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:

 

Hi HTC, welcome to our humble forum.
I've had glitches in the past, but have been fixed by forcing Grim Dawn to run in direct X 9 mode and the FloatConstants enabled in the registry.

Your screenshot though looks like a driver-related problem. I don't have any AMD video cards, but in the past their drivers have been problematic.

Do you have any graphical artifacts in your other games?
Have you tried updating/downgrading your video drivers?

Note: you can't edit your posts until you reach 15 posts.

It's my only game: sorry!

About the FloatConstants: did i do it correctly?

i64.tinypic.com/e824q8.png

I hadn't done this reg edition until today but, because of the glitching, i can't check if it fixed the portals or not.

This glitching started happening 2 days ago: before that, the game was quite playable. Not anymore

How do i go about forcing DX9? I don't see that option anywhere

 

Nope, create a new String Value in the Direct3D folder
Name it:

CheckFloatConstants

Then enter:

enable

I'm glad you asked... I recently added the force direct x 9 because I just found out about it. Open Steam and right-click Grim Dawn. Go to Properties and look for launch options
When you open the launch options, enter

/d3d9

 

Nope, create a new DWORD in the Direct3D folder
Name it:

CheckFloatConstants

Then enter:

enable

I'm glad you asked... I recently added the force direct x 9 because I just found out about it. Open Steam and right-click Grim Dawn. Go to Properties and look for launch options
When you open the launch options, enter

/d3d9

About the FloatConstants thing:

i63.tinypic.com/34g6ovb.jpg

Doesn't allow to give the value "enable" since it's either decimal or hexadecimal only: i must be doing something wrong.

On the bright side, i had the game running just fine, before going to sleep: played for about 30 minutes or so and the portals displayed properly.

But it didn't last ... just tried to play the game again and the damn glitching is back This was with the "/d3d9" set, btw: tried without it but got the same result, so i put it back again.

DAMN

 

This is what i mean with glitching (believe it or not, it was worse then this earlier):

Installed the screen recorder just to record this little bit.

I even went as far as installing the game without PoL (somehow managed to pull it off) because, from the very 1st time i installed the game, and it played correctly @ the time, PoL always crashed while stating that, if the game was running, i should just click next, which is what i always did. Since the game still glitches even though PoL was purged from my system, the problem is not PoL related.

I had suspected it was because of Oibaf's package, which is why i gave Padoka a try but, since it has the same problem, that's not it either.

What the hell is wrong???? DAMN

 

That is my fault. Create a new string value, not DWORD. Sorry about that.
I was going off of memory.
I'll have to check my setup at home to be absolutely sure.

To fix occasional missing textures on start, run "wine regedit", open and create the key "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D", and there create the string values:
- "CheckFloatConstants" with value "enabled"

 

That is my fault. Create a new string value, not DWORD. Sorry about that.
I was going off of memory.
I'll have to check my setup at home to be absolutely sure.

I see: thanks for the clarification.

Yesterday i managed to play the game for about 3 hours: everything looked great (no portal issues), right until i exited the game.

I then proceeded to check "sudo apt update" and sure enough, i had 35 upgrades pending, which i performed with "sudo apt upgrade". A bit later, tried to resume gaming ... and the glitch was back ... but worse ...

That was with a clean 16.04 install, without PoL. All i had installed was:

Wine latest staging
Winetricks
Oibaf PPA
Grim Dawn
SabNZBdPlus
VLC stable branch
Ukuu, but had not yet updated the kernel

Just installed Ubuntu 17.10: gonna try, yet again ...

Since this problem started, i've un-installed / (re-)installed the game @ least 20 times, and Ubuntu itself (16.04) about a dozen times too

 

UPDATE

It seems i figured out the problem: tried installing without PoL just as i had in 16.04 but i got stuck @ Steam's login screen without being able to enter anything so i opted to do it by way of PoL, which went just fine and ...

The game glitched again ...

So i tried something i had never tried before: use the built in graphic drivers instead of Oibaf's or Padoka's and, right away i noticed that i had 35 packages to downgrade ... 35 ... that number sounded familiar ... so i went ahead, purged Oibaf's PPA, upgraded (downgraded actually, LOL) and rebooted ...

And success: the game's OK again, @ least for now! Hope it stays that way.

I know performance will be affected but @ least i can play the game properly!

 

I had a feeling it was driver related. Thank you for the video, that really showed me what your symptoms were like. I never had those type of symptoms... ever.

Sad that drivers effect games so dramatically. Wine games are effected by so much as well. Specially games like Grim Dawn that are still in development.

Older games are easier because if you get them working, it will always work.

 

I bought GOG's version + Crucible (for now) but i'm having problems setting this up.

I thought i could use this guide and change just Steam's installer for GOG's but i can't do it that way: always crashes while installing and i dunno how to get around that.

I did manage to install the game when i selected the game's installer instead of GOG's installer but that opened up another can of worms because, even though i got the installer from Galaxy's page, it has an icon on the virtual drive to install Galaxy, which i can't use because the game launches right away ... which ain't bad by itself but ... even though i have one of the DLCs, it doesn't let me install it ..., which means i messed up somewhere but i'm having trouble figuring out how to fix it.

This is my one and only game from GOG: i'm a complete noob concerning setting up GOG.

 

One thing I noticed when downloading from GOG, they will link to the games original installers and Galaxy installers. Its confusing I know, but try this.

Initially when you go to Download Grim Dawn you see this

At the bottom it describes that this installer "included GOG Galaxy..."
Click "More"
Now click "Classic Installers"
You should be able to install Grim Dawn like in our guide with these installers"

 

... instructions ...

But doesn't that make it so Galaxy isn't installed? From what i read, that means i will have to re-install the whole thing when updating patches, no?

What i was trying (and failing miserably) was to use your (this) Steam guide and replacing the Steam setup.exe by GOG Galaxy setup exe: that didn't work @ all

Under Steam DLCs are automatic, once set up to be included. Since i can't access GOG's program the same way, i can't set up the DLC.

 

Yes, and the Galaxy client doesn't work in Wine anyways. So its better this way. GOG usually provides the patches separately.
As far as I can tell, the main Grim Dawn campaign is finished, so you won't have to re-install the whole game. But they may add patches later on.

I should probably create a new Grim Dawn guide with the GOG installer

 

If i may add a small suggestion, in the following section of the guide:

The virtual drive name may not always be "grimdawn".

I just made a fresh install (Ubuntu 18.04) and named the virtual drive "Steam_grimdawn". Was following the guide as per usual but it was messed up: took a bit to figure out what i was doing wrong and the virtual drive's name was "the culprit".

As for GOG's version, managed to install 1.0.5.1 using your suggestion from reply #20 (picked Outlaw's guide for this) but, like before, i can't install Crucible. How do i add a DLC to GOG's version under linux?

 

Hmm, I don't have crucible, but normally if an expansion is a separate installer, you can do this:

1. Open PlayOnLinux
2. Click Configure
3. Select game (left side)
4. Click Miscellaneous Tab
5. Click "Install an .exe in this virtual drive"
6. Select the installer
7. Follow instructions

This normally works for patching and installing expansions, but sometimes an installer requires dotnet or vcrun. So if it fails, put the .exe in the virtual drive "drive_c" directory, Then make a shortcut to it and run it with debug. This way you can see the errors.

 

... instructions ...

Success!!!!!! I'll do the same to AoM once i purchase it, which i haven't, yet.

One thing i noticed, and this goes for the Steam version as well: whenever i install vcrun2015 using your instructions, it always changes the windows type in the virtual drive from windows 7 to XP, and i always change it back to 7 when it finishes. Am i doing the right thing?

Another thing, and this pertains to the GOG version: had this happen the 1st time i managed to install the GOG version and also the 2nd time (was still version 1.0.5.1). The game starts locking before entering the menu area, with Crate's logo on the bottom right getting stuck, and i have to exit the game by alt-tab and exit the virtual drive.

This only happens after rebooting the PC as i can enter and leave the game's menu just fine until then. No idea what's wrong.

Hopefully, since i removed and re-installed the virtual drive to make way for version 1.0.6.0, with which i finally managed to install Crucible (also 1.0.6.0, ofc), this won't happen.

EDIT

Purchased AoM expansion and installed it using your method and it works for AoM too. Played a bit with my main char just now.

Haven't rebooted, yet: hopefully, it won't start locking up like with version 1.0.5.1.

 

I haven't installed Grim Dawn in a while, but I don't remember it locking before the menu. In the past I've experienced buggy fonts and missing graphics. Like invisible textures.

I'm glad it works for the expansions! This is great news. I plan to purchase them during a sale eventually.
I totally prefer the GOG version over Steam.
Thanks to testing the expansions and GOG version. I will eventually create a new guide just for the GOG version and we'll be set

 

I haven't installed Grim Dawn in a while, but I don't remember it locking before the menu. In the past I've experienced buggy fonts and missing graphics. Like invisible textures.

I'm glad it works for the expansions! This is great news. I plan to purchase them during a sale eventually.
I totally prefer the GOG version over Steam.
Thanks to testing the expansions and GOG version. I will eventually create a new guide just for the GOG version and we'll be set

Just tested: no locking up.

YES!!!!!!!

I noticed yesterday that some monsters occasionally suddenly become more of a red color: perhaps shifting to the red spectrum? Dunno! Not many, though: just a few here and there. I only played about 20 minutes or so, yesterday.

Off to play ...

 

Hmm, haven't seen the red problem in a long time. That is probably a direct x related issue. There will always be minor bugs with Wine, but its amazing how well it DOES work.
Good Job!

 

hello guys Im playing Grim Dawn (GOG Version) with all the expansion. Im using Vulkan (dxvk 1.7.2) that Daerandin helped me install. The game is awesome!!!! no problems with textures or things like that but.... The games freezes a lot during my gaming time, specially when I turn around camera (have to restart whole computer). Have the last nvidia drivers and everything - I saw is a common issue on their forums..
Any magic trick to fix this issue Booman?????

Linux Mint 19.3 Tricia (64 bits)
Cinnamon 4.4.8
Kernel: 5.4.0-52-generic
AMD A6-7400K Radeon R5, 6 Compute Cores 2C+4Gx1
12 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti (2GB)

 

Unfortunately no
I am currently playing Grim Dawn with all the expansion in co-op with my wife. I don't have any delays with the camera movement, but if too many monsters attack in the screen all-at-once, it slows down a lot!

I even tried cranking down the graphics, but since I'm hosting it still slows down.
I'm also using DXVK for Direct X 10/11 compatibility.