Hearts of Iron III Forum

Ok, I purchased Hearts of Iron III a few days ago after playing it on my friend's pc and being blown away by the game. While my computer easily handles the rather low system requirements of this game (lack of moving graphics helps a LOT.) I'm running into a serious problem each time I try to load the game. I purchased it through steam thinking that this would be the most convenient way to do so, and each time that I try to run the game I get the following messages:


Whether I click yes or no the game does not actually load. This happens each time I try to load the game.

I have found a solution to this problem when it happens with actual PC computers here: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=839988
Unfortunately because I cannot locate the specified files that I need to edit to disable this auto-re-install of directx each time I attempt to load the game I cannot use this solution.

Please help me make this game work, its a great game and there is no rational reason why it shouldn't work on Macs given its surprisingly low system requirements and effective lack of graphics (It uses sprites for God's sake!).

Regarding the solution you found, what that thread is talking about is
manipulating the windows system registry using 'regedit'. Crossover/wine
also uses it's own version of a windows registry, and has it's own regedit
builtin. You can get to this by running cxsetup => in the add/remove window
highlight the bottle the game is installed in =>click on configure => control
panel => and you will see the 'Run a command in this bottle' button => click
it, enter regedit in the stringbox, click on ok -> run.

Then you will see the key entries/values referred to in the posting. Do note,
I've a suspicion there might be a little more to this than just the registry
key edits mentioned (like, they're talking about a 'real' windows installation,
and transposing that case into the crossover/wine realm might take a bit more
finesse), but certainly it's something to try because crossover-games has it's
own installation targets for directx & visualc redist packages which do install
correctly (if they're needed)

Hope that helps some...

I could do with some help too. I am trialling crossfire and will buy it if I can get it to run HOI3. I have set up a bottle and installed HOI3. I cancelled the Directx and .net installations and installed directx modern.

HOI3game.exe loads and it gets as far as 'creating world' before hanging.

One thing that puzzles me is that when I go into regedit to try and edit the direct3d settings, I can't find KEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/direct3d or /DirectSound even though the bottle definitely has directX installed.

If anyone has any tips I'd be grateful.

dashstar1972 wrote:

I could do with some help too. I am trialling crossfire and will buy
it if I can get it to run HOI3. I have set up a bottle and installed
HOI3. I cancelled the Directx and .net installations and installed
directx modern.

HOI3game.exe loads and it gets as far as 'creating world' before
hanging.

One thing that puzzles me is that when I go into regedit to try and
edit the direct3d settings, I can't find
KEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/direct3d or /DirectSound even though
the bottle definitely has directX installed.

If anyone has any tips I'd be grateful.

Hi,

If the game bundles with .NET ; it needs .NET -- .NET is unsupported in crossover-games
but you might be able to try the following;

create a new bottle in crossover-games - install directx runtime modern into this bottle
archive this bottle - then quit crossover-games
start crossover-standard and restore the archived bottle created above
install .NET 2.0 (or whatever version .NET is needed**) into this bottle using crossover-standard
archive this bottle again - then quit crossover-standard
start crossover-games and restore the bottle created with crossover-standard
now in crossover-games, install the HOI3 program
see it if starts/runs

*Currently, crossover-standard only supports .NET up to and including .NET 2.0 SP1 -- if the game
requires a newer .NET version the above will not* work and you'll have to wait for those .NET
supports to be added to crossover-standard. Alternately, mainstream wine can be installed with
.NET 3.0 (using winetricks)....you might try this if HOI3 requires .NET 3.0

You may download/install the demo of crossover-standard to get this done (if applicable)

Cheers!

Thanks! This worked. I will test it a bit to see how fast it is compared to running in Windows. I'm also hoping I won't get the overheating problem.

dashstar1972 wrote:

Thanks! This worked. I will test it a bit to see how fast it is
compared to running in Windows. I'm also hoping I won't get the
overheating problem.

Great! I'm unsure if it'll help with your overheating problem (the same software, HOI3, is still
going to utilize your hardware in pretty much the same fashion...you should of course be better
off, compared to running this in a virtual-machine instead - crossover is less hardware intensive)

Do post back how it goes and what the performance is like -- what I described I call 'a closed hack'
and I'm interested to know when such an approach does work out.

Cheers!

Well, I got it working for a bit but I seem to get graphics corruptions build up. e.g. text splashed across the screen, hatching etc. It's odd because it basically works well for a while. Maybe I need to edit some settings in the registry. The following was suggested at WineHQ:

Note
Some users are reporting you may have to set some more Registry Keys in order to experience better results (e.g. borders drawn incorrectly). You may try these:

in HKCU/Software/Wine/Direct3D/
DirectDrawRenderer to "opengl"
OffscreenRenderingMode to "backbuffer"
OffscreenRenderingMode to "pbuffer"
OffscreenRenderingMode to "fbo"
PixelShaderMode to "enabled"
VideoMemorySize to the size of your video memory (e.g. "512")
in HKCU/Software/Wine/DirectSound/
MaxShadowSize to "0"

edit: I tried these settings and it didn't help. My free trial period is about to run out so I think I will have to give up unless I get any other suggestions.

dashstar1972 wrote:

edit: I tried these settings and it didn't help. My free trial
period is about to run out so I think I will have to give up unless
I get any other suggestions.

Hi,

Have you tried running the title with 'emulate a virtual desktop' enabled in winecfg?

Regarding your trial period, if you remove/delete your existing crossover-games installation
and the directory created under your username home directory, you can reinstall crossover-games
demo to get another 7days to experiment with this.

Cheers!

edit: also, check out the 'how to play hearts of iron III' entry at...;

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=17439&iTestingId=43318