I finally got my hands on a copy of Darkfall Online. My next task once that was done was to try and get it to work with WINE on my Kubuntu 8.10 laptop. Well it's not quite as smooth as I would like, but I did manage to find a web page that got me started on the right path. But in the end I pretty much just started from scratch and I think I'm close.

Because I was going through so many iterations, I created a script that deletes the .darkfall wine directory and then reinstalls. With this script I'm able to get the client to login and patch. I say that because at the moment it is downloading about 9GB of data and its going to take a while to finish. I'll post a follow up to let everyone know if I managed to get it in a playable state.

Here is what I posted over at Max's page in his comments section.

I have not gotten mine to patch properly quite yet. I’m using WINE
1.1.18. I’ve written a little script that will delete and reinstall
darkfall in its own WINE directory. What I’ve found using 1.1.18 is
that if I install directx9 with winetricks that Darkfall will not
install properly. If I install Darkfall first before touching anything
else in WINE than it will install without error. But I still cannot
patch at all. The Darkfall patch just tells me that it errored out
prematurely. So I copied the files that their patcher extracted under
~/.darkfall/drive_c/users/[your user name]/Application
Data/Aventurine/Darkfall/install to the root of my home directory, and
I ran them manually with the following command.

WINEPREFIX=~/.darkfall wine msiexec /i ./Darkfall.msi

Now I can get past the login screen and it is running the internal
patcher and downloading a ton of files at about 469 kB/s. The
downloaded numbers don’t refresh on my screen unless I minimize the
window and restore it again. At first I thought it wasn’t downloading,
but I brought up my System Monitor and my incoming network traffic was
going crazy.

So This is basically the script that I ran
—– begin script —–
#!/bin/bash
cd ~
# completely remove previous directory if its there
sudo rm -r ~/.darkfall
# make sure fonts are downloaded
WINEPREFIX=~/.darkfall winetricks allfonts
WINEPREFIX=~/.darkfall wineboot
# Make sure winxp is the OS set for WINE
WINEPREFIX=~/.darkfall winetricks winxp
# Install Darkfall
WINEPREFIX=~/.darkfall wine ~/downloads/Darkfall\ Install/Darkfall.exe
# Always run this after the Darkfall.exe install otherwise Darkfall.exe install will fail
WINEPREFIX=~/.darkfall winetricks vcrun2008
# For some reason their install process fails so I run this manually
WINEPREFIX=~/.darkfall wine msiexec /i ./Darkfall.msi
# Running this before Darkfall.exe makes the install fail so far I haven’t run it at all
#WINEPREFIX=~/.darkfall winetricks directx9
WINEPREFIX=~/.darkfall winetricks winxp
—– end script —–

So now I’m sitting here waiting for it to patch. I have no idea whether it will run properly, but at least its patching :).

I haven’t run the directx9 install yet, with 1.1.18 there may be no
need to. I may also install the gecko engine as that may provide enough
web functionality for some of the screens in the game. If that doesn’t
work perhaps I’ll install IE6.

So I may be adding the following to my script:
WINEPREFIX=~/.darkfall winetricks gecko
and/or the following if gecko doesn’t do the trick
WINEPREFIX=~/.darkfall winetricks ie6

I hope this helps some people out there. It took me a while to
figure this crap out. I hope my patching completes OK so I can stop
playing the “Install me in WINE” game and start playing the “I’m gonna
die and lose all my crap game” and love it!