Friday, 23 May 2008 15:05

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.

System Specs:
Operating System: Ubuntu 8.04
Wine version: 1.0-rc2 with 3DMark patch applied.
Video Card: Nvidia 8800GTS 640MB
CPU: Intel E6550 2,333 GHZ
Memory: 2 gb RAM

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

$ cd /media/cdrom0

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

/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 DirectX9.0C 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.

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 a very good 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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Kumagoro 2008-09-14 01:51:54

Windows just lost its last reason to stay on my hard drive

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hav0k 2008-09-25 05:49:07

indeed, games were windows' last holdout over better OS setups, and they are loosing ground
steadily.

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shader

Gary 2008-10-29 09:46:53

I have got the game to run all ok, following your guide, however, when i run oblivion in wine,
and start a new game, i can not see my charater, and if i just hit done so i can go and
play, i still see nothing, as it is all black.
i hope you can help with this, as i really
do want to get on and play this game.
my thanks.
Mogg.

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