Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Star Wars - The Old Republic Free to Play on Wine

Time and time again, I've tried to get this blast game to run on Wine.  As fate would have it, no such dumb luck for me.  I knew it was only a matter of time before the game hit the free to play model, and it happened.  So after some more fighting and tussling, I finally got the game to work.

This is also my first time using PlayOnLinux and it's a splendid tool that makes maintenance of my Wine builds easy.  What you need to do to get the game to work is run the script after downloading the exe installer from the main website.  This should pretty much run without issue.

If you run the launcher afterwards, all you'll get is a black screen.  You can set your Wine virtual desktop to 1000x600 to get the launcher to appear.  The game won't run afterwards, so I had to poke around a guide.  This one from the SWTOR website was extremely helpful.

Essentially, you'll need to get the password hash and other parameters of swtor.exe that the launcher runs and create your own shortcut that runs the exe directly.  My guess is that the long winded paths are messing up the game if executed by the launcher.

Performance seems OK, but it's only the starting planet.  Hope this little entry helps.

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