How to run DDO on Linux

"DDO" is not an abbreviation I'm familiar with, but I'm assuming you're referring to Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited. If so, you're in luck.

WineHQ has a step-by-step tutorial for it, and DDO on Wine is rated platinum.

I strongly recommend visiting WineHQ and poking around, and if you should attempt this, the method that uses PlayOnLinux is normally the easier one by far.

Good luck!

Link copied here to guard against link rot:

Standard DDO Wine installation

First, you need Wine and/or PlayOnLinux installed.

Check your distribution's package manager - you want either the latest stable (currently 1.6.2) or the latest testing (currently 1.7.22, but changes frequently) wine. If you're going to use PlayOnLinux, just grab 1.6.2 since it's required for PlayOnLinux to be installed - If you want a newer version you can install it within PoL itself.

As for PlayOnLinux, the newest version is 4.2.4, but any reasonably recent version should be fine - check your package manager and install it from there first. If it's not available from your package manager, you can download it from playonlinux.com. Make sure you follow the instructions there which are appropriate for your distrubution type.

For complete Wine installation on systems such as Arch/Manjaro 64bit make sure you also install these packages:

Samba lib32-ncurses lib32-mpg123 lib32-libldap lib32-openal

Nvidia users might also need/want: lib32-opengl-nvidia lib32-opencl-nvidia

If you're using wine without PlayOnLinux, you will also need winetricks (check your package manager, most distros have it available by default, or get it from http://winetricks.org/winetricks, mark it executable (chmod +x winetricks) and move it to /usr/local/bin (sudo mv winetricks /usr/local/bin) ).

Grab the installer from http://www.ddo.com/en/game/download (Get the one that under "On PC" that says "Download then Play" - the "Play Instantly" version uses HappyCloud, which DOES NOT WORK). Installing the game:

Wine users (if you use PlayOnLinux instead, see below) - Open a terminal and run the following commands (note: lines in parentheses are notes, not commands - only run the commands on lines starting with $, and don't include the first $, that's just notation for needing a prompt):

$ mkdir $HOME/wineprefix

$ export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/wineprefix/ddo

$ winetricks vcrun2005sp1 corefonts tahoma d3dx9 (note: d3dx9 usually isn't required anymore, but doesn't hurt, and not having it can break on some systems) \

$ wine ddolive.exe (follow the prompts and wait for wine to for the program to finish the basic installation) (I recommend not installing shortcuts - a desktop shortcut will still be created for you)

$ wineboot (I don't know if this is always required, but it's not a bad idea.)

Once the installation completes, double-click the ddo icon on your desktop (note: don't close your terminal just yet, you might need it).

Now is the tricky part: The launcher should try to install Akamai Netsession. If the launcher hangs without ever displaying Turbine's version of the Akamai Netsession license agreement, close it, go back to your terminal and run the following command:

$ ps aux | grep netsession

This will show 0 to 3 lines, depending on whether grep shows itself on your system and whether netsession is currently running. If there are 2 or more lines, the 2 lines we're worried about are the ones that say "netsession_win.exe". The second column in each line is a number. Run the following command for each line, replacing $NUMBER with the numbers you found, one at a time, starting with the one that does not say "--client" (note: pkill doesn't work here or I'd have suggested it):

$ kill -9 $NUMBER

Once you've done that, or if grep didn't say anything about netsession (ie grep only returned 1 line, or nothing at all), do the following:

$ export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/wineprefix/ddo (only needed if you've closed the terminal since you started the install) $ wineboot

Now try running the launcher again. Eventually, the launcher should pop up a license agreement, and then it may pop itself back up over the top of the agreement. If it does, alt-tab back to the agreement, then scroll down and click accept to begin installing Netsession. Follow the prompts, including accepting the agreement again, and once Netsession is installed, the launcher should begin downloading DDO.

Once the installer finishes downloading everything, the game should be ready to play, enjoy. :)

PlayOnLinux users:

Start PlayOnLinux as usual. If this is your first time using PlayOnLinux (or you've always just used "system" wine), you'll need to install at least one version of wine in PlayOnLinux - here's how: Go to Tools->Manage Wine Versions In the "available versions" side of the dialog, select any version that ends in a number (i.e. 1.7.22, not 1.7.21-swtor, for example - I recommend either the highest version that ends in a number, or 1.6.2), and click the ">" button. Close the "Manage Wine Versions" window and continue. Click install (the big "+" button). In the lower-left corner of the window that appears, click "Install a non-listed program". Click next, select "install a program in a new virtual drive", and click next again. Enter a name for your virtual drive. I used "ddo". In the next dialog, check the boxes for "use another version" and "install libraries" (paraphrazed). Next, PlayOnLinux will ask you to choose a wine version. Choose any version that ends in a number - I recommend either 1.6.2 or the latest version (currently 1.7.22, but this changes a lot). If no wine versions other than "System" and versions that end in something other than a number are listed, cancel the instal and follow the instructions above for installing a wine version - both System and "named" wine versions can cause problems with DDO (named moreso than system, but both tend to cause their share of problems). After you click "next", wine PlayOnLinux will create your Virtual Drive, then run winecfg. In winecfg, go to Graphics, click "Emulate a Virtual Desktop" and in the 2 boxes that just became active, enter your desktop resolution (if you want to play in windowed mode, either just click OK or enter the resolution you want to play at) and click OK. Now PlayOnLinux will show you a bunch of things you can install in your wineprefix. You need to check the following 4 items from this list: POL_Install_corefonts POL_Install_d3dx9 POL_Install_tahoma POL_Install_vcrun2005 After selecting the above, click next. After a few seconds, PlayOnLinux will prompt you to select the installer to run. Click browse, find "ddolive.exe", and once you've selected it click next. Go through the install wizard, selecting all the defaults, until it finishes. When it's done, PlayOnLinux will pop up a list of exes to install shortcuts for. Select "TurbineLauncher.exe" and click next, name the launcher anything you want (I named mine "DDO"), click next again, then select "I don't want to make another shortcut" and click next one more time. The PlayOnLinux installer will then close. Select your DDO shortcut in the POL window, click "configure", click the "Wine" tab, and click "Windows Reboot", then close the configure window. Your next step is to simply run the launcher, so select it in the list of games and click on the "run" button. The Launcher should start, and then bring up a license agreement - if it doesn't, close the launcher, run whatever task manager you like or open a terminal, and kill any running instances of "netsession_win.exe", and then restart the launcher. After the license agreement pops up, the launcher may pop back up to the top, covering up the agreement - if this happens just alt-tab back to the license agreement. Read that (or just scroll through it to the bottom) and click "Accept". This will start the Akamai Netsession installer. Follow the prompts, accpeting the agreement again, and let it install. Once installed, the launcher should start downloading DDO. When it finishes, you should be able to log in. Have fun. :)

Fixes

At this point you should be able to sign in and play the game. But its normal for some issues to arise. Here are some tweaks/fixes you can try.

“AwsomiumProcess has encountered…”

If you followed the instructions above when installing you shouldn't run into this one, but if you do....

This error is common among the Wine games. Seems to pertain to the fonts somehow. In many cases the error can be closed & ignored. The game continues to work fine. But it doesn’t stop once it starts. The fix is to run:

$ winetricks corefonts tahoma

ALSA lib pcm.c:7843:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred

This problem (if it occurs) happens to kick in when you try to switch to windowed mode or change video resolutions. In my case on Manjaro the solution was to install the ‘pulseaudio-alsa’ package and reboot my system. (Note: This issue is probably specific to arch and gentoo (and derivatives, like manjaro and funtoo). For gentoo users who use PulseAudio, if you run into this issue, make sure PA is built with USE="alsa" and if not rebuild it with the alsa useflag enabled - and a word to the wise: only set USE="-alsa" for those programs that support pulseaudio and have an "alsa" useflag - setting USE="-alsa" globally can cause problems, like no sound in some apps).

Set the correct video memory size in the Registry.

Wine doesn’t usually input your video memory size correctly. To take advantage of your video memory you can set the amount yourself with winetricks.

1gb = 1024 (change to your video memory size).

Note: winetricks only suports video memory sizes of 512M, 1024M (1G), and 2048M (2G). If your card doesn't have one of those memory sizes (i.e. 128M, 256M, 768M, 1536M/1.5G, or >2048M/2G), you'll have to set this by hand. See http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys for how to do this.

$ winetricks videomemorysize=1024

Set Direct Draw Renderer to OpenGL

Setting this option can improve the game performance. Or at least it seems to work in my case.

$ winetricks ddr=opengl

(note: this should be the default, but just to be sure...)

Set OffscreenRenderingMode to pbuffer

Open regedit with:

$ wine regedit

Fine the key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D

And a new string value named ‘OffscreenRenderingMode’ and set it to ‘pbuffer’

Install PhysX (Nvidia only)

Nvidia users can improve the performance of game physics by installing PhysX from Nvidia. Winetricks can handle this.

$ winetricks physx

Note: This requires the nVidia OpenCL drivers to be installed, including the 32-bit ones for your system. If they're not installed, DDO will crash with PhysX installed, so be sure to have them installed.

 Game Tweaks

Game Tweaks

Tweaking the game:

Setting the video memory size usually fixes most performance issues. However there is a list of things you can do to try to kick the performance up an extra notch. Of course these are just suggestions. They are all optional.

Disable desktop 3D effects (In Unity switch to 2D session)

The 3D desktop features can cause some performance issues in the game. Logging out and changing your Unity session, or disabling 3D desktop effects can greatly increase game performance.

Choose a ‘Graphics Quality’ in Options->Graphics

It’s common for the auto detection to misdetect the card since there is a wine api in the middle of everything. Select this manually to get the quality you want. (I chose ‘very high’ for my 1gb Nvidia card)

Increase ‘Texture Cache Size’ in Options->Adv. Graphics

You can increase this to improve the game performance by increasing the amount of system memory used for graphics resources. This can decrease load times and in turn increase game performance.

Enable ‘Triple Buffering’ in Options->Adv. Graphics

For video cards with extra memory you can use this setting to slightly increase rendering performance.

Disable ‘Player Mesh Combining’ in Options->Adv. Graphics

This feature not only uses up more system memory, but also video memory. Saving a little video memory can always help game performance.

Disable ‘Distant Imposters’ in Options->Adv. Graphics

This option simply allows trees and other objects to render over distant scenery. Can be disabled to increase game performance.

If you use the Turbine Launcher, and don't have the game installed on an SSD, enable preloading of game files (or client_gamelogic.dat?) in the launcher's options.

This preloads the client_gamelogic.dat file into memory, drastically decreasing initial login/load time, at the cost of needing about 300M of extra memory when launching the game (this is a fix/workaround for the first-login red-latency-disconnect bug).