Editing Installing WoW under Wine (section)

== Misc symptoms==

Running Wow 4.3.4 on stock wine 1.4 in Ubuntu worked just fine without extra work.

Wow 4.3.4 on Fedora 17 wine 1.5 didn't work with my normal method, so I tried getting it to work in virtual box or Xen.  But that didn't pan out for me.

===Access violation after launching wow-64.exe===
sounds a lot like this bug:
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29584 which was marked fixed in wine 1.4-rc3.  Sigh.

* wow 5.0.4
* wine 1.5.11
* fedora 17
* run launcher (wine ./World\ of\ Warcraft\ Launcher.exe)
* log in successfully
* pick a character
* character loading screen appears
* character appears, environment sounds play
* screen is frozen for 5 seconds
* <pre>Error #132 (0x85100084) Fatal exception!
Program: Z:\home\blah\.local\share\wineprefixes\wowtrial\drive_c\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft\Wow-64.exe
Exception: ACCESS_VIOLATION
the memory could not be read</pre>
* window opens for wow error to send the crash dump to blizzard
* window opens for general error message
* click ok, everything closes

===Obscuring polygons and rays===
* wow 5.0.4yum install wine-1.5.17-1.fc17.i686
* wine 1.5.11
* fedora 17
* run launcher, it says game is up to date, click play or start with Wow-64.exe
* when walking on dirt in ogrimmar, there are lots of obscuring polygons and rays that shift with your point of view
* walking on rock or grass, there are no weird polygons
* PC characters are solid black, NPCs render properly

I tried making the suggested video settings:
<pre>
If you find see a lot of black dots and lines all over the screen, go to Options -> Graphics and set:

Liquid Detail: Fair (or lower)
Sunshafts: Disabled
SSAO_Label: Disabled

Alternatively, you can do regedit and add the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D\AlwaysOffscreen set to "enabled"

Ref:
http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30403
</pre>                                
But those changes did not correct the display glitches or make any visible difference.

After starting with Wow-64.exe and then trying to go back to using Wow.exe or World\ of\ Warcraft\ Launcher.exe, I now get a crash 5 seconds after picking a character.

==== wine ./Wow-64.exe -opengl ====
When I start the game with this switch, I am able to log in, and the initial display of my character standing in Ogrimmar displays, but does not update.  I hear environment sounds but after about 5 seconds of a static display, wow crashes with a memory access violation.

Starting a different character gets to a similar spot.  The character logs in but can't move and then a crash.

===Failed to run agent===
* on Ubuntu 12.04
* Wow 4.3.4.15595
* wine 1.4
* run wow, and the launcher tries to upgrade
* upgrader displays "Downloading updated tools..."
* then a separate error window displays:
<pre>Failed to run a required program (Agent). Wait one minute and try again and if that doesn't work please restart your computer and try again.
Please click the link for more information or contact Customer Support if the problem persists.
Error code: BLZPTS00007
</pre>
====There is a patch to wine to fix this but I was unable to find it====

Manually run agent.
But which one?  Agent is here:
<pre>
rday@merkli:~/.local/share/wineprefixes/wowtrial/drive_c/users/Public/Application Data/Battle.net/Agent$ ls
Agent.1040        Agent.dat  Agent.exe.trash          Logs
Agent.1040.trash  agent.db   ErrorReporter.exe
Agent.1267        Agent.exe  ErrorReporter.exe.trash
</pre>
Make sure no other agents are running, then launch the highest level agent manually, and then re-run the installer.

====Another untried fix for the agent problem====
 	
Agent.exe
by Robert Rak on Wednesday October 3rd 2012, 2:54

For anyone having issues with Agent.exe, I just ran winecfg, tabbed over to Libraries and deleted the dnsapi dll and now I have no issue with updating.

===Stuck when running installer===
*The installer progress window says "Updating setup files" and the progress bar never moves past about 60%.
*The installer throws this error to stdout: "Caught json::ParseException: Unexpected End of token stream, Line/offset: 1/1"
*The agent throws this error in stdout: "Request issued to non-existent Uri: GET - /update/client Response: 404

===Stuck when downloading updated tools===
* on Ubuntu 12.04
* Wow 4.3.4.15595
* wine 1.4
* run wow, and the launcher tries to upgrade
* upgrader displays "Downloading updated tools..."
* progress bar stops at about 40%
* you can click start, but then it starts downloading again and freezes at the same point

I was able to get past this by removing all the lock files in World of Warcraft/Data and making sure any running downloaders were killed.

===References===
* http://www.wowwiki.com/World_of_Warcraft_functionality_on_Wine
* http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4496521038
* http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4362519923

===Freeze on character selection screen===
* Wow version 5.4.2.17688 x64 Dec 12 2013
* wine version 1.7.12
* ubuntu 13.10 saucy
* worked fine on previous versions of wow and wine, but broke after a wine upgrade (it turns out this may have been a coincidence as other wine versions fail in the same way)
* 5 seconds after character selection screen, wow freezes and and a crash dump is generated
* wow-64.exe access violation, memory could not be read

*a full reinstall of wow did not solve the issue

This issue was resolved by renaming Wow-64.exe to Wow-64.exe.notused and launching just Wow.exe.
There is speculation (
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=28973&iTestingId=82373) that the problem is caused by Warden which searches for cheaters in memory locations that cause wow to crash under wine, and that 32-bit wow doesn't invoke that code.
Also on that link, it points out that there was an update, from 17665 to 17668 on Feb 10th, 2014.  The date at least corresponds to my experience, but I was broken at client version 17688, not 17668.

Wowpedia (http://wowpedia.org/Patch_5.4.2) says that client update 17688 was on Dec 18, 2014.

===Version 5.4.8 crash on character selection screen===

* invocation:
<pre>
cd /home/rday/.local/share/wineprefixes/wowtrial/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/World\ of\ Warcraft
wine ./Wow.exe
</pre>
* launcher starts version 5.4.8 (18291) (Release x64) May 19, 2014
* crash about 4 seconds after character selection screen is displayed
* Exception ACCESS VIOLATION
* memory could not be read
* the upgrade placed another copy of Wow-64.exe
* rename it to Wow-64.exe.bad3
* launch again and accept EULA
* success

===After upgrade to 5.4.8 (18414) can't get past launcher===

I have wine 1.6.2 installed on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr.
Now at patch 5.4.8 I can no longer play.  I've always had trouble with the installer, but have been able to get around and play in the past.
Now this version makes it harder to get around the Launcher.

I've tried running the installer in wine to see if the installer and launcher now work, but that fails as before.

I've tried running the 32-bit version of Wow.exe and that hangs indefinitely.

I've tried running the 64-bit Wow-64.exe and that also hangs.

I have a couple of desktop shortcuts configured:

* Battle.net/Battle.net Launcher.exe

This starts the launcher and I can log in to Battle.net, then it opens the wow launcher and crashes about a second later.
A log entry appears in Battle.net/Logs/Switcher.log, but no error appears.

The next step is to copy a working windows installation and see if I can get that to start.

* Copying a working installation from Windows yields a working game.

* however, I had to run in windowed mode instead of full screen
* I also had to run the 32-bit client (moving the 64-bit wow-64.exe out of the way)

* launching like this:
<pre>
 __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1 WINEDEBUG=-all wine Wow.exe -opengl
</pre>
* I get about 80 fps in window mode
* switching to windowed fullscreen makes the game screen disappear behind my desktop and I can't bring it up to a visible layer
* the battle.net client allows me to log in, then crashes
* the launcher crashes
* the 64-bt client crashes

===After upgrade to 6.0.2 (19034) 64-bit wow works but launcher doesn't===

* I patched with a windows client and then copied the wow directory to linux
* the updater crashes
* battle.net client crashes
* launching the 64-bit client works with this invocation:
<pre>
wine ./Wow-64.exe
</pre>
* but only in windowed mode.
* wow came up in full screen mode at first and I had to edit wtf.config to include this line:
 SET gxWindow "1"^M

* frame rate in windowed mode is about 40-60 fps
* with opengl enabled the frame rate seems the same