Installing WoW under Wine

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.

Obscuring polygons and rays

• wow 5.0.4
• wine 1.5.11
• fedora 17
• run launcher, it says game is up to date, click play
• when walking on dirt, there are lots of obscuring polygons and rays that shift with your point of view
• PC characters are solid black, NPCs render properly

 I tried making the suggested video settings:

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

But those changes did not correct the display glitches.

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 "Dowloading update tools..."
• then a separate error window displays:

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

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

General install procedure

After making sure the hardware requirements are satisfied, the recipe looks like this:

• winetricks
  • install game
  • wowtrial

If the desktop icon is broken, start the game with:

./local/share/wineprefixes/wowtrial/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/Wow.exe

The installer starts, but hangs when displaying "Downloading updated tools"

Check to see if the patch in Temp is completely downloaded:

rday@potato:~/.local/share/wineprefixes/wowtrial/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/Temp$ ls -l
total 23112
-rwxrwxr-x 1 rday rday  6399096 May 23 18:04 wow-4.2.1.2736-enUS-tools-downloader.exe
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rday rday 12866240 May 23 18:11 wow-4.2.1.2736-enUS-tools-patch.exe.part
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rday rday  4392070 May 23 18:34 wow-patch.mpq

That patch has a .part extension, so it is not ready to run yet. But 12MB is about the right size.

rday@potato:~/.local/share/wineprefixes/wowtrial/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/Temp$ ls -l
total 23100
-rwxrwxr-x 1 rday rday  6399096 May 23 18:41 wow-4.2.1.2736-enUS-tools-downloader.exe
-rwxrwxr-x 1 rday rday 12853680 May 23 18:46 wow-4.2.1.2736-enUS-tools-patch.exe
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rday rday  4392070 May 23 18:41 wow-patch.mpq

Those files are ready to go. Cancel the installer and go to the WorldofWarcraft Temp directory Manually run the wow-4.2.1.2736-enUS-tools-patch.exe

rday@potato:~/.local/share/wineprefixes/wowtrial/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/Temp$ wine ./wow-4.2.1.2736-enUS-tools-patch.exe 

Wait for the Installer/Updater to download the rest of the game.