L.G.C. |How-To| — The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Winetricks

About: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a Single-Player Role-Playing video game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. It is the fifth installment in The Elder Scrolls action/adventure RPG fantasy video game series, and follows The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion by approximately 200 years, during the 4th Era.

This how-to will cover updating WINE, installing Steam and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on Ubuntu 11.04 or other Ubuntu derivatives.

Links:
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Wine PPA
Winetricks
Steam

Tips!

Delete the video file from ~/.local/share/wineprefixes/steam/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/steamapps/common/skyrim/Data/Video

PlayonLinux script: HERE

Always Walking: Press ESC > Controls > click (W) > then <enter> followed by (T) Then <enter> and tab out.

MASSIVE Performance Boost: Disabling GLSL shaders (winetricks, or manually with regedit) increases performance immensely.

24 Comments
  1. Ubuntu 11.04 isn’t LTS (Long Term Support) version (it’s 10.04 that is LTS). You can check it on Wikipedia:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28operating_system%29
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubuntu_releases

    You mention that with GLSL disabled performance increased immensely, but how many fps do you get. What’s the screen resolution and other graphical settings. I’m asking this because for me Skyrim is very slow it barely get 11fps ever mostly it’s 3fps.

    My system:
    -CPU:AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ @ 2,3GHZ
    -VGA:nVidia 9600 GT OC 512MB
    -RAM:GeIL Ultra DDRII 2GB/800 (2 x 1GB)screen resolution: 1920×1080
    Antialiasing: 2 samples
    Anisotropic Filtering: Off
    Texture Quality: High
    Radial Blur and Shadow Quality: Low
    Decal Quality: Medium
    FXAA: enabled

    Water:
    – Reflect Land: enabled

    I’m running it with this script:

    #!/bin/sh
    export WINEPREFIX=”/media/Dane/.wine-Skyrim”
    cd $WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files/The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim/
    WINEDEBUG=fps wine-git SkyrimLauncher.exe 2>&1 | tee /dev/stderr | grep –line-buffered “^trace:fps:” | osd_cat

    it prints frame rate on left top corner. You have to install xosd-bin (xosd) and x11-utils (xfontsel) packages on Ubuntu to get it working.

  2. When I disable GLSL, Skyrim doesn’t start it says: “Could not initialize renderer, ShaderModel3 required but not supported by your videocard”

    It does run with GLSL enabled, but it would surely benefit if I could run without GLSL

  3. You could buy the game and just download the cracked updates, I assume anyway. It’s hard to tell with games these days, their makers go all hog-wild and make all these intricately laid DRM pieces all throughout their software that one may have to actually download the cracked copy if they expect to be able to use the cracked updates.

    However, it seems these cracker’s, no pun intended, do a somewhat decent job of separating the original game from their cracks, leaving us to install the cracks separately if we want too. If that’s true, which I’ve never really tested because it’s almost unheard of that the base version of a game would be released without the primary DRM already attached, then it’s feasible that the cracker’s cracked updates should still install into the retail version of the game. Which should mean that you can buy the game before the first update becomes standard, and just install the first update using the cracked update you downloaded. Anyway, that’s what I would try after I backed up every single folder and all of it’s contents that the crack was going to attempt to replace. And of course, if worse comes to worse, having the retail version in your hands, you can reinstall/repair so that you can properly do a complete uninstall, and then just either download the cracked version and laugh at Bethesda’s pathetic attempts at control or reinstall the retail version and submit to Bethesda’s masterwork of DRM measures.

    Although, I would be remiss to point out that at least Bethesda is demonstrating a certain concern over the common Gamer’s dislike of DRM measures by using only Steam rather than other more intrusive and problematic DRM’s. For example, Steam removes the need to have a disk in the DVD drive, and from what I’ve heard, only from what I’ve heard, even though Steam is required to run the game, a game requiring registration through Steam, in accordance with whether or not the end-user license allows it, Steam can allow you to make multiple backup copies of that game and allows the re-download of the game multiple times. Of course, like I said, Steam only allows this if the end-user license allows it.

    In fact, Fallout New Vegas, another Bethesda game, had an association with Steam that if you bought the retail version, got your key out, you wouldn’t even have to take the game out of the box because you could just download it via Steam and play it. It allowed for you to do with Steam whatever Steam allowed. Steam was it’s only DRM, which means that you could make however many backup copies Steam allows, install it on however many computers Steam allows, and you could re-download it as many times as Steam allows, which I think is an indefinite number for all of them because Steam associates every game registered through it with a specific account, and nobody else can even use that account without your password, and I doubt you could use that account simultaneously on different computers if you weren’t using offline Steam.

    It’s actually something I’ve been wanting to experiment with my brother and I. We play a lot of the same games, and I was thinking that maybe we could get a Steam account to share, and go half and half on buying games, and then using offline Steam with the games that allowed it so that we wouldn’t have to coordinate times for playing them.

  4. I installed skyrim through steam in a different, more straightforward manor, but I keep getting the same issue. on the home screen, after the “Bethesda” screen, no text appears, in fact when I type in the console nothing appears, though it works, I cannot COC. I also found that the buttons are their, just invisible. The other thing I realize may be effecting it is that it does not truly open full screen. The menu bar is still visible.

    I dread the thought of completely redoing the installation a different way, but I can’t seem to find anyone else with this problem.

  5. Well, it would seem that installing it on my girlfriend’s system (the Windows version) always results in this crappy error:

    “No SteamConfig Servers Available!”

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