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Starcraft 2 on Linux/Wine: Part 2 and Some Thoughts

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I’m glad I was able to help some people out with my previous post on the matter. I’m still getting some questions and the like; here’s what I’ve been able to ascertain thus far from my own experiences:

The ALSA sound driver doesn’t seem to play nice with SC2. It will crash the game on startup and throw an error box in your face… at least, it does for me. The best workaround I can find for this so far is to go into the Audio tab in winecfg and set the sound to ESound. If you play WoW and have been running it with ALSA, as I have, you’ll just have to deal with manually switching back and forth (until I can figure out an automated way to accomplish this.)

There will be some sound glitches but not many. I’d say the sound is about 95% workable.

I have to run with the graphical settings all the way down but I think that is because of my own personal computer setup more than because of Linux/Wine. My computer is a self-built machine from about four or five years back and it’s definitely starting to show its age. Similarly, videos/cut-scenes are low-quality but run and are watchable. Be sure to make sure you are running the game in opengl mode. I accomplished this by adding “-opengl” to the end of the command on my SC2 desktop shortcut. There is also a way to edit it in the config file, I’m sure.

I experience slowdown on occasion; it helps to close most of your other programs in the background. Still, the game is very playable, and everything that I have tried works so far.

The game occasionally crashes on startup, at random. This is a kernel issue, not a Wine issue. (For the record, this is the same thing that now causes WoW to occasionally randomly crash on login, if you have noticed that these past few weeks as well.) I dunno about everyone else but this problem seems to be showing up less and less for me so I just suck it up and live with it. If you really don’t like it, though, you can patch the kernel. If you want to do that then I would recommend searching up instructions specific to your distro.

Some people still seem to be having problems with the installer, I am not sure how to help you with that, but I would direct you to the Wine subforum on Ubuntu Forums, or the Starcraft 2 entry in WineDB.

I’ve been having a blast with this game, and I’m constantly impressed with the Wine team for maintaining this software and making these great Blizzard games available to us ‘nix-heads. Between playing World of Warcraft on Linux for more than three years now, the original Starcraft, and now Starcraft 2, I think it’s safe to say that I basically owe the Wine people a good chunk of my soul, or at least my firstborn child. Much love, guys! <3

8 thoughts on “Starcraft 2 on Linux/Wine: Part 2 and Some Thoughts”

  1. The slowdown could also be attributed to your computer’s age. Trying to run it on my P4 is a nightmare in the campaign mode due to all the scripted events running at the same time as all the units running across the map.

    Of course, that’s no longer an issue with my i7, which I am about to set up right now. *swoon*

  2. One thing I’ve wondered – since OSX has its roots in POSIX/BSD, have you tried using the OSX client and see if it runs natively? Probably a long shot, but…

  4. @ krizzlybear – so jealous of your new setup D= But have fun! *nod*

    @ Rilgon – I’ve actually considered that before. I dunno if it would work, but it’d be fun to find out.

    @ Tora – OMG I LOVE IT. <3

  6. Uh – don’t think it will work … OSX (in spite of its BSD heritage) uses Mach as the real underpinning and executables are a hybrid Apple/Mach form – nothing like the Linux executable – and not even like BSD executable formats.
    Sorry….

  7. I’ve had to run with everything on Low as well, and I’ve got a decent rig. (meets the “recommended” specs on the SC2 box) I haven’t tried the -opengl command, though. I was under the impression that that wasn’t supported in the released version.

    As for the sound, there is a workaround you can do that was mentioned on the WineHQ appDB. Some DLL that you can disable. Doing that fixed all of my sound issues.

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