http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8436
--- Comment #11 from Nelson Hicks thegriffin@gmail.com 2008-09-20 18:51:55 --- Ok, I went back over my changes and I had used winetricks to try to get Warhammer Online to work. By working backwards, here's what I've discovered.
1) You must start the game with the directory the game was installed to as the current directory, or the game will fail with an error opening the translation file before even switching video modes to start displaying the intro videos/menu. 2) A normal install gives the errors previously listed shortly after the menu screen appears. The menu music does play in the background, but I don't see the background animating. I've noticed it also doesn't display the intro movie. 3) By installing DirectX9 redistributable first, the intro movie plays and the menu no longer generates an error that it cannot find translation files, but wine dies immediately at about the same point with an unhandled exception complaining about division by zero (sounds similar to the exception that Ascaron's exception handler was catching). I will attach the wine console output as 'fixmes with DX9'. 4) By accident, I discovered that installing to a non-default directory of C:\Games\Port Royale 2 gets past this. It is possible to choose menu options to start a new free game or to start a new scenario, but both cause wine to report an exception of "denormal float operand in 32-bit code" before actually starting the game. I will attach the wine console output as 'fixmes at newgame'. Installing to the non-default directory does NOT fix the issue in step 2; only installing the DX9 redistributable has worked around that so far. 5) I can load a saved game that was saved at the map successfully, but if I click on a city to enter it, the game closes and wine reports the "denormal float operand in 32-bit code" exception that I get when starting a new game.
There's also some severe graphical corruption in the menu screen where the reflective water should be. Disabling the reflective water options make the water look normal, but then there's some weird discoloration in the menu screen. At the world map, the water seems to be too dark a shade of blue. I haven't really tested any further because the crash when trying to enter a city makes it basically unplayable, and the need to install DX9 probably makes these problems very difficult to isolate and fix. Hopefully, the original problem can be found and fixed instead.