Grim Dawn Guide

Grim Dawn is an action hack-n-slash created by the makers of Titan Quest. Slaughter minions and bosses in a dark fantasy world of exploration, loot, hacking, slashing and a lot of skills! Do not miss this game! You will love the AAA experience from a small indie team who are very talented and passionate about Action RPG's!

Follow my step-by-step guide on installing, configuring and optimizing Grim Dawn in Linux with PlayOnLinux.

Note: This guide applies to the Steam version of Grim Dawn. Other versions may require additional steps.

Tips & Specs:

To learn more about PlayOnLinux and Wine configuration, see the online manual: PlayOnLinux Explained

Mint 17 64-bit
PlayOnLinux: 4.2.6
Wine: 1.7.39staging

Wine Installation

Note: Versions of Wine older than 2.0.2 and Wine 2.12-staging no longer work with Steam

Click Tools
Select "Manage Wine Versions"

Select it
Click the arrow pointing to the right

Click Next

Downloading Wine

Extracting

Downloading Gecko

Installed

Wine 1.7.39staging is installed and you can close this window

Downloading Steam

Go To: http://www.steampowered.com
Click Install Steam

Do not click "Install Steam Now"
It will automatically install Linux Steam. Since Grim Dawn isn't made for Linux, we will download the Windows Steam instead.
click "Windows" under the green button

Navigate to your desktop
Click Save

Setup PlayOnLinux

Launch PlayOnLinux
Click Install

Click "install a non-listed program"

Click Next

Select "Install a program in a new virtual drive"
Click Next

Name you virtual drive: grimdawn
Click Next

Select all three options:

• Use another version of Wine
• Configure Wine
• Install some libraries

Click Next

Select Wine 1.7.39staging
Click Next

Select "32 bits windows installation"
Click Next

Configure Wine

Applications Tab
Windows Version: Windows 7
Click Apply

Graphics Tab
Check: Automatically capture the mouse in full-screen windows
Check: Emulate a virtual desktop
Desktop size: 1024x768
Click Ok

Install Libraries

Check the following libraries:

• POL_Install_corefonts
• POL_Install_d3dx9
• POL_Install_tahoma
• POL_Install_vcrun2010
  
• POL_Install_vcrun2012

Click Next

Note: vcrun2015 will be installed later in PlayOnLinux configure

Installing Steam

Click Browse

Navigate to your desktop
Select: SteamSetup.exe
Click Open

Click Next

Click Next

Check: I accept the license...
Click Next

Click Next

Click Next

Click Install

Click Finish

More downloading, updating, extracting and installing

When Steam is done installing the login screen will pop up. You probably won't see any text because there is a font bug.
Click the "X" to close Steam login

PlayOnLinux Shortcut

Select Steam.exe
Click Next

Name your shortcut: Grim Dawn
Click Next

Click Next

PlayOnLinux Configure

Back to PlayOnLinux
Click Configure

General Tab
Wine version: 1.7.39staging
Arguments: -no-dwrite -no-cef-sandbox
This fixes the missing font and store problem

Display Tab
Video Memory Size: Select the size of Memory your video card/chip uses

Installing vcrun2015

Note: vcrun2015 has to be installed before first launch of Grim Dawn. Otherwise the game installs vcrun2015 for you and breaks Wine. If you accidentally launch Grim Dawn one time, you will have to delete the virtual drive and start over from the beginning.

Miscellaneous Tab
Click "Open a Shell"
Copy/Paste:

wget  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks

Press Enter

Copy/Paste

chmod +x winetricks

Press Enter

Copy/Paste

WINEPREFIX=/home/username/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/grimdawn ./winetricks -q vcrun2015

Press Enter

Note: Replace "username" with your login

Close Shell

Close Configure

Launching Steam

Select Grim Dawn
Click Run

Click "Login to existing account"

Login

Steam Overlay

Steam overlay has been known to cause problems launching games.
Click Steam menu
Click Settings

Select "In-game"
Uncheck "Enable Steam Community In-Game"
Click OK

Installing Grim Dawn

Click Library
Select Grim Dawn
Click Install

Click Next

Click Next

Click Finish

Wait while Grim Dawn downloads

Click Play

Optimization

Click Options

Click Video
Change Window Mode to Fullscreen
Select Resolution to match your Linux Desktop

Adjust:
Anti-aliasing
Anisotropic Filtering
Texture
Shadows
Detail Level
Reflections
fX
Lighting
Weather

Enable/Disable:
Vertical Sync
Triple Buffering
Detail Objects
Post Processing
Depth of Field
Soft Particles

Click OK to apply settings

Rule of Thumb:
High settings = More detail, lower frame rates
Low settings = Less detail, higher frame rates

Conclusion:
Grim Dawn didn't have too many problems with my GeForce 550 Ti. Tested with Wine 1.7.39 staging and now everything runs beautifully with hardly any lag. There were a few times when the game slowed down because of all the minions in the screen. Lowering the anti-Alias and Anisotropic filtering helped. I also tried adjusting fX and Lighting to produce better performance while it didn't affect the visuals. There were a few occurrences where my character had invisible texture upon loading. Quitting the game and launching again would fix this problem.

Texture/Font Bugs:
There is some texture reload issues in Grim Dawn that can be resolved by adding launch option in Steam:

/d3d9

To fix any missing textures:

1. Configure
2. Wine Tab
3. Registry
4. Navigate to
   

   [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D]

5. right-click Direct3D
6. Select New
7. String Value
8. Name:

   CheckFloatConstants

9. Value: enable

Gameplay Video:

Screenshots:

 

Good guide as always, titan quest creators very interesting

 

Grim Dawn is very impressive for an indie development team. The game progresses just right... not too fast not too slow. They have all the Action RPG elements that make it a LOT of fun! A lot of detail is presented to your character and character development. So you can micro-manage your character and design the class you want.

 

Updated Grim Dawn guide to work with vcrun2015

 

Heya's,

Hoping I can get some current info from you about the Crash after Cut Scene issue...
I keep seeing your username pop up about it (i.e. On github). It all seems related to this: "wine: Call from 0x7b83f812 to unimplemented function api-ms-win-crt-math-l1-1-0.dll._except1, aborting".

All the forum posts about it just kind of end Anyways, any help or direction would be much appreciated.

POL Debug here.

 

Welcome to the forum. Yes I have been posting on Reddit and the Grim Dawn forums. For a long time I wasn't able to launch the game because of their Visual C+ 2015 upgrade. Finally there is a fix and the game launches, but I still can not get past the loading screen. I've tried everything I know. So we are still stuck at the same place.

The last I've seen about it is on Github
I have been busy testing other games to continue troubleshooting Grim Dawn.

Your log looks just like mine. Same errors
I am curious is someone figures out what is missing in vcrun2015 because I would like to Play Grim dawn again some day

 

Well thats too bad Thanks for the reply and the guide as well. I'm no Linux guru but I'll keep tinkering with it. Let you know if I find a solution

 

If I hear anything... I'll definitely post it here

 

Guess What???
It works! Try this guide again and don't install dotnet40
The winetricks was updated for vcrun2015

 

Hi there, thank you for the guide.

I have followed the installation however when I tried to launch the game, on the main screen of GD, my graphics is checkered. Is there a file that I need to install to so I can play it properly? I am running it on Korora 25 with native gfx ( wayland ). I would really appreciate your help.

 

Thanks for posting... unfortunately I do not have any knowledge of Korora 25 or Wayland. I tested Grim Dawn in Mint 17.3 and Mint 18 with a GeForce video card and Nividia 370 drivers.
Recently they updated visual C and it stopped running, but I found a work-around and now it runs pretty well.
I normally have some graphical problems like missing textures, but not checkerboard textures.

I suggest you make sure the proprietary drivers are installed for your video card.
Everything else in this guide should get it working.

 

Thanks for the response. I am new to Linux. Still looking for some guide on how to install AMD drivers on Korora 25 ( Fedora 25 ). I have an old Powercolor Turbo Duo 7790 running on the system.

 

I have read that the open-source drivers provided by Linux has pretty good performance for AMD video cards, but you may want to try using a more popular distro if you are planning on playing a lot of games.

This is why I stuck with Mint. It is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. All three distros are pretty popular for gaming needs. I initially used Fedora, but installing drivers was quite a pain.

 

Yeah, read that too on some forums. However, I am planning to familiarize myself on RedHat based distro for career purpose. It just makes me sad that I can't play this game on Korora/Fedora 25.

 

Ok, that makes sense. I have used Fedora and CentOS, which are Red Hat derivatives.
I didn't do a lot of gaming on them, but I've read that Fedora can run games.
It isn't so much your Distro but the hardware that can provide issues. Mostly because of drivers.
Can you play any other games in Korora 25?
Make sure to install the 32-bit libraries as well.

Grim Dawn has not been an easy game to setup in PlayOnLinux, but it does run on my GeForce systems.

 

I tried installing it again and this time the gfx on the main screen is now fixed. Though I can't click any options from the menu, lol

 

All right it's working now. I can now play the game. Btw, do you have any advice if there are adjustments that I can make coz everytime I do Alt+Tab, the stuttering on my linux machine is terrible.

 

Ooh, almost there.
I haven't experienced that problem, but I've had missing graphics. Like an invisible character.
Sometimes killing the game and re-launching will fix it.

 

Would we follow mostly the same steps to get the GOG version of GD to play? I think I followed it mostly (excluding anything steam related) and it launches but as soon as the opening cinematic plays it crashes. Oh and the menus do work, but the text seems somewhat (if not 100%) illegible.

 

Welcome to the forums!
Yes, I think everything would be the same except instead of installing/updating Steam you would just install the GOG version.

Just follow any of our GOG guides and replace the name with grimdawn. GOG games are always easier to install with less steps than Steam games.

I wish I had the GOG version.