try WINE myself over the next few days (the open beta closes today afaik) so should have more time for testing after that.