The Lord of the Direct3D

I’ve done things that I’ve considered stupid. I think everyone has. That
said, there’s not much in the world of computing that I’ve encountered
that I couldn’t fix. It’s just how it is — either I have the knowledge,
myself, or know pretty much right off the hop where on the interenet to
look for answers. That hubris was challenged this week/end.

My son plays LOTRO — The Lord of the Rings Online. By virtue of this
fact, I, too, play some LOTRO. There’s something inherently geeky about
meeting up with your 12-year-old son to “hunt some orc” online. He’s
loved The Lord of the Rings since seeing the Fellowship of the Ring at
the ripe age of 4 1/2. Yes, I know, I’m going to hél. Since then, he
devours anything LOTR related, books, games, name it. So, when the Mines
of Moria expansion came out, it was a foregone conclusion that he would
want to have this installed as soon as possible. Well, I run a linux
system — in case you couldn’t tell from the rest of the blog entries on
here — and, so, my getting things set up, on my system, to do test
installations so I don’t hose anything up on his Win7 laptop,
well…it’s trickier.

First off, let’s get this out of the way — LOTRO is a large pain in the
rear to get running *well* on a linux system if you don’t know what
you’re doing. I do, for the most part, so it’s only a small-ish pain in
the rear. There are things to minimize the rear-pain out there and I’d
used one of them to get the standard installation of LOTRO up and
running on my machine. In wanting to set up the Mines of Moria
expansion, I thought I would set it up in a different “bottle” or
$WINEPREFIX, as it were. This, as it turns out is a good idea, however,
the way I set about doing it was not. I chose the “easy way.” Oops.

The easy way is to use CodeWeavers’ CrossOffice/Games proggie and simply
install the game into its own little bottle (compartment, really…).
This, as it turns out, was dumb. I don’t really know *why* it was dumb,
from a “how the heck did THAT happen?” standpoint, but I know *why*
inasmuch as “because it was.” Now, I’ve used CrossOffice in the past
over the years and have run Office2000, Office2003 and so on with it
with great success. Having shaken the shackles of MSOffice in favor of
more open source apps, I have had little use for CrossOffice since what
I do run through Wine does so quite nicely, even LOTRO. So what on earth
possessed me to color outside the lines and add another layer of “what
could go wrong?” to this equation? Foolish hope that it would, indeed,
simplify a fairly complicated installation procedure.

So, I installed CrossGames. I then created a new bottle and installed
LOTRO:Mines of Moria. It never worked. It would freak out when going
through the server checks in the native client and blow up in with a
partial black screen and an obscured error message that told of doom and
asked if I had changed my resolution. Not good. The exact error for all
the search engine hits is “err:xrandr:X11DRV_XRandR_SetCurrentMode
Resolution change not successful — perhaps display has changed?” The
answer to this, of course, is no. However, there’s an underlying error
message hidden behind the quartered off screen, and that’s “Could not
initialize Direct3D. Must have DirectX 9.0 or higher [105].”

Sadly, this isn’t going to tell you how to fix those two errors,
*really,* though what I did works, mostly. I know — such
definitiveness. Here’s what I *did.* I removed CrossGames, completely. I
removed Wine completely. I deleted both .wine and .wine-lotro
directories (after backing up some things, of course). I reinstalled the
most recent stable version of Wine and Winetricks. I also installed
PyLotro — which is nice…when it works. For the record, PyLotro worked
PERFECTLY until this whole CrossGames fiasco. Also, for the record, I’ve
*never* had to go *this* scorched earth with any linux installation
prior and that includes some pretty festive go-rounds with DB2, Oracle8i
and, well, just about any IDE prior to 2004 that would lead one on a
trail of dependencies. I digress…

I also did something *smart* this time around. After looking for roughly
5 days on all the forums from Turbine to WineHQ to just about every
MMO-related board out there, I came “back to my roots.” I came back to
the script that made it work, the last time. Why had I not looked into
this, before? Um…because I forgot? That’s about the only real excuse I
have. So — what magic has made LOTRO work again? Go here:

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=14566&iTestingId=46193

Follow the How-To. Really. It errors out at the end but, as far as I can
tell, everything’s working AND inexplicably I’m running with high detail
with very little slowdown…something even my previous, working,
installation couldn’t boast. The downside? PyLotro still blows up with
the Direct3D error. However, the command line script (lotrolauncher.sh)
works beautifully and, as I’m not averse to command lines in the least,
I’m up and running again.

So, why the title, “The Lord of the Direct3D?” Well, it’s simple, it’s
still the force of evil out there that makes you go insane after a bit.
Additionally, once you get it working, simply imagine curling up around
the proper files for DX9 and mumbling, “my own…my precious…” Trust
me, it could happen.

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