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(0 comments) show comments Half-Life classic on Linux (Fr jul. 31st, '09 at 01:18 am)

Do you still have that decade old Half-Life CD and an old(er) computer running Linux?

The crash-on-load you see for example on 'load game' or when the train from new game reaches the first loading point is not some wine error or incompatibility like I thought. It is in fact a file permission problem. Half-Life somehow just really really wants to write an update to the save folder even if you just load your game. And the logged on user who last played the game 'owns' the file, so the game crashes in every other account until some superuser sets writable permissions for all users on all saved files again.

I have fixed the permission-mess crash in a way that gives every user their own private save games, which is convenient because you cannot name the saves so it pretty quickly becomes a mess if two people play the game anyway.

The desktop shortcut to start Half-Life simply points to this file (or you can run it from a terminal or alt+f2):
/usr/local/bin/hl

#!/bin/bash
 # Half-Life classic independent saves per account
 # Make sure halflife/valve folder has write access for ALL!!
 # Redsandro 2009-07-30
 
 savedir=~/.halflife
 gamesavedir=/usr/local/games/halflife/valve/SAVE
 
 # Verify SAVE folder
 if [ -d $savedir ]; then
 echo okay
 else
 mkdir $savedir
 fi
 
 # Unlink old symlink if exists
 if [ -L $gamesavedir ]; then
 unlink $gamesavedir
 fi
 
 # Link SAVE folder to HOME folder
 ln -s $savedir $gamesavedir
 
 # Start Half-Life
 env WINEPREFIX="/home/`whoami`/.wine" __GL_FSAA_MODE=4 wine "L:\\games\\halflife\\hl.exe"
 
 # Remove symlink
 unlink $gamesavedir

Exporting __GL_FSAA_MODE is for 2x anti-aliasing on nVidia based cards.. you might export some vars specific for your card.

Happy gaming! Smile

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