Laboratorium Komputerowe Progmar
Marcin Załęczny

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The Witcher (pol. Wiedźmin) - Enhanced Edition - how to install (Ubuntu 16.04)

Make sure you have wine installed at minimum 2.3 version (it was tested by me). Here is how to achieve this: latest wine installation

Make sure you have proprietary producer's graphic card drivers installed. For example for NVIDIA required version is minimum 375.26 (it was tested by me). Here is how to achieve this: NVIDIA GTX GeForce drivers installation

Below there is a step by step instruction how to install and run the game:

  1. env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 WINEARCH=win32 /opt/wine-staging/bin/winecfg

    In a popup window in Applications tab select Windows 7 option. Next switch to Graphics tab, check Virtual Desktop Emulation checkbox and fill in your desktop's resolution in use, for example 1366x768.

  2. cd /media/[username]/The\ Witcher\ Install\ Disc/
    env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 WINEARCH=win32 /opt/wine-staging/bin/wine setup.exe

    After installation the game is located in ~/.wine32/drive_c/Program Files/The Witcher Enhanced Edition directory. There is a launcher.exe file there. If you run it the game crashes, so you have to run file witcher.exe directly (it is located in System subdirectory):

    cd ~/.wine32/drive_c/Program\ Files/The\ Witcher\ Enhanced\ Edition/System
    env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 WINEARCH=win32 /opt/wine-staging/bin/wine witcher.exe

  3. If you run the game and see that the avatars are transparent (no textures applied), then open a regedit program as below: env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 WINEARCH=win32 /opt/wine-staging/bin/regedit and create following key with values (all values must be created as "string value"): [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D]
    "DirectDrawRender"="opengl"
    "OffscreenRenderingMode"="fbo"
    "PixelShaderMode"="enabled"
    "RenderTargetLockMode"="textex"
    "UseGLSL"="enabled"
    "VideoMemorySize"="4096" (this is amount of graphic card memory in megabytes)
    "CheckFloatConstants"="enabled"

    Next apply changes to wine server: env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 WINEARCH=win32 /opt/wine-staging/bin/wineserver -k and run the game again: env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 WINEARCH=win32 /opt/wine-staging/bin/wine witcher.exe

From now the game should run without above flaw. Unfortunately it sometimes crashes because of some internal error. This is why you should be encouraged to save game often not to lose your progress. I also met a crash just after the movie that glued first chapter with a next one. The movie finished and a black screen appeard and nothing happened. In the case you can press ALT+TAB shortcut to switch to terminal from which game was fired and then press Ctrl+C to kill it. After next run you can restore your progress by loading last autosave item. If you encounter the crash that make ALT+TAB not working then press CTRL+ALT+F1 to switch to virtual terminal, log in to shell there and issue following commands to kill the game: ps aux | grep witcher
kill PID_WITCHER_PROCESS Now you can switch back to your graphic environment by ALT+F7 combination, run the game again and load most up to date savegame. Happily the game does not crash often so you can play with a pleasure.

Sample screenshots