[Wine] How do I set up Steam?

[David Griffith]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2008, Grimhound wrote:

> jorl17 wrote:
> > Hi. Followign the tutorial you'll get it running, but abotu the
> > friends issue, it seems that you must hover the frinds' name to
> > refresh it. There is an open bug relative to this and it is still
> > something that hurts me. Good luck with Steam! (remember to disable
> > community in-game)
>
> Is there any way to get it working to Windows-level with any of the
> other programs meant to bring Steam to Linux?

What do you mean?  After applying the changes detailed here[1], I was able
to successfully buy, install, and run Half-Life 1 and its add-ons.  A big
sanity-saver was realizing that Wine seems to tell Steam that using the
only most bleeding-edge DirectX is okay.  You need to set the launch
parameters within Steam to get things sane.  Here's a shell script that I
use to launch Half-Life 2:

#!/bin/sh
WINEDEBUG=fixme-all wine C:/Program\ Files/Steam/Steam.exe \
    -user user password\
    -fullscreen -width 1440 -height 900 -applaunch 220 \
    -dxlevel 81 -novid -silent\
    -heapsize 512000 +map_background none \
    -script init "$@"

Now for some problems I've had:

1) Steam will randomly forget my password or both my username and
password, forcing me to input them manually.  When I think I've nailed
down what's causing this, the cause shifts elsewhere.  Lately this hasn't
been a problem.

2) Certain places in Half-Life 2 will cause the framerate to drop to one
every two or three seconds and broken-record audio glitches.  It happens
when Alyx says "Uh oh, look at the monitor" (noted on the Wine website).
In Episode 1, this happens when you rejoin Alyx after she goes to check on
the reactor.  The solution is to start the game with "-dxlevel 61" just
prior to the glitch point and let the video on the ingame monitor finish,
then save and restart with "-dxlevel" set to what it was before.

3) Portal doesn't want to let me load alternate maps.  I select the file I
want to load from the obvious place, but nothing actually happens.  If I
manually put the contents of the map archive where they need to go, I see
the alternate map appear in the menu, but selecting it does nothing.  Has
anyone sucessfully loaded alternate maps for Portal or Half-life 2?



[1] http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-433548.html.  I can't
access it right now due to a 503 error.

-- 
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu

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