World of Warcraft Forum

Howdy folks, I'm Matt. New to the Advocates group. I'm working with Crossover Linux, and I'm on Xubuntu 18.04.

Today is 9-5-18, and I just installed World of Warcraft, which is now on the 8.0 release. Battle.net loads, however, once I try to launch WoW I get an Initialization Error -1, or something like that. Anyway, here are some important details. I tried to hunt down the info needed to fix it.

1 - DirectX 9 is dead for WoW, and now everything is on DirectX 11. The libraries for DX 11 will need to be added to the recipe / tie file. Additionally, the future of WoW will be all 64 bit.

2 - The Lutris website link for WoW - (https://lutris.net/games/world-of-warcraft) notes that Wine Staging 3.14 has some DXVK stuff enabled (a bit unsure what that means) and that it runs (and well!). I feel like a lot of the work has already been done, now it just needs to be put into CrossOver. That's the sort of thing I don't know how to do, yet.

3 - When I checked my WoW bottle, it was using Wine 2.8. Numerous updates, including DX11 implementation updates, have been released since 2.8 (May 2017). I think for games, especially high performing / popular ones, keeping up with the Wine version is going to be a necessity.

4 - I get multiple errors during installation, and when running battle.net. My guess is that the dependencies are out of date or incomplete, I dunno.

I think that's a good start. I'll try to add more to this thread when I can. I'm going to follow the Lutris install procedure and see how that works. But ideally, I'd like to see CrossOver handling this.

Matt

Update 1

I completed the installation using the Lutris + WoW link I posted. The install completed without an issue. Battle.net application launched, updated the game, then the game launched, and I was able to bludgeon all of the plainstriders in Mulgore. I made no changes to the Lutris wine config.

Attempting a Crossover nightly build tonight. Additionally, I will try to incorporate the settings that Lutris used. If I can get both CrossOver and Lutris to run at the same levels of performance... success!

*** Edit

I just saw that there is a special WoW build for CrossOver. I'll look into that too.

Matt F wrote:

Update 1

I completed the installation using the Lutris + WoW link I posted.
The install completed without an issue. Battle.net application
launched, updated the game, then the game launched, and I was able
to bludgeon all of the plainstriders in Mulgore. I made no changes
to the Lutris wine config.

Attempting a Crossover nightly build tonight. Additionally, I will
try to incorporate the settings that Lutris used. If I can get both
CrossOver and Lutris to run at the same levels of performance...
success!

*** Edit

I just saw that there is a special WoW build for CrossOver. I'll
look into that too.

The WoW build is quite old at this point, and won't work with current WoW. Rather than do that, I'd suggest you wait a little for our upcoming beta of CrossOver 18. I can't make any promises right now, but we are working hard to get things exactly like what you're talking about working in 18. Our release cycle is typically to have a major version each fall, with a beta for a few weeks prior to release. All advocates are notified when betas start.

I can certainly help out / beta test once it's ready. The Lutris + wine setup for WoW is working very well, so I figured that would be 'low hanging fruit' for making tie files and such.

Considering I blew up my Windows partition trying to install SteamOS (I swear I was careful) I gotta make something work for games :)

According to my experience, WoW isn't really playable with lutris (wine+dxvk) at this moment. It runs quite fine for a while in less crowded areas (~40FPS @4K on GTX 970 with medium details) with occasional ~1s lags. But lags are gradually more frequent as I play and after ~30 minutes of my typical play (solo questing and exploring) I end up with ~0.5 FPS slideshow. In heavily crowded areas this happens much faster. It's independent of visual details and/or render resolution. Running nvidia-smi dmon indicated, that GPU was idle during lags.

I use debian testing with nvidia drivers from experimental (396.51). It was even worse with older drivers from testing (390.77) though. I didn't have much time to dig deeper in searching for lag source.

I haven't had that experience at all, however, my graphics settings are on normal / modest.

I ran through Thunder Bluff, Orgrimmar, and a few other fairly populated areas, and played for about 6 hours so far on Lutris. No crashes other than an error that required replacing the WoW cache file. I was down for 5 minutes due to that.

Here are my WoW settings. Important to note - if I move my Anti-Aliasing up from CMAA I start to get some weird artifacting. Not a problem for me, I can leave it at CMAA. I feel like the game looks good at the posted settings. I turned down or disabled the things that don't matter (to me) like shadows and water quality. My view distance is reasonable, effects look good, I have projected textures, which is critical for dungeons and raids, and my monitor only pushes 60hz so I was able to force the game to only run at that refresh rate. Attaching my settings screenshot, hopefully it will help.

For reference, I'm running stock Radeon drivers on an FX-8150 (I know it's old) with 16GB of RAM. My video card is a R9 295x2, which sounds great but the 2nd GPU seems to be ignored. I'm on Xubuntu 18.04.

I haven't seen any slowdowns, the game looks great and runs smooth, even while windowed.

If my camera is completely taken up by a magic effect, like an explosion, fire, stormcloud, etc, I get a bit of a dip in framerate. Once the camera is no longer completely taken up by those effects, framerate returns to normal.

Every now and again I get a weird hazy artifact thing. It clears up the moment I hit C and look at my character's equipment.

I'll add more info as I can. Happy WoW adventures!

Miroslav Maiksnar wrote:

I use debian testing with nvidia drivers from experimental (396.51).
It was even worse with older drivers from testing (390.77) though. I
didn't have much time to dig deeper in searching for lag source.

Thats your issue. You will want the latest dxvk (.80 at the moment) and at least the short lived 396.54.0 or better yet the .54.x series or best yet (forget offhand) the vulkan beta branch.

I can play with zero issues with lutris using the esync+pba staging wine.

Andrew Schott wrote:

Miroslav Maiksnar wrote:

I use debian testing with nvidia drivers from experimental
(396.51).
It was even worse with older drivers from testing (390.77) though.
I
didn't have much time to dig deeper in searching for lag
source.

Thats your issue. You will want the latest dxvk (.80 at the moment)
and at least the short lived 396.54.0 or better yet the .54.x series
or best yet (forget offhand) the vulkan beta branch.

I can play with zero issues with lutris using the esync+pba staging
wine.

I'm not sure if this is just nvidia driver. Updating to 396.54 did somehow help, probably thanks to resource leak fix, but major lagging still remains. No other games are affected, I have tested like 10 other windows games using steam proton (which is also based on dxvk) recently and all run fine.
Lags are caused probably by some blocking call or bad thread synchronization, because both CPU and GPU are idle during lag. Probably not disk I/O though, as it behaves same on HDD with btrfs raid0 and SSD with ext4. It might be caused by sound driver, but i didn't test this hypothesis yet :)

So you should just ignore my complaint about lags as most probably it is specific to my HW/SW combination.

I have crossover Linux v 18 and world of Warcraft does not work, no log in button. My computer runs on amd 8320 , 8 gigs of ram. If someone can help get battle .net program and world of warcraft work, I would be grateful.

sincerely,

James Behr

Hi everybody,

Just wanted to state my latest experience with this game on cx 18.0:
The game works, but performance is poor, usually there is lag for a second every few seconds; enough for a quick login, do missions, and logout.

Then I remembered that dxvk is a thing now, installed it to the same bottle, and: UI doesn't render. The game window opens but all it contains is a snapshot of whatever was on my screen before. Music plays, but stutters a lot.

Finally I used wine staging from the opensuse tumbleweed repos, and the game works very well with dxvk!
Fingers crossed that whatever change staging has that CX hasn't, will eventually land.

Cheers,
Thank you for the info about this. I was able to use this and now can play Overwatch and WoW with no issues. This is awesome. Now if Blizzard would support Linux would be better. :)

Now if Blizzard would support Linux would be better. :)
Would be a welcomed miracle as people have been asking for this since WoW went live ..... ...funny part is WoW alpha and beta had linux clients