The Lord of the Rings Online - Wine Setup

[Beanpole]

Greetings everyone.
I was just toying around this weekend and discovered how to get The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO - a free MMORPG with pay-to-play options, similar in play-style to World of Warcraft) working in Wine on PCBSD. I am posting a quick tutorial on it here in case anyone else is interested. I have successfully tested this on two PCBSD 8.2 x32 systems.
Note: Whenever a step says to install something, I just used the default settings for the install.

1) Install Wine from PBIDIR.com (I used 8.x version 1.3.14)

2) Download the LOTRO installer from the game's website: http://www.lotro.com/support/download-lotro
3) Run the LOTRO installer using wine by double clicking on the file or running "wine lotrohigh.exe" from the command line (it also could be lotrostandard.exe depending on the resolution you chose in step 2)
This step will start the main download of the game files (~10-11GB for the high resolution version). The background for the downloader will be upside down, but there is no actual problem with it. Once the files are finished downloading, the installation will begin.

4) Download PyLOTRO (an alternate program launcher) from here: http://www.lotrolinux.com/download.php (get the pylotro-setup.exe file)
5) Install PyLOTRO with wine (the exact same method as step 3).

6) Run the PyLOTRO program (START-Applications-Wine-Programs-PyLOTRO)
7) In PyLOTRO, click Tools -> Settings Wizard, then click "Find Games" in the window that opens. It should find LOTRO at "C:\Program Files\Turbine\The Lord of the Rings Online" in the lower section. Click on this game directory and then click "Apply" in the lower right corner.
8) In the main PyLOTRO window, click Tools -> Patch. Then click "Start" in the lower right corner of the window that opens. This will patch the game files if they need it. Just be patient for this step, as it will not display much while connecting to the server. Once this is done hit "Exit" to return to the main window.

9) You should now be all set to start the game! just select your server from the "Realm" list, then enter your username and password for the game and click "Login".

In order to play LOTRO on PCBSD, you will just need to start the game using the PyLOTRO program rather than the main LOTRO launcher. I have not gotten the official Turbine launcher that comes with the newer versions of LOTRO to work within wine yet, and using PyLOTRO is a workaround that many Linux users also utilize.

Some Comments:
I have also attempted this process on a PCBSD 8.1 x64 system with some success. The only problem is that step 8 (patching the game) causes some problems with a 32-bit dll. Because of this, after launching the game, it gives a message saying that the version is not correct and exits. So it seems like if we could get the patching process working on a 64 bit system, the game would run fine.

If you have any comments or better ways to get this game to work, let me know about them!

[bgalakazam]

Great, thanks for informing about PyLotro. I have just one thing to add. I was getting a common error and crash running the downloader and several pages suggested:

$ GC_DONT_GC=1 wine lotrohigh.exe

which fixed it. After download and install, I just followed your PyLotro instructions of patching and running.

[Beanpole]

Just an update:
This process works well with PCBSD 9.0, both 32 and 64 bit versions. If running a 64-bit system, you just need to be sure you are using "wine64" rather than "wine" from the AppCafe to get everything to work properly.

[sg1efc]

Cool, great to know PCBSD can play such games. Once I get some spare money I'd like to get Skyrim and try to play it on PCBSD.

[Tigersharke]

This is exactly the sort of information that can be placed on Game Testing. When I get a chance, I may add it myself, unless someone beats me to it.

The Game Testing wiki page is intended to be an archive of information on how to get games working, by various methods, on PC-BSD. One difference between the wineHQ site and any wine info placed on the wiki page, is that there is no plan to remove older games simply because they are old. The desire is to have a place that we can be sure to find this type of information. A hope is to have enough information there that it will make figuring out how to get additional games working a bit more easily, and be an aid to further documentation.