Adventures in Linux

[nscreated]

So after discovering that FO3 and FO:NV both work perfectly well using Wine, I set out to see if I could get TTW working in Wine as well.

My system is a Core i3 with a Radeon HD7870, running Mint 17 XFCE and Wine 1.7.31, and installing TTW 2.7.2

The good news is that I was able to play TTW in Linux. The bad news is that (1) The installer didn't work at all, so I had to boot to my Windows partition to run it and create the TTW folder, (2) I had to do a manual install because FOMM crashed too often in Wine, and (3) the game still has major bugs.

After all of that, the game remains almost totally playable. There were just three bugs that I could see so far:

1. 
   Bush textures look weird, like something messed with their transparency and now they all look like they have fat flat branches.
   
    


2. 
   Seemingly randomly, certain things will disappear all at once: hair, lights, the HUD, the player's arms/weapon, and dialogue. It seems to be affected by which direction the camera points.
   
    


3. 
   Music would cut in and out, especially during dialogue, but sometimes it would come back.

Anyway, I'm not seeking tech support, and I'm giving up on this project, but I just wanted to let you all know it's quite possible. I haven't seen anyone else try it.

[KeltecRFB]

Cool, I always wanted to try Xen since I gave up on Wine ages ago.

[pintocat]

Does NVSE work in WINE?

[Mystical Panda]

[quote=NolanSyKinsley]

...loading the clean TTW starting save from nexusmods works fine, and all gameplay from that point on is just as stable as regular FO:NV gameplay under WINE. No windows instal necessary at all.

[/quote]

Nice!!!

[Keats]

Purely for the sake of posterity(because this is one of the first links to pop up if you type "Tale of two wastelands linux" into the search engine of your choice), I've decided to post my own experience here.

I've been using TTW 2.9.4b(with GOG versions of both Fallout 3 and New Vegas) with Ubuntu 18.04, Linux 4.19.4/4.18.20(I had to downgrade the version due to an unrelated bug affecting 4.19) and Wine 3.21. On the hardware side, I'm running with R5 1600 and RX 550(I know... but New Vegas is fairly old game after all, so the GPU is quite sufficient).

Installing and early game(so about half of Fallout 3) worked well, but ever since I started on Point Lookout, I've gotten increasingly frequent crashes, freezes and long load times, to the point where the game is very nearly unplayable. This is with minimal amount of modding as well(only mods are More Perks, More Perks Patch and Level100PerkPerLevel).

Since I've apparently been using an old version of TTW, I'll refrain from posting detailed troubleshooting information for now. Will post an update if/when I try a new save with TTW 3.2.

[Mewtastic]

As this post is still on of the top search results for TTW Linux I'm going to post my experience 2 years after the previous post.

I did the install for TTW 3.2.2 using the Steam versions of both Fallout 3 GOTY and New Vegas Ultimate on Arch with the latest kernel release available using the latest standard package of Wine 7 (Wine-GE will not work for this install). I have a low spec laptop with a Ryzen 5 and no gpu, although this isn't a problem since Radeon integrated graphics are exceptional.

The installer was the most difficult to get working, but checking the TTW FAQ page will give you three commands to run which make the installer more or less work out of the box. I noticed however that it only used 2 of my cores during the majority of the install process making an 8 to 12 hour install take about 26 hours. I tested performance in a Windows 11 virtual machine and it properly utilized all of my cpu cores.

Setting up modding was also difficult to pull off. Mod Organizer 2 has a Lutris script, but the current version does not install for Fallout New Vegas and running MO2 without the Lutris script makes it impossible to launch from inside of MO2 and I couldn't figure out how to get it so you could launch Steam in a way that it would read the way MO2 organizes mods. I instead installed Vortex using the Lutris script off of Github which appears to be no longer receiving support. It worked and I was able to install mods like normal.

Finally the game actually has improved performance and stability over Windows, because the proton libraries implement the memory enhancements you might get from ENBoost (But better) out of the box. Another small caveat is that you need to move the FalloutCustom.ini from .wine/drive_c/<path_to_ini> into .local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/<game-id>/drive_c/<path_to_ini> unless you like red diamonds.

It's a complicated install process and Linux is in real danger of losing the ability to mod TTW without having to do it manually, but I'd say if you can get MO2 or Vortex working and fully capable of launching Vanilla NV with a few mods... You should be able to install TTW and run it like it's native or better.

[Keats]

As this post is still on of the top search results for TTW Linux I'm going to post my experience 2 years after the previous post.

I did the install for TTW 3.2.2 using the Steam versions of both Fallout 3 GOTY and New Vegas Ultimate on Arch with the latest kernel release available using the latest standard package of Wine 7 (Wine-GE will not work for this install). I have a low spec laptop with a Ryzen 5 and no gpu, although this isn't a problem since Radeon integrated graphics are exceptional.

The installer was the most difficult to get working, but checking the TTW FAQ page will give you three commands to run which make the installer more or less work out of the box. I noticed however that it only used 2 of my cores during the majority of the install process making an 8 to 12 hour install take about 26 hours. I tested performance in a Windows 11 virtual machine and it properly utilized all of my cpu cores.

Setting up modding was also difficult to pull off. Mod Organizer 2 has a Lutris script, but the current version does not install for Fallout New Vegas and running MO2 without the Lutris script makes it impossible to launch from inside of MO2 and I couldn't figure out how to get it so you could launch Steam in a way that it would read the way MO2 organizes mods. I instead installed Vortex using the Lutris script off of Github which appears to be no longer receiving support. It worked and I was able to install mods like normal.

Finally the game actually has improved performance and stability over Windows, because the proton libraries implement the memory enhancements you might get from ENBoost (But better) out of the box. Another small caveat is that you need to move the FalloutCustom.ini from .wine/drive_c/<path_to_ini> into .local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/<game-id>/drive_c/<path_to_ini> unless you like red diamonds.

It's a complicated install process and Linux is in real danger of losing the ability to mod TTW without having to do it manually, but I'd say if you can get MO2 or Vortex working and fully capable of launching Vanilla NV with a few mods... You should be able to install TTW and run it like it's native or better.

I use FOMM on my New Vegas prefix because it's 32-bit (and while it lacks some QoL features of MO2, FOMM is perfectly functional), but when I played Fallout 4 I installed MO2 and it worked without a hitch (that is, Fallout 4 needed some troubleshooting to get working, but MO2 itself worked fine out of the box). The only caveat is that since MO2 doesn't support 32-bit versions of Windows, it needs a 64-bit WINE prefix as well.

In general, I would advice you to try installing things normally first(preferably on a clean prefix), and only if that doesn't work try to use a Lutris script or other tools.