How-to: Playing Oblivion on Linux with Wine!

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This is my first How-to here at Wine-Review. Some tips on what I can improve would be nice!

Oblivion is a single-player game that takes place in Tamriel's capital province, Cyrodiil. You are given the task of finding the hidden heir to a throne that sits empty, the previous emperor having been killed by an unknown assassin. With no true Emperor, the gates to Oblivion (the equivalent of hell in the world of Tamriel) open, and demons begin to invade Cyrodiil and attack its people and towns. It's up to you to find the lost heir to the throne and unravel the sinister plot that threatens to destroy all of Tamriel.

Oblivion features a groundbreaking new AI system, called Radiant AI, which gives non-player characters (NPCs) the ability to make their own choices based on the world around them. They'll decide where to eat or who to talk to and what they'll say. They'll sleep, go to church, and even steal items, all based on their individual characteristics. Full facial animations and lip-synching, combined with full speech for all dialog, allows NPCs to come to life like never before.

This test was done in a clean wine prefix and the game was played in a Virtual Desktop.
Wine version used for the test: 1.0-rc2 with 3DMark patch.

Installation
First of, you have to cd to your dvd directory in a terminal, in my case it look like this:

david@david-desktop:~$ cd /media/cdrom0

and then you start the installation program by typing "wine setup.exe", in my case it look like this:

david@david-desktop:/media/cdrom0$ wine setup.exe



Patching
After you have installed the game, then you will probably want to upgrade Oblivion to the latest version:

Get the official patch here

Download the patch, and install it by typing the following in a terminal:

Wine patchname.exe



After the game has been patched, you probably want to play!

Important! The game will crash if you don't have installed DirectX 9.0C.You can find Twickline's awesome guide here.

Playing the game
To start the game, cd to the game directory via the terminal, and start the game with:



wine Oblivion.exe

Performance boosters
If you want to enhance performance, the you can add WINEDEBUG=-all before ”wine Oblivion.exe”, ”WINEDEBUG=-all” means that the Wine Debugger will be shut off.

Compiz can be quite the performance killer. Since I use Gnome, i replace Compiz by typing ”Metacity –replace” in a terminal before i play. Then i simply turn Compiz on again by starting a new terminal and typing ”Compiz”.

You can change some settings in Wine's regedit to enhance performance. This is how my settings look like:




You can read more about regedit on this page: http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys

And last but not least, here is an awesome Oblivion Tweak guide: http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html

Video
And finally, here is a video when I play Oblivion. (the performance is a lot lower because of the screencast program)

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