Hi, I'm the maintainer for World of Warcraft, and I've noticed a few things which have been pointed out before (on irc, bugzilla, mailing list) but have not really gotten any attention. As this is one of the most popular, if not THE most popular pc game at the moment, it seems as though it would be worthwhile to look into getting this to work if it does not require a complete rewrite of wine to do so.
There are currently two things preventing operation of the game. Firstly, I'll start off by saying that there are two separate modes to run the game in. d3d9, and opengl.
The d3d9 mode doesn't currently work since the support for this dll is not complete. I have been following it closely though, and I constantly find myself impressed with the amount of work being poured into it lately. It's really coming along, and I've even gotten it to run a few demos. Unfortunately, even with the latest patches it still comes up with a blank screen. I don't want to rush anything in this department since I know there's a massive transition from the d3d* architecture to wine3d, and I think it's a really great idea to funnel everything through opengl and only need one rendering library. It's hard for me to say as a WoW addict myself, but I would rather have a complete implementation of d3d9 than one that is only able to play WoW. So I guess what I'd like to say on this front is this: awesome work guys!
As for the opengl mode, it crashes strangely just after the character loading screen, but before actually getting into the game. I'm not really sure exactly what is causing the crash. I've run several traces, and all that comes up is a large group of fixmes which look like this:
fixme:thread:GetThreadTimes Cannot get kerneltime or usertime of other threads fixme:thread:NtQueryInformationThread info class 9 not supported yet
The error I am able to get (when I change my winver to win2k) is an actual game error (not given by wine). This one looks like this:
ERROR #0 (0x85100000) Program: C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\WoW.exe File: C:\build\buildWoW\WoW\Source\Ui\MinimapFrame.cpp Line: 1287 Expr: !("CGMinimapFrame::Initialize(): can't get render target for minimap")
I posted a bug about this on December 7, 2004 at this location: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2603 Nothing has happened yet with this bug except for someone else confirming it.
I'd appreciate it if someone could give me one of two pieces of information (both would be spectacular!): 1) What exactly is causing the problem with the opengl version, and is it easy to fix? 2) Is there any sort of goal that the people working on d3d9 dlls have set as far as a date they would like to have it done by? Or is it just one of those "It will be done when it's done" sort of things?
Thanks in advance, Darckness