Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
In many ways I feel I’ve been spoiled in that my entire experience with Linux has been very graciously blessed with an overly-abundant plethora of video games. The whole time I’ve been using Linux there have been more than enough video games with which to divert my worries, challenge my reflexes, relieve my stress and inspire me to keep creating the same art that has kept my heart beating since birth. I started using Ubuntu back in 2010 and ever since then, there’s been an ever-growing flow of Linux-native games released. Because of such blessing, I’ve never had the need to rely on simulators. However, things weren’t always that way. In fact, even today, the amount of games available on Linux is perhaps less than 1% of the number of games available on Windows. A lot of those games can actually be played on Linux via Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator). So, I’ve decided to finally give it a try at playing a video game through an emulator. Recently, a friend of mine suggested that I try to play World of Warcraft and review it, which I’ll probably do in the near future but for now I’ve gone ahead and installed Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and to my delight, I’ve had some pretty rewarding results. Warcraft III is a fantasy, real-time-strategy game. Intended to be played on a computer, Warcraft III can only be played with mouse/keyboard. So, let’s get on with it. Without going into too much detail (there are numerous how-to-guides available on the internet) I’ll briefly go over a few basic steps needed to install and play Warcraft III in a modern version of Ubuntu & its derivatives (the steps I’ve followed should work with most releases after Ubuntu 14.04).
Originally released in 2002, Warcraft III is the third game from the Warcraft game series. The Frozen Throne, an expansion pack was released the next year, in 2003. You can buy Warcraft III directly from Blizzard’s battle.net shop for $9.99 if you buy only the game without the expansion pack. This game has been such a big hit over the years that Blizzard is still actively updating it. The latest patch (version 1.29) for Warcraft III was actually released in April 2018 which is pretty impressive for a 16 year old game. I was lucky enough to find the Warcraft III Battle Chest in Amazon for the low price of $6.99 in new condition. The Battle Chest includes Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos CD, Warcraft III Expansion: The Frozen Throne CD and two bonus strategy guides from Brady Games. I was able to install the game from these CDs.
There are plenty of guides on how to get Warcraft III running on Linux. However, with the new release of Ubuntu 18.04, there are a few hurdles which I had to jump in order to first install and then to run the game. I’ll briefly go over these crucial steps which no single guide will include. Let’s first talk about problems you may run into if you’re using the latest version of Ubuntu and a possible solution which may work for you. The first problem I encountered dealt with installing wine. According to most of the up-to-date content I found regarding the installation of Warcraft III on Linux, a regular wine version will not suffice. Instead, it is recommended to install wine-staging which is the newest version of wine, or as it’s called on the winehq.org website, the Staging branch. Unfortunately, at this time there isn’t yet an official release key for winehq on Ubuntu 18.04 so instead I had to do a bit of a runaround. I basically tricked my OS into using the Ubuntu 17.10 version of the winehq release key.
So, the steps I followed are these: $ sudo dpkg –add-architecture i386 $ wget -qO- https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/Release.key | sudo apt-key add - $ sudo apt-add-repository 'deb http://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ artful main' It was at this step where I first ran into problems because the release key that we’re adding is not yet an official release for Ubuntu 18.04 but it’s very likely that by press time this is no longer an issue. So, let’s review: to install Warcraft III on Linux it’s recommended to use wine-staging instead of default wine. Unfortunately, for Ubuntu 18.04 there is no official repository key for wine-staging so you may need to add it to /etc/apt/sources.list
At the following line, change it from bionic to artful and that should do the trick: deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ bionic main It should now look like this: deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ artful main OK, now we’re ready to continue without interruption as follows: sudo apt-get update apt-get install –install-recommends winehq-staging Most of the steps I followed came from the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=uPPyBkq_fNg.
Now that we’ve got wine installed we can continue with the installation of the game. This part should be easy. Just pay attention as to the location of the installation files for Warcraft III, especially the Warcraft.exe file. In my case, since I was installing straight from disc, the location for me was: /media/username/WarcraftFolder/Warcraft.exe The steps to follow are these: /opt/wine-staging/bin/wine64 /path/where/you/downloaded/the/wc3/installer Notice the space after wine64 and before /path and it should go without saying that the path where you downloaded the wc3 installer should specify the real location of where the installer is. So this leads us to the final part of the installation which should be pretty automatic, if you have any questions at this point is when you can watch the video.
You might have to register the game by entering the CD key provided. Then continue with the installation by clicking OK on all of the screens that follow. Always read before clicking OK just in case something else unexpected comes up. Once I had the game installed I kept running into problems when trying to run the game for the first time. The main problem was that although I could hear the game running, I couldn’t see it. Instead, all I could see was my desktop and whatever other windows I had open on such desktop. Then I found out that the game works best in linux/wine with opengl in native Full Screen so to launch it I had to run the following in a terminal: $ wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Warcraft\ III/War3.exe -opengl -nativefullscr Having run that command I was finally able to successfully launch the game and I’ve had zero problems with it ever since. Next month we’ll finish this with the actual review of the game