Step 1: Get ready...
After much experimentation we have managed to get Incognito Episode 1 to install on Linux platforms. For Linux we used Ubuntu 8.04. The trick is to use WINE (Wine.Is.Not.Emulator) to create the compatibility layers requires for OGRE and NeoAxis to run without to many problems.The NeoAxis Engine to be specific requires that you run the Configurator first in this scenario. Set Physics engine to ODE (Open Dynamics Engine), and make sure Audio engine is set to FMOD. Using these two modules allows for greater compatibility with Linux environments.
Also I will make note that you need full OpenGL support on your video card and most newer cards have little incompatibility and both drivers from ATI and NVIDIA are quite nice at time of writing (Wed 24 Sep, 2008). Even though they are non-free and propitiatory they do offer kernel level patches that will give your Linux box the same graphics capabilities that Windows users have especially under Wine. If installing kernel patches scares you a great tool called 'ENVY' written in Python will do all the dirty work for you.
Onward with the experiment!!
Step 2: Install Wine
- Install Wine and from: Winehq.org
- Install 'winetricks' from: Wiki.winehq.org
When this is done using the command 'wine --version' should give you: wine-1.1.5
Step 3: Setup Runtime Environment
There are a lot of proprietary Microsoft libraries that need to be installed so NeoAxis will run correctly. We installed them in this order to get the Demo to run. You should already have 'winetricks' installed so this should work without problems, if you get weird errors then it's outside the scope of this tutorial.
YOU MUST HAVE A VALID WINDOWS LICENSE TO USE (SOME OF) THESE LIBRARIES FROM MICROSOFT
- winetricks allfonts
- winetricks allcodecs
- winetricks dotnet11
- winetricks dotnet20
- winetricks mono19
- winetricks ogg
- winetricks vcrun2003
- winetricks vcrun2005
- winetricks vcrun2005sp1
- winetricks vcrun2008
- winetricks msi2
- winetricks directx9
- winetricks fontfix
Step 4: Now we can actually install the NeoAxis Engine!
Make sure you download the installer from neoaxisgroup.com . Once you have that simply from the Terminal type:
- wine Incognito_Episode1.exe
Everything should go without problem during installation, but at the end you will encounter an error when the 'PhysX_Game_installer_281.msi' is launched and attempted to be installed. Ignore this and press OK to continue to the engine optimization process. This is where a program called 'ngen.exe' will create assembly code for the JIT (Just In Time) compiler for every Dynamic Link Library (DLL's) the engine uses and including the Executables (EXE's). This will take some time to complete (more so than most users on this board are used to?!). Now run this command:
- wine Configurator.exe
After a moment you should be presented with that program interface, you should see a girl, spider monster, stop sign, and a picture of a human eye. If everything looks ok and appears to be running at a decent frame-rate with NO errors you can move onto bigger fish, now try running the game itself:
- wine Incognito.exe
Links* Bugs.winehq.org .net 2.0's ngen.exe hangs while compiling a particular assembly
