EVE and Wine

I am a bit of a gamer, but I have stayed out of the MMO game in part because I never felt like dealing with the headaches of Wine and online games. Last year, however, I tried out EVE Online on a Windows box I had lying around and rather enjoyed it. Once I reinstalled my Ubuntu I decided to plunge into the hairy world of Wine and gaming.

Between Crossover gaming, Cedega/WineX, and vanilla Wine I had my work cut out for me. For brevity’s sake Cedega has worked the best and is a wonderful choice well worth the little bit of money they ask. The application ships with a library of installers and getting Eve installed was as simple as downloading the off line installer from CCP and running the setup program available in Cedega.

Getting EVE to actually run on the other hand was at best a colossal pain in the ass and at worst took two years off my life. I own an ATI video card (AGP 3650 HD to be more specific), and the game would crash when I tried to start. This was cause by Cedega having issues with ATI cards and FBO’s. Finally I found a group of settings that worked, and EVE plays very nicely and beautifully.

The magic combination seemed to be disable “Framebuffer Object”, set “Pixel Shaders” to 3.0, and “Vertex Shaders” to 2.0. Otherwise, the defaults are fine.