fizzlepud wrote: ↑Sun 29 Dec 2019 6:56 AM
I just recently found out about Phoenix and very interested in playing; however, I am not sure if I can play it on a Linux/Unix system.
I have a really old laptop that I want to use, but it is supper slow running Windows and want to wipe it to put Linux on. It is also the laptop that my son uses, but he wants to play DAOC with me. I've read through a few posts here about Linux and it seems like that option is going away.
Can anyone clarify? If it is capable, can you tell me which OS version and packages need to be used (or shoot me a link to a how-to)?
Thanks
Yes, I play Phoenix on both Linux and FreeBSD. You just need at least WINE version 2.0 and higher (I think 4.x is the current version).
I did a full write-up on how to play DAOC on Linux on Uthgard's forums back in the day (Uthgard 1.x days), but that was when the vertex shader support in WINE had issues and needed patching. Since WINE 1.8/1.9, that's been fixed.
(AFAIK, you can't play on Linux/Mac/FreeBSD with Uthgard 2.0 because they don't support WINE)
It's fairly straightforward though:
1. In a terminal, set up your Phoenix WINE prefix like this:
Winearch=win32 WINEPREFIX="~/.wine-phoenix" winecfg
(It'll create the needed files, prompt you to download gecko and some other toolkit, then you can quit winecfg)
2. Next in the terminal:
export WINEPREFIX="~/.wine-phoenix
And then run the DAOC installer using:
wine DAoCSetup.exe
This will install the game into
$HOME/.wine-phoenix/drive_c
(I think it'll be C:\Electronic Arts\Dark Age of Camelot\etc..)
I recommend copying the game folder out of there and into your home directory. That way, phoenix DAOC folder will be separate and you can still switch to using Live if you wish. For example, on mine, I put it in $HOME/games/phoenix
3. Run winecfg and set your D: drive to whatever your home directory is then games (if you copied to $HOME/games/phoenix)
4. Unzip the Phoenix launcher into the 'phoenix' directory: https://forum.playphoenix.online/assets/launcher.zip
5. Set up this shell script to invoke the game:
#!/bin/sh
export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-phoenix
export WINEDEBUG=-all
wine "D:\Phoenix\Phoenix.exe" 2>&1 > /dev/null
That script should load the game off the D: drive which you defined in winecfg above.
A lot of the tweaks that raghh mentioned aren't actually needed.
Though if you can figure out why zones lag so badly (Jordheim and Ellan Vannin), let me know. I've toyed with copying the game onto a tmpfs (RAMDISK) and playing that but a 5 GB RAMDISK is kinda resource intensive (though I have 16 GB RAM on my laptop). I thought perhaps it was disk latency but I think it's just the inherent shortcomings of the old 32 bit client.