Hi everybody,

I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 and trying to install NWN 2 through playonlinux, and I have run into some problems. I haven't used playonlinux before, so I have some difficulty troubleshooting it. I have tried to use/adapt a number of different guides online. I also saw the sticky thread on this forum about how to "Install Neverwinter Nights on any Linux distribution", but that seemed to only be for NWN 1.

I have done a complete purge of playonlinux and wine, and then installed playonlinux from the repository. When I try installing the "GOG_Galaxy_Neverwinter_Nights_2_Complete.exe" in playonlinux (I have tried both the "main" installation file and the offline backup game installers) I get the output seen in the attachments. For some reason I cannot post it here directly. There are a number of warnings, errors, and fixme's, so I'm sure something is wrong. I just don't know where to start. Also this is the only thing I'm using playonlinux for so it does not matter, if I have to make changes to it for the game to work.

Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thank you for the input. It let me in the right direction. And I had no idea there were any significant difference between the two installation files.

You are right, that using such an old version of wine is strange. I only did it because it was the automatic choice for the nwn2 gog installation script on playonlinux. I also noticed that the installation seemed to have some trouble with the wine mono installation. Google told me there were some problems with the older wine versions and mono.

So I tried to install as a non-listed application using wine 3.13. I added a number of different components as suggested in various guides (vcrun, d3dx, dxdiag, devenum, core fonts, video driver and a few others I don't think was necessary). I put dxdiag and devenum to native, and in the display tab of the wine configuration I put glsl support to enabled, direct draw renderer to opengl, offscreen rendering mode to fbo, and specified my video memory size.

I then tried to install, but it loooked like it had stalled about 75% through. I tried to quite the installation, but then it popped up saying intallation complete. All of a sudden I was able to play.

I think everything works, at least I can start all the campaigns, everything looks right and runs smoothly, and this is of course great. But I'm a little worried that I'll get half way through a campaign and then run into something that wasn't installed properly, which crashes the game.

But for now it looks to be working, so thanks for the help!

Awesome! Glad you managed to work it out. Your answer may come in handy for those who will use POL to install NWN2 in the future.

I would recommend in the future, not even using the PlayOnLinux installation scripts. They were a good idea at one point, but it was an idea that was poorly implemented, in actual practice. Most of the scripts are very old and out of date now, and no one seems to maintain or update them. The install script itself is the reason it was trying to use an old version of wine, because it was probably a new version at the time the script was written (which would have been many years ago for wine version 1.5), and the install script probably hasn't been updated since then. Several of the install scripts have errors in them as well, and most of them try to use old software, or have dead links to old software, or try to use old solutions to get something to run, which is no longer even necessary.

Your best bet, is to just select the option in the lower left corner to "Install a non-listed program", then just manually select the installation file for the program you want to install, even if there is an install script listed there. Make sure you create a separate clean virtual drive for each game (or wine prefix) and many games only need 32-bit, such as NWN2 specifically. If installing it that way doesn't work for you, you can check the Wine Application Database, to see if there are any special tweaks or additional libraries needed to get the application to run correctly- https://appdb.winehq.org/index.php

You'll likely have much better luck doing it that way, than trying to use those very old install scripts. Hopefully someday they will implement a better system for keeping them up to date, or at the very least, list the date the scripts were written, so that people know how old they are before using them. But for most games, those scripts really aren't even necessary anymore. There was a time when wine had problems with various different game installers, especially if it was on a protected game CD, and there were sometimes complicated tweaks necessary to get them to run and install correctly. But that was a very long time ago now. Wine is in much better shape and is much more mature now, than when those install scripts first came out, and wine now runs every installer that I've tried to use it with it in recent years. In most cases, you will have far less problems skipping those install scripts all together, and just use PlayOnLinux for manual installations, to manage all of your games in separate prefixes.

GOG games in particular, do install correctly. However, there is an error (or two) that always seems to come up at the end of the installation when installing with wine. Just click OK on any errors at the end, and ignore them. Everything should still install and run correctly, so the error at the end is harmless.