The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Forum

Just got The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to run under CrossOver Games 10.1.1 / Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS 64-bit.

I installed the game in Windows first, and then ran it from the install directory. The installer may work under CrossOver, I just haven't tried it.

Steps:

1. Create a new Windows XP bottle
2. Install Visual C++ 2008 redistributable
3. Install DirectX Modern
4. Run the executable
5. Click Install
6. Set windowed mode under the game options and press Play.

Even with these settings, starting the game resulted in a blank window most of the time (apparently random). Once I got it to start, the intro ran fine.

The game window traps the mouse, but pressing Alt-Tab in windowed mode releases it.

To get full-screen mode, I had to select a virtual desktop. Please note that you need to select the correct aspect ratio in the game options before your screen resolution will show up in the list.
Using Alt-Tab in full-screen mode caused the Tab key to stop working, which frequently gets you stuck in paused mode without any way of resuming. In windowed mode, Alt-Tabbing worked fine.

Works: Launcher, intro and first ten minutes of gameplay.
Doesn't work: Alt-Tabbing causes tab key to stop working in full-screen mode, which gets you stuck in dialog boxes.
Not tested: Installer, anything else.
Performance: Runs fine on my Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3 GHz + nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS, but movements are a tiny bit choppy.

OS: Ubuntu 11.04 64bit
Crossover: crossover games 10.2.0

Hardware
CPU: Intel 2600K
GFX: Nvidia GTX 580
RAM: 8GB

I pretty much did the same as your steps, that got me to run 800x450 windowed, anything higher would cause different menu bugs, all of the higher resolutions would crash when starting a game (buttons could be selected with keyboard even if they were missing).

To be able to run 1920x1080 fullscreen, i had set the following regedit key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Wine -> Direct3D -> create a new called "useGLSL" and set it to "enabled"

I can run 1920x1080 fullscreen,and everything works great, except i have to run low settings, it gets really laggy at higher settings and crashes. No crashes so far running low settings and its "playable", but far below the whats expected from that hardware.

Im very pleased with how "well" its running from the release date, but theres plenty room for improvements.

EDIT: I'm running the steam version of the game

Just to say that a few people have posted to WINEHQ's appdb with similar levels of success. Some there have rated it "Gold", but from their descriptions I don't think that's right.

I agree, gold is too much.

The thing is though, the only BIG problem i've experienced is poor performance, no purple landscapes, flying tree, odd crashes etc. However the performance is REALLY bad, i would say between bronze and silver, from the medal descriptions here it's probably silver, although thats slightly high as well.

Similar experiences here. I managed to install the game using Crossover and Steam easily enough, but the game usually launches to a black screen just after the Bethesda logo. After a number of tries I managed to get into the game, but the sound wouldn't work.

I compiled Wine 1.3.32 and tried again, the black screen seems less frequent and when I did get into the game the sound was working. Performance on "High" settings was just barely usable and it occasionally crashed with a seg fault.

So (shame) I installed Windows and played the whole weekend on Ultra settings..

Slackware 13.37, i5 @ 3.3 Ghz, 4 gig ram, 1 gig Nvidia gtx460.

Neil, about the black screen after logo. Go into your Skyrim folder then find /data/video, rename/delete BGS_Logo.bik, that should fix the black screen problem.

Installed using Steam (Steam was installed with CrossOver 10.1.2). Ubuntu 11.04

After installing I hit the "play" button - this then installs micrcosoft components, the first 2 installed O.K. but the third (framework 3) did not complete installing, instead a dialog box appeared saying the SkyrimLauncher.exe had encountered a serious problem and had to close.

Each time you try to launch using Steam the same thing happens, this also happens if you try the launcher directly.... .cxgames/steam..../steamapps/common/skyrim/SkyrimLauncher.exe. but if you use the TESV.exe (in the same folder) the game launches and plays really well - with a couple of issues.

These issues are :_

1). game starts in a window that is too small to display everything (the window almost fills the screen but has wrong resolution). Altering window resolution (or switching to full screen) in the INI file just results in a black screen every time.

2). as a result of the above problem it is difficult to start a new game - had to randomly click along the right-hand side of the screen to get the option to start a game (once you have a save game you can see the "C" of "continue at the right hand edge to click on). This is also annoying in game as writing and game bars run off of the side and bottom of the screen.

Any advice on working around this would be very welcome - but please be aware that i am a complete amateur with Linux, and would need a step by step guide, just telling me to reinstall net framework 3 without saying where in a directory to put it, etc, etc would not work.

Observations on the game - when I started the mouse was very unresponsive - until I realised that the default setting was top have 360 controllers enabled - once disabled the mouse worked fine. The game looks, and sounds gorgeous and plays really well. If there is a solution to the "window" problem then I would say that the game was well worth a silver Medal.
,
I don't think the problem is caused by my system - I have LOTRO installed and it runs as well under Ubuntu as it used to with windows. I also have (via Steam) Sims3/Sims 3 WA (both run well but with a few "slow downs") Oblivion (plays really well - not had any problems with it)

Mikkel P wrote:

Nell, about the black screen after logo. Go into your Skyrim folder
then find /data/video, rename/delete BGS_Logo.bik, that should fix
the black screen problem.

Thank you, that fixed the launching problems. I still have no sound in crossover games, but sound works fine in Wine 1.3.32.

However, the performance in both, even on low settings is pretty abysmal.

If your bottle is set to Windows 7 you won't get any sound, if thats the case set it to Windows XP. Otherwise i don't know.

Does anyone know how well it will perform on my laptop?

Im have version 10.1.2
Im using a Macbook Pro lion 10.7.1
Processor 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics Intel HD Graphics 3000 384 MB

Thanks

owenbalfe wrote:

Does anyone know how well it will perform on my laptop?

Im have version 10.1.2
Im using a Macbook Pro lion 10.7.1
Processor 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics Intel HD Graphics 3000 384 MB

Thanks

If it's going to be anything like what i've experienced, i highly doubt it will run well. However others seem to have pretty good performance, there's no sure way of telling, don't set your hopes too high though.

About the sound issue, while i don't get sound in Windows 7 bottle, but get it in Windows XP bottle, over at wine others need it reversed, if anyone is missing sound, try switching the bottle modes.

Mikkel P wrote:

owenbalfe wrote:

Does anyone know how well it will perform on my
laptop?

Im have version 10.1.2
Im using a Macbook Pro lion 10.7.1
Processor 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics Intel HD Graphics 3000 384 MB

Thanks

If it's going to be anything like what i've experienced, i highly
doubt it will run well. However others seem to have pretty good
performance, there's no sure way of telling, don't set your hopes
too high though.

About the sound issue, while i don't get sound in Windows 7 bottle,
but get it in Windows XP bottle, over at wine others need it
reversed, if anyone is missing sound, try switching the bottle
modes.

...indeed -- this title is going to be well beyond the capabilities of
the HD3000 GPU & drivers with crossover/wine -- I would be surprised if
it ran at anything other than the lowest possible settings on this hardware,
if at all...(at least currently -- the HD3000 might fair better in Windows
with windows drivers) ... that chipset, is going to rather limit what you can
achieve 9or not) on that machine with crossover/wine...

Cheers!

owenbalfe wrote:

Does anyone know how well it will perform on my laptop?

Im have version 10.1.2
Im using a Macbook Pro lion 10.7.1
Processor 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics Intel HD Graphics 3000 384 MB

Thanks

Minimum System Requirements

• OS: 7/Vista/XP PC (32 or 64 bit)
• CPU: Dual Core 2.0GHz or equivalent processor
• RAM: 2 GB
• HDD: 6 GB
• Graphics: 512 MB card
• Sound Card: DirectX 9 Compatible
• DirectX: Version 9.0c
• Internet for Steam activation

Recommended System Requirements

• OS: Windows 7/Vista/XP (32 or 64 bit)
• CPU: Quad-core Intel or AMD CPU
• RAM: 4 GB
• HDD: 6 GB free disk space
• Graphics: 1 GB Graphics Memory
• Sound Card: DirectX 9 Compatible
• DirectX: Version 9.0c
• Internet for Steam activation

Since your graphics card is below spec (unless it'll be using a whole heap of shared memory) I'm guessing you'll be out of luck.

So i got it to work and load up. The game runs well, but the mouse for some reason defaults to going down. All the time. in the game, the main menu, and the escape menu, the mouse goes down. I can move it up, but it is always going down. I downloaded Morrowind, and this exact same thing happened. Maybe it is the mouse I'm using? I'll try a different mouse and edit it if that worked

EDIT: No, I tried my default mac mouse and that still didn't work. Does anyone have any tips at all? Its really frustrating being able to run the game fine but not actually play it lol

EDIT 2: I got it fixed.

It says, Failed to initialize renderer: Unknown error creating the renderer. I'm running a 13 inch macbook pro intel 3000 512 MB, 8 gigs of ram.

Hi,

..that doesn't surprise me at all with an Intel HDxxxx GPU ;
although they are an improvement over the previous intel GPU's,
they still over classify as a 'low end entry level graphics card'
these days, and the video -driver- supports in linux/OSX are
really lacking - they work a bit better with Windows drivers..

...there's not much you can do about it, except experiment ;
have a read of this thread ...;

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=2586;forum=1;msg=82874

... would appear to be exactly the same issue...

Cheers!

Wait so how do I install it without getting the .NET framework screw-up because when I try to launch it using the TESV.exe it tells me that it failed to initialize the renderer... I got CrossOver to play this game so I'm pretty pissed off now.

Let me preface with me being a complete complete nub. I am on a Mac Pro OXS 10.6.7. I have 12 gb of ram, 8 cores, processor name is quad core intel Xeon.... Also, the graphics card is an ATI Radeon HD5770 with 1024mb of Vram... Having said all that, this thing is running like dog shit. I am sure it is primarily on me. I am running it through steam. I have followed all of the steps I read in this thread. I am just completely lost. In game, with settings turned down so low I feel like I am on an atari, it is still choppy choppy choppy.
If you have any advice, please give a very detailed instruction on how to execute it.
Thanks,

In my opinion this is expected. Wine can't really hope (at least for now) to run multithreaded Windows apps the way Windows does. You can test this with winrar easily. 7zip may behave equally bad.

While your system, hardware-wise exceeds what Bethesda listed under the recommended settings, wine can't really present that HW to Skyrim.

There are other games and apps that suffer from the lack of multithreading in Wine that come to my mind. World of Warcraft and Guild Wars come to mind.

With WoW, raiding is almost impossible, and my machine is no slouch either (an I5 2500K with 8 GB of RAM). FPS will drop to 30 or 20 while in instances as spells and stuff start to fly all over the place.

With Guild Wars, the problem is almost ridiculous if you want to play immediately after installing. While data is being downloaded, the game will slow to a crawl, and you will lag horribly. All of this because game stuff and downloading data happens on only one core. This means at some point the CPU will process game data (rendering scenes, other chars etc.) then stop that work to allow the downloader to do its work for a while and switch back and so forth. The way to avoid this is to first make sure the game is fully updated (and this is covered in the tips section) the play it.

PS: People that are more knowledgeable than me, please feel free to chirp in if you feel that anything I said is not entirely accurate.

Silviu Cojocaru wrote:

In my opinion this is expected. Wine can't really hope (at least for
now) to run multithreaded Windows apps the way Windows does. You can
test this with winrar easily. 7zip may behave equally bad.

While your system, hardware-wise exceeds what Bethesda listed under
the recommended settings, wine can't really present that HW to
Skyrim.

There are other games and apps that suffer from the lack of
multithreading in Wine that come to my mind. World of Warcraft and
Guild Wars come to mind.

With WoW, raiding is almost impossible, and my machine is no slouch
either (an I5 2500K with 8 GB of RAM). FPS will drop to 30 or 20
while in instances as spells and stuff start to fly all over the
place.

With Guild Wars, the problem is almost ridiculous if you want to
play immediately after installing. While data is being downloaded,
the game will slow to a crawl, and you will lag horribly. All of
this because game stuff and downloading data happens on only one
core. This means at some point the CPU will process game data
(rendering scenes, other chars etc.) then stop that work to allow
the downloader to do its work for a while and switch back and so
forth. The way to avoid this is to first make sure the game is fully
updated (and this is covered in the tips section) the play it.

PS: People that are more knowledgeable than me, please feel free to
chirp in if you feel that anything I said is not entirely accurate.

...I'll chirp on your post-script =)....

....wine does run multithreaded on multiple cores (if available) ; most of the
issues you described are caused by other things, not this. Currently on OSX you're
boned, because user cannot sway cpu_affinity (and hence thread concurrency) ;
the OSX kernel manages the CPU scheduling at all times. In linux, however, you
can actually bind a process to a single (or pair) of CPU cores, thus negating the
kernel thread scheduling routine....

...typically speaking, most multithreaded win32 apps are ok/unaffected by things
like this -- there are exceptions ; Deus EX, S.P.A.Z. are two that I can name off
the top of my head ; in linux where one can set cpu_affinity, both these titles
run significantly better if bound to a single CPU core. There are others...

...OSX is seemingly particularly bad at marshaling networking operations in concert
with app operations in wine ; I have no idea of the cause, only that it is so. I know

• I have both linux & Mac machines here, and anything with online content being tossed
  across the network interface, hits the Mac much harder than in linux ..ie; the Mac will
  display jerky/stalled graphics when the app is generating/receiving network data, but
  in linux such is not so evident...

Cheers!

Am I better off just installing windows and running bootcamp on my computer or will that leave me with the exact same problems? Thank you guys for the help btw.

Anybody got this working on OSX Lion.

When I try to open install.exe a small window pops up but there is nothing inside for me to click on.

Also, I have directx runtime - modern and visual c++ 2008 redist installed in the bottle

I just installed the demo of CrossOver Games 10.2.0

Got trouble installing but just used the installed game directory I used when I had Windows 7.
(Made my own reg entry in user.reg)

Installed DirectX modern and C++ Runtime 2008 and got the game running nice and smooth in fullscreen.

Only problem I got now is that mouse movements are choppy and sometimes the keyboard controls seem to get 'stuck' ie. keeps strafing without touching A or D.
Deselecting Xbox360 controller doesn't work either.

Anybody got an idea? If this game runs ok I might consider buying CrossOver Games.

Run fine

i've install in windows before port on CrossOver Mac Game

iMac 2011 (Lion, 8Go ram, Core i7, 2Go Ram memory)

Mouse issues:
http://appdb.winehq.org/commentview.php?iAppId=13667&iVersionId=24749&iThreadId=73481

Sound issues:
Change to emulated

I've installed the Steam version of Skyrim on Ubuntu 11.10 (Dell laptop XPS 1530) using Crossover Games v10.2.0 and it runs close to 'Gold' for me.
I've also installed it on a Mac book Pro (Lion) and it crashes more frequently than the Ubuntu setup.
This may be due to graphics settings. Skyrim is prone to crashing, anyway, (as of this date) so that might be an indication of how well it's running!

Crossover Settings:
Install: As suggested above by Jonas. This works on both platforms.
Sound: as suggested above - use 'Emulation'

Skyrim Settings:
Graphics: I use 'Medium' in the Skyrim panel, although it wants to set it to 'High' on both machines. This seems to slow down the frequency of game crashes/random freezes. I'll try 'Low' on the Mac to see if that makes any difference.
Mouse: You can try tweaking the sensitivity in Skyrim settings, but it's not as useful as it should be.

General:
Mouse problems: Skyrim has mouse control problems (see above). Since this occurs on its native platform there are various suggestions & tweaks.
Performance Tuning: The Skyrim Nexus site (I think) suggests some Skyrim prefs file settings to maximise the look while minimise the processing overhead.
These work, but since Skyrim often crashes and you need to 'Verify the Game Cache' in Steam, it will overwrite your changed hand-changed prefs (well, it does for me.)
Mods: I haven't tried any yet. I can't see why they wouldn't work.

Gameplay: For me it works as if it was native, it's playable, it's quite smooth, the graphics settings can be set to high or tweaked manually as you would on its native platform.

Problems: Verify the Steam Game Cache.
(I'm pretty sure these are Skyrim faults and not related to Crossover.)

1. Won't start after crash/freeze. If you've had to 'force quit' the bottle (for example)and the game won't start after clicking 'Play' or you get a black screen after the Skyrim Settings box, you should 'verify the game cache' in steam. This resets (overwrites from Steam) any of my manual prefs changes but it always fixes problems.
2. Crash/freeze: Seems to be a known bug in Skyrim. Cope and wait for a patch, I suppose.

I will upgrade to 10.2.1 and see what happens.

Skyrim has all sorts of problems on Windows too. Game wasn't ready, but hey, deadlines are deadlines...