Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell on Linux with Wine

Written by Tom Wickline

Monday, 31 December 2007 06:14

About Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell

Tom Clancys Splinter Cell is a critically-acclaimed 3D action-adventure stealth-based video game, developed by Ubisoft Montreal and built on the Unreal Engine 2. It is the first Splinter Cell game in the series endorsed (but not created) by author Tom Clancy, and follows the activities of American NSA Black Ops agent Sam Fisher.

Splinter Cell's stealth-based gameplay, although frequently compared to the Metal Gear series, has more in common with that of the cult PC series Thief which pre-dates it by several years. Most of the game is spent sneaking around, using darkness and shadows to hide from patrolling guards. The player is equipped with a "light meter" that indicates how visible they are to enemies, as well as night vision and thermal vision goggles to help the player navigate in darkness and spot enemies. For combat, Fisher is equipped with a suppressed pistol as well as a suppressed assault rifle that can be used for combat, sniping, and even for launching various non-lethal devices such as "sticky shockers" and "gas grenades". Fisher can also sneak up on enemies from behind to knock them unconscious or grab and interrogate them. Fisher is also extremely acrobatic, and has a variety of maneuvers including the ability to mantle onto and climb along ledges, hang from pipes, and perform a "split jump" in narrow spaces to mantle up a steep wall.

The game heavily encourages stealth over brute force. Although Fisher is equipped with a firearm, he only carries at most 60 rounds of ammunition and rarely is able to obtain more during a mission. He also can only survive about 6 bullet hits before dying, and since most enemies are equipped with fast-firing automatic weapons they have the ability to cut Fisher down in a second or two. Additionally, Fisher must go in "aim mode" before firing his weapon, during which his movement speed is significantly slowed down. Moving while firing also makes Fisher's weapon highly inaccurate, as does firing more than one bullet at a time. It is also critical to hide bodies after killing or knocking them out. If another patrolling guard finds the body, he can alert other enemies and an alarm is heard. If the body is unconscious, the guards can revive him. Sometimes the only option is knock them unconscious, as lethal force is not permitted.

Wine configuration
You must have Wine 0.9.52 or later to play this game, and you will need to set OffscreenRenderingMode to fbo in your registry.

This is with a clean configuration directory and running in a 1024x768 virtual desktop.

$ winecfg

Once the .wine directory is built the configuration tool will start and you can set a virtual desktop in the graphics tab if you wish. This is a good time to also set your Audio driver in the Audio tab.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell install

The full game or demo should install without any problems, (I installed the demo BTW) if your installing from the game CD just mount the CD and change directory to where the setup.exe is located and run $wine setup.exe

tom@tuxonfire ~ $ wine splintercelldemo.exe