Yesterday I was waiting... and waiting... and waiting for the patching to complete. I am pretty sure that it just completely downloaded the entire game again. What is the point of having 8GB of install files sitting around if the whole game is just going to completely re-download itself?

The good news is that the patching completed successfully. I'm now backing up the ~/.darkfall directory before I mess with anything further. I do NOT want to go through that patching horror again! :). My next step after backup is complete will be to install gecko and try logging back in to see if I get an improved character creation screen or not. Then maybe I'll try IE6 if that doesn't work. I'll also try installing the latest DirectX9 to see if that has any improvements over the default DirectX support in WINE.

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.