Icewind Dale II Forum

Hello,

I'm a trial user of Crossover Games 8.1.4. I decided to attempt to move a handful of my Windows-based games over to OS X 10.6.2 on a 13" unibody MacBook in order to assess whether I'd be interested in purchasing the product.

One of the titles I attempted to run in this environment was Icewind Dale II. The program was easy to install and run, including use of Weidu mods once I learned the "wineconsole cmd" command. Overall, I was very pleased with how effectively it runs in the environment.

One problem that I've been unable to circumvent so far, however, is that the mouse cursor is extraordinarily jittery, flashing or flickering on and off several times per second. It's quite unpleasant and distracting. After doing some research, apparently this is due to a DirectDraw transparency issue with more modern nVidia-based GPUs.

The various recommended solutions to this (for the typical Windows-based environment) include disabling hardware acceleration, disabling DirectDraw, disabling Direct3D, altering DirectDraw properties, or using a custom ddraw.dll wrapper (nvddf.dll), which supposedly can help address the issue. I've been unable to mimic any of the suggested solutions in the Crossover/Wine environment, though this may be due to my inexperience with the toolset.

I was wondering if anyone has been able to install Icewind Dale II without suffering this epilepsy-inducing cursor problem? Any reports of success, suggestions or relevant information would be valued, though even more so if it came from an environment where I could replicate the advice (OS X 10.6 w/ an nVidia GPU).

Thank you very much.

Hi,

The only thing I can think of (analogous to one of the Windows solutions), would
be to change the way crossover/wine is rendering things - in crossover/wine, you would
need to do this by using regedit, and adding the following key;

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D]
"DirectDrawRenderer"="opengl"

This will tell th ewine engine to use opengl instead of d3d calls...

Hope this helps

Cheers!

Thank you very much for the suggestion, Don.

Based upon your suggestion, I found this webpage with additional values and their descriptions.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to resolve the problem using any combination of the Registry keys that I tried. Heh...I was able to make it much, much worse using some of the options, however. Opengl, in particular, was not supported by the application, so I had to revert to gdi. The RenderTargetLockMode and OffscreenRenderingMode values appeared to impact the timing and performance minimally, but didn't address the particular concern. And it didn't seem that disabling UseGLSL had any beneficial impact, either.

I do very much appreciate the suggestion, and learned a few things about Crossover/Wine in the process. But, unfortunately, I'm still looking for a resolution.

Thanks again.

Cool....result or not, learning something is always a result 😉

The only other thing I can think of, is having a play with the
Graphics tab settings in winecfg...done that yet? Sometimes you
can get some gains in there - that said, some games are prone
to this problem for various reasons as you've already found out...

Btw, exactly what GPU chipset have you got installed there? I also
believe there's some driver bugs still in 10.6.2 (Apple's problem)
but I've no way of telling if such is related to what you're seeing here..

Cheers!

ps: apols for not linking you that wine wiki page....there's a lot of
'good oil' in that wiki about various wine related procedures, most of
which can be applied directly to crossover in one way or another..

Don,

I definitely agree with you on the value of learning more about the system.

I've played around with the settings on that tab (and the others), to no avail. I'm just going to chalk this one up to being unresolvable at the moment. Perhaps future drivers or future releases of Wine/Crossover might miraculously fix the issue.

The MacBook came equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M.

Thanks again.

Switching my display to 16-bit color depth (thousands of colors, rather than the typical millions of colors) before opening CrossOver substantially reduced the cursor flickering/flashing. Note that switching display color depth after CrossOver is already loaded into memory does not have any impact.

I'm surprised that the larger color depth caused an issue, given that the game natively supports 16-bit, 24-bit and 32-bit color depth configurations.

While there is still a small bit of flickering (especially on maps with lighter colored backgrounds), it is vastly improved, and definitely playable in this configuration.

Has anyone been able to fix the flashing cursor problem?? Everything else installs and the games plays perfectly but the flashing mouse pointer makes it unplayable, strange how Baldurs Gate and Planescape have no problem but Icewind Dale II has a cursor problem.

Crawfish wrote:

Switching my display to 16-bit color depth (thousands of colors,
rather than the typical millions of colors) before opening CrossOver
substantially reduced the cursor flickering/flashing. Note that
switching display color depth after CrossOver is already loaded into
memory does not have any impact.

I'm surprised that the larger color depth caused an issue, given
that the game natively supports 16-bit, 24-bit and 32-bit color
depth configurations.

While there is still a small bit of flickering (especially on maps
with lighter colored backgrounds), it is vastly improved, and
definitely playable in this configuration.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but when I tried this (I use DisplayMaestro from Koingo Software to change my display to Thousands to resolve a similar issue with Planescape Torment), the game crashed - or rather, it locked up with a white screen. What were the settings you had for the in-game graphics? Maybe it's a configuration issue, but I don't know for sure.

What I do know is that this particular problem is due to a bug in WINE that's apparently a regression; the technical aspects are a little arcane to me, but more details are here: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22413 - the good news is that it's a confirmed bug, so they should be working on it.

@rampancy - I know you hang out at GoG a bit, are you talking about their release or the CD version?

Cheers!