Is it currently possible to play DoC in Linux?

[SeekTruthFromFacts]

Hi to all!

I used to hang around here in the 1.15 era. Last weekend there was a Civ VI free-to-play weekend. I tried out VI and it just made me nostalgic for +DoC...

It's great to see the mod is alive and well. Many thanks to Leoreth for your ongoing and generous development!

I am thinking about playing DoC again but unfortunately, I no longer have easy access to Windows. I know that DoC is not officially supported on Linux, but @bluepotato was apparently playing it on Linux+Wine with occasional switches into Windows a couple of years ago. As of 2021, is it possible to play DoC in Linux+Wine only?

I know no one can definitely answer "yes", but to get this to work I would have to install a DVD drive, Wine, Lutris, Civ IV vanilla, BTS, the updates to 3.19 and then DoC.... that's going to take many hours that I'd rather not waste if the answer is definitely "no"!

If bluepotato or anyone else does have it working, what CIV medium (DVD/GOG/Steam?) and Wine version work for you, please?

 

[rmontaruli]

Well, i can tell you that i own civ IV complete for windows on DVD, and a full installation of it require to keep DVD inserted to play.
But after having installed the official upgrade of firaxis BtS to 3.19, DVD inserted is no longer required to play.

So i presume (because i have got other games from GOG) that the GOG version should be playable without DVD.

In this way it should be possible to install it under Wine.

But i never tried, so i cannot confirm.

 

[Leoreth]

Hey, welcome back. I definitely recall your username.

I have not looked into the best settings for how to run DoC with Wine but as you said, bluepotato got it working in the past, and nothing has changed that would affect this. So it's worth giving a try. But if you want advice on the best required settings you should probably contact bluepotato directly, unless someone else has experiences they want to share in this thread.

 

[FalseIlyu]

If bluepotato or anyone else does have it working, what CIV medium (DVD/GOG/Steam?) and Wine version work for you, please?

The GOG version is playable on wine 6.5, you'll need to install msxml3 and you probably need to install d3dx9 too. DoC (The version from the released installer) don't need further configuration to launch but i encountered a series of important bug on civ resurrection, first one reported being reported here.

The information in WineHQ#notes might not be the most up to date but if you encounter a problem you might want to try install some of the libraries under winetricks (especially quartz and vcrun2003), the rest of the configuration should not be necessary anymore.

The only major problems i had after the installation of the libraries is an annoying bug where the game always move all the unit in a tile even if you only select one after an alt+tab (only solved with a restart), and the inability to use shortcut for mods (although i didn't put much effort to look into that).

 

[bluepotato]

I don't have much to say that hasn't already been said (I personally run the GOG version with wine+d3dx9+msxml3); but just to clarify:

as you said, bluepotato got it working in the past, and nothing has changed that would affect this.

To an extent, yes, but the game would always eventually crash because of city flips, forcing me to switch to Windows. At some point I tried to bisect the commit that broke this, and I ended up finding some rather innocuous one from 2011; unfortunately it didn't seem to be directly related to the problem (reverting it didn't fix anything either).

My theory is that it's something (or some things) invoking undefined behavior which DoC inherited from RFC, and Windows somehow copes better with that. However, the only thing that makes me suspect this is that I had experienced very similar crashes in RFGW (with corrupted units) before I threw out the entirety of the RFC code, so it's pretty much circumstantial evidence only. It may very well be a bug in wine or something else.

Either way, the problem seems to persist to this day, I gave up on my last Polynesia game too because of it (I no longer have access to Windows either).

 

[FalseIlyu]

Is it the same with the git and the release version? On my end the workaround i applied here managed to suppress any subsequent exception and following crash (ofc some of the results are now out of line with what seems to be the mod specs). As for your theory it seems that the bug you reported here and the bug i reported later all revolve around access to previously invalidated object make it the most satisfactory explanation. In any case even if the reason the game crash because of a wine bug or something else, as long as the crash revolve around undefined behavior in RFC and/or DOC a correction at this level seems in order.

 

[Pavel Chichikov]

Hi to all!

I used to hang around here in the 1.15 era. Last weekend there was a Civ VI free-to-play weekend. I tried out VI and it just made me nostalgic for +DoC...

It's great to see the mod is alive and well. Many thanks to Leoreth for your ongoing and generous development!

I am thinking about playing DoC again but unfortunately, I no longer have easy access to Windows. I know that DoC is not officially supported on Linux, but @bluepotato was apparently playing it on Linux+Wine with occasional switches into Windows a couple of years ago. As of 2021, is it possible to play DoC in Linux+Wine only?

I know no one can definitely answer "yes", but to get this to work I would have to install a DVD drive, Wine, Lutris, Civ IV vanilla, BTS, the updates to 3.19 and then DoC.... that's going to take many hours that I'd rather not waste if the answer is definitely "no"!

If bluepotato or anyone else does have it working, what CIV medium (DVD/GOG/Steam?) and Wine version work for you, please?

Is Civ VI is garbage as I remember Civ V being on release? I guess they've stuck with their 1-unit-per-tile mantra?

 

[Publicola]

Civ VI seems to have more tactical flexibility, since you can also have 'support' units and 'civilian' units and 'religious' units on the same tile as a 'combat' unit, even if it remains officially 1UPT. On the other hand, Civ VI also adds a '1 district per tile' element to city-building, which makes it a lot harder to role-play as a full civilization across history (rather than a more tactical duel-sized arena). Overall, I'd say it's not nearly as bad as Civ V, certainly not as bad as 'Civ V on release', and an interesting game in its own right even if my heart belongs to Civ IV.

...On second thought, I'm pretty sure this isn't the place for reviews & opinions on a different game in the Civilization series. Sorry

 

[SeekTruthFromFacts]

I know this is a rather old thread, but I got Civ IV+BTS in a Steam sale and finally gave this a go. It worked!

Initially vanilla BTS kept crashing my potato-chip iGPU, but running the game with PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command% in the Steam options fixed that.

EDIT for future reference:
I cloned the latest DoC from the GitHub repo into ...SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Sid Meier's Civilization IV Beyond the Sword/Beyond the Sword/Mods/; as usual the newly-created directory must be renamed RFC Dawn of Civilization. The BTS settings file (needed to remove the intro movies, amend the autosave & directly launch DoC every time) was installed into ...SteamLibrary/steamapps/compatdata/8800/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/My Documents/My Games/Beyond the Sword/CivilizationIV.ini. Games are saved into ...SteamLibrary/steamapps/compatdata/8800/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/My Documents/My Games/Beyond the Sword/Saves/single.

I decided I'd just play a few turns to test it out. Now I remember why this is called Dawn of Civilization: it's because you're still playing when the next day dawns...

I was then unable to resume that save game. I think that's because of an issue with Varietas Delectat (which I will bug report separately), but I used protontricks to install msxml3 so that might have helped too.

It's great to see that DoC is still under active development. It seems that civs now have a 2nd Unique Unit? Also, playing as China, Genghis Khan wanted peaceful coexistence which surprised me a little, not sure what I did there.

Respect to Sid Meier for inventing a genre, Soren Johnson for creating the best version of Civ & opening it up to modders, Rhye for making it the historical simulator that I always wanted Civ to be, and many thanks to Leoreth & other contributors for extending and polishing that vision.