[Guide] How to get Plutonium MW3(and BO2, and WaW) to run on Linux with Wine and DXVK

DoomPenguin

I know there exists a Lutris install script for Plutonium BO2, but it does require some modification if you want to play BO2 at decent framerates and also want to play MW3 without the game crashing every 10-20 minutes, so I decided to write this guide for my fellow Linux users who might be interested in playing Plutonium MW3, BO2, and/or WAW.

Prerequisites:

Wine
Winetricks
Wine mono
DXVK

On Arch based distros you can obtain all these like so:

sudo pacman -S wine-staging winetricks wine-mono

and DXVK you can get from the AUR with your favourite AUR helper(in my case Paru):

paru -S dxvk-bin

Alternatively, you can compile DXVK from source.

On Ubuntu based distros, I don't know, never used one for a notable period of time, so I don't know how get all of these, but it shouldn't be a complicated task(any Debian/Ubuntu/Ubuntu based distro users are welcome to give me the commands so that I can add them to the guide).

Start by creating a 32 bit wine prefix by creating a directory in, let's say, your home directory:

mkdir ~/Plutonium-prefix

Run

WINEPREFIX="/home/$USER/Plutonium" WINEARCH=win32 winecfg

When the gui window appears, select Windows 10, click "OK", and close the window.

Now we need to install some necessary things in the prefix using winetricks. Run the following commands in this order:

WINEPREFIX="/home/$USER/Plutonium" WINEARCH=win32 winetricks --force dotnet472

WINEPREFIX="/home/$USER/Plutonium" WINEARCH=win32 winetricks d3dcompiler_47 d3dcompiler_43 vcrun2005 vcrun2008 vcrun2012 vcrun2019 d3dx11_42 d3dx11_43 msasn1 physx xact xinput corefonts mdac28

Once you are done installing all that, you need to install DXVK in the prefix by running

WINEPREFIX="/home/$USER/Plutonium" WINEARCH=win32 setup_dxvk install

Now your prefix is ready, you just need the plutonium client and your game files. Put the Plutonium.exe and your game files in

/home/$USER/Plutonium/drive_c/Program\ Files/

and delete the steamappi.dll if you are using the steam version of BO2(it doesn't seem to matter for MW3, but I removed it from there as well) since it causes the game to crash.

WINEPREFIX="/home/$USER/Plutonium" WINEARCH=win32 wine /home/$USER/Plutonium/drive_c/Program\ Files/plutonium.exe

This is optional. You can set an alias in you .bashrc(or .zsh, or .fishrc) with the last command from point 5 so that launching plutonium is easier. Something like

alias plutonium="WINEPREFIX="/home/$USER/Plutonium" WINEARCH=win32 wine /home/$USER/Plutonium/drive_c/Program\ Files/plutonium.exe"

or you can simply import the prefix into Lutris and launch Plutonium from there.

You might have noticed that I did not start Plutonium with Esync, and that I am also running it in a 32bit prefix. Why is that? Well, Esync causes crashes and terrible performance(especially in BO2), and I need a 32 bit prefix in order to install mdac28, which fixes MW3 crashing with a ntdll.dll error.

If you noticed something I am missing or have an idea of how to simplify the process, please let me know.

DoomPenguin

I wrote a Lutris installer, which you can find on the MW3 Multiplayer Lutris page here.

_Slink

Thank you so much. I followed your instructions and it worked perfectly

[77] Meline

thank you so much! your lutris script works like a charm! I even was able to get the mods working fine with t4.