Given that there has been some recent activity, and since this is related to the topic, I am just going to post this here, but I updated the Lutris installer. However, as it is currently under submission you can use the following link to open the new installer: lutris:w3d-hub-launcher?revision=79264
- I updated it to install dotnet472 i.e. Microsoft .NET framework version 4.7.2, since that is what the installer tries to install anyway.
- I changed the installer to set the following registry key: KEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics\DisableHWAcceleration to type DWORD and value 1. Without it, WPF applications will not render properly, in that they will not refresh the drawing, so you may just see a black window, noise or some old data that is currently in your framebuffer.
- I added a silent option to the W3D Hub installer, such that it just installs the W3D Hub Launcher in the background.
The new installer gives me a nice out of the box experience where it just installs the W3D Hub Launcher. The W3D Hub Launcher just works and I used it to successfully log in and download and install APB. Then after the 1.6 GB download, I was able to just launch APB and play it. All of this on Linux.
I haven't tried using d9vk yet for additional performance, as the games already perform really well as-is, but I can experiment a bit with that and see. In general performance with d9vk should be better as it handles Direct3D9 calls over Vulkan instead of OpenGL. If your machine is somehow struggling with these games, you can try enabling d9vk through winetricks (assuming you have native Vulkan support).
While I don't use Ubuntu myself, yes, these instructions seem to be right: https://linuxconfig.org/install-lutris-on-ubuntu-20-04-focal-fossa-linux. The idea is enable the i686 repositories (to provide 32-bit packages, as most older games are 32-bit and therefore need 32-bit WINE), install WINE stable and Lutris from their respective repositories, as Ubuntu may not have the packages by default or they are likely out-dated already (WINE progresses at a much faster pace than Ubuntu can generally keep up with). From there you can just use Lutris and use the installer for the W3D Hub Launcher.
I am not sure which version of WINE is being used in this question, though, but I had no issues installing dotnet472. However, how well the .net framework installation goes depends on your version of winetricks (e.g. dotnet461 used to have deadlock issues with older versions of WINE). I am reporting this for WINE 6.14 (the lutris-fshack-6.14-4-x86_64 build to be exact) where the experience seems to be flawless.
