Fonts not visible in Far Cry 1 with Wine

I recently installed Far Cry 1 (5 CD retail) under Wine using this tutorial on my Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit.

My Pc specs are as follows:

Integrated graphics: Intel G33
openGL version: 1.4
Ram: 2GB DDR2 (upto 4GB upgradable)
Wine version: 1.6.2

Installing went fine and later that I installed 1.4 cumulative patch. Then game ran with lag under setting r_Driver="Direct3D9" and I got following screen.

Game menu under r_Driver= "Direct3D9"

Then as per the tutorial, I changed r_Driver="openGL" and after that ran the game again. Game ran more faster (less lag) with openGL. However, this time I saw a white screen at startup (when Ubisoft logo plays) and after that I saw following menu screen.

Game menu under r_Driver= "openGL"

Now the graphics are rendered much better but I cannot view any fonts.

So, can anyone please help me solve this problem. Thanks in advance.


What you probably need to do is just is try a newer wine version - there is a database of apps that have been tested under wine, and FarCry is rated Gold/Platinum there with most recent versions and OSs.

Using PlayOnLinux etc with a particular wine version will often work - but often newer wine versions will work, perhaps better - the info that says 'this is latest version of wine that will work for this' can become out of date with newer releases.

To install the latest wine version (currently):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.7

This is also heavily detailed here.

N.B. As far as I know, Wine has even and odd releases, even (e.g. 1.4, 1.6) are 'stable', odd (e.g. 1.7) are 'staging'. Staging releases genrally work fine, and may work better with some apps as they are more up to date, unless they suffer from regressions. The wiki says:

You should avoid using them [development versions of wine] unless the current stable version of Wine does not support or is incompatible with the application you wish to use.

but that may be out of date anyway... It is recommended by Wine though to test the app in newer versions before reporting any bugs.


Some programs using wine for some reason will hide text and other things if they use openGL. (A good example is using RuneScape client with openGL)

Another thing is that openGL sometimes won't display correctly with certain video cards, your specific card has good support for Direct3d9 but much less support on openGL.