Guide:Path of Exile on Wine
Guide to install PoE on Wine under PlayOnLinux to fix memory leaks, crashes and FPS drops
Now Updated for Path of Exile 0.11.6
Originally posted by Sovyn on the official Path of Exile forums, here.
First, my system is:
Ubuntu Linux 13.04 64-bit
4 GB RAM
Nvidia GT 545 with GDDR5 memory video card
Nvidia proprietary driver 310.44
If your system is different, this guide may or may not solve every little issue but it should get you up and running without memory leak issues or crashes.
Step 0) If you don't yet have PlayOnLinux, go get it. It's free and makes it easy to manage different versions of Wine. After installation of PlayOnLinux, you can resume this step-by-step guide.
Step 1) In PlayOnLinux: in the menu, click Tools / Wine Versions. In this window, select a version of Wine for installation (1.5.28-PathOfExile is a good choice as of this writing). Newer versions of Wine may have regressions, for example, 1.7.1 has issues with Path of Exile. I recommend an x86 version of Wine for best compatibility, although currently you may have to select amd64 if you require the highest texture quality setting in PoE. After selecting your version, press the right arrow in the window and follow the simple prompts to install Wine. After that finishes, close the Wine Versions window.
Step 2) Back in the main PlayOnLinux window, click the Configure button. Click the New button. In the virtual drive creator wizard, select 32 or 64 bits windows installation per your choice in step 1, then select the same Wine version that you installed in step 1, name the drive (PoE, for example).
Step 3) After completing the virtual drive creator wizard, click the name of the new virtual drive you created (PoE). Go to the Miscellaneous tab. Click "Open virtual drive's directory." You are now looking at a file manager window. Open the folder drive_c, then Program Files. In the manner you typically do, open a new file manager window and navigate to wherever you currently have Path of Exile installed. You will now be looking at two file manager windows side-by-side. Right click the Grinding Gear Games folder and left click "Cut". In the other window, right click in the empty white space in the window, and left click "Paste." You have now moved your game over to the new PlayOnLinux virtual drive. Close both file manager windows. Basically, in this step we are getting a fully working Path of Exile install from somewhere and pasting it into the new virtual drive's programs directory. It does not matter where you get it from - a Windows partition, a different PlayOnLinux virtual drive, your .wine folder, bring it over from a friend's on your thumb drive, etc.
Step 4) Still in the PlayOnLinux configuration window, click the name of your new Path of Exile virtual drive (PoE in this example). Click "Make a new shortcut from this virtual drive" Follow the wizard to make a shortcut for PathOfExile.exe. It should show as one of the options. You will need to name the shortcut, I named it Path of Exile. The wizard will ask you if you want to make another shortcut, select "I don't want to make another shortcut".
Step 5) Make sure you have the latest version of Winetricks installed. I just edited my copy which was located at /usr/bin and cleared the file, pasted in the latest Winetricks code (20120912 as of this writing) from the link above, then saved the file. In a system terminal type: sudo gedit /usr/bin/winetricks
Back in the PlayOnLinux configuration window again, click the name of your new Path of Exile virtual drive (PoE in this example). Go to the Miscellaneous tab. Click "Open a shell." From the shell prompt, type: winetricks vcrun2010
You will see a few lines of output reported in the window. Don't be alarmed if there are what appears to be a few error messages sprinkled in. When it's done, close the window.
Step 6) Fixing the crashes: Install the latest Microsoft Directx redistributable. Download it from here.
When it is finished downloading, you need to extract the directx installer. On most systems you will have wine installed, in which case you can simply right click the directx_Jun2010_redist.exe file and left click on "Open with Wine Windows Program Loader" and select a folder you would like to extract to, after agreeing to the MS license.
Back in the PlayOnLinux configuration window again, click the name of your new Path of Exile virtual drive (PoE in this example). Go to the Miscellaneous tab. Click "Run a .exe file in this virtual drive." Navigate to wherever you extracted Directx. Double click DXSETUP.exe. Follow the prompts.
That's it!
For Nvidia Graphics Card Owners only - FPS drops fix:
In the PlayOnLinux configuration window, once again click on the name of the virtual drive that we made (PoE).
- Click the "Display" tab.
- Next, select "disabled" in the drop-down box next to "GLSL Support".
- Close the PlayOnLinux configuration window.
- Enjoy graphics free of FPS drops.
For ATI/AMD Graphics Card Owners only - I recommend that you buy, beg, or borrow a decent Nvidia card, but if you must, here is a possible improvement for the extreme FPS drop issues on AMD/ATI graphics cards, at least on my test system (Ubuntu Linux 12.04.1 LTS AMD64, ATI HD 4770, 4 GB ram, Samsung SSD).
First, I removed the AMD proprietary drivers (FGLRX), if present. In a system terminal:
sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx fglrx_* fglrx-amdcccle* fglrx-dev*
I then rebooted just in case.
In a system terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates sudo apt-get update
Then I went to the Update Manager as I wanted to see exactly what packages were being updated.
I installed everything suggested.
Then I rebooted again.
In a system terminal:
glxinfo | grep "OpenGL version"
....Now reads Mesa 9.0 instead of 8.x.
Basically this mini guide reverts from the proprietary driver back to the free open source (FOSS) driver, and then updates the FOSS driver to a newer version than available from the default sources.
The average FPS is not super, but I think overall the game is more playable than with the 'faster' proprietary driver with its more extreme hesitations in PoE.
Intel Graphics Owners - Intel Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge graphics (HDxx00) needs the latest Linux kernel for best performance. Older Intel graphics chipsets (GMA series) are too problematic and/or slow for PoE to be playable.
Optional Fix for Launcher Window Appearance
In the PlayOnLinux configuration window, click the name of your Path of Exile virtual drive (PoE in this example). Go to the Miscellaneous tab. Click "Open a shell." From the shell prompt, type: winetricks riched20
Possible fix for the LONG Allocating Space issue Credit to FeepingCreature and Drakier
I'm running a Debian based 64-bit system so I had to "apt-get install eatmydata:i386" from a terminal (since wine is 32-bit, you need the 32-bit version of the lib). Normal users on 32-bit installations should be able to "apt-get install eatmydata" (or whatever the relevant command is for your distro - for example it would be "emerge libeatmydata" on Gentoo).
Once that was done, I had to track down where it put the lib, which I found on my system at the following location: /usr/lib/libeatmydata/libeatmydata.so
I then went into PlayOnLinux and clicked Configure on the Path of Exile shortcut, then under the Miscellaneous tab the bottom box is a command to exec before running the program, and I put in there export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libeatmydata/libeatmydata.so
I closed the dialog. Then to test it, I renamed my old Content.ggpk to a backup and launched the Path of Exile shortcut. Allocating Space took only a few minutes rather than the HOURS it was before.