How to play Cry of Fear 1.6a on Proton
12 Feb, 2021
Cry of Fear is a psychological survival horror game taking place in a deserted town. I have a lot of memories playing Cry of Fear when it was released as a mod for Half-Life. However, I have not played it much since it became a standalone game. The standalone version is still based on Half Life 1's GoldSrc engine from 1998, but it is modified to a point where I have not been able to play it on GNU/Linux. Team Psyskallar understandably focused primarily on providing support for Windows. Native builds of the game were never released for either Linux or MacOS.
My attempts at running Cry of Fear on Xash3D, which is an open-sourced game-engine compatible with GoldSrc, have been unsuccessful as well. Though things have changed thanks to Proton (which is Valve's fork of wine; a compatibility layer to play Windows games on Linux).
You will want to use a recent version of Proton, at the time of writing I used Proton version 5.13-5 - but anything starting from Proton 5.0 should work fine!
Patching the Paranoia renderer
The game ships with a modified renderer called Paranoia renderer, which features dynamic lighting amongst other things. This renderer, however, is the cause of bugs like three hands being visible or a non-functional flashlight.
There is a workaround available to get dynamic lighting to work, which the people at WineHQ forums came up with.
- Download the patch at cof-opengl32.tar.gz and move it into your Cry of Fear game folder
- Extract the patch and run it
tar -xvf cof-opengl32.tar.gz patch --binary opengl32.dll < cof-opengl32.patch - Rename
opengl32.dlltoopenpr32.dll(or a different file name; must have same amount of characters asopengl32.dll) Change every occurence of 'opengl32.dll' to 'openpr32.dll' in
hw.dllandcryoffear/cl_dlls/client.dllusing a hex editor. In my case I just used vim and ran the 'find and replace' command on both files:%s/opengl32.dll/openpr32.dll/g
Most lighting issues should be solved now. :)