Warlords Battlecry III (433280)

[ranplayer]

Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: Warlords Battlecry III
• Steam AppID of the game: 433280

System Information

• GPU: RX 6700 XT

• Video driver version: Mesa 24.0.1

• Kernel version: 6.6.18

• Link to full system information report as Gist: steam-sysinfo-20240225.tar.gz

• Proton version: 9.0 (Beta 11)

I confirm:

• [X] that I haven't found an existing compatibility report for this game.
• [X] that I have checked whether there are updates for my system available.

Logs: steam-433280.tar.gz

Error lines

2350.791:0124:0128:warn:seh:dispatch_exception EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION exception (code=c0000005) raised

Symptoms

• Game crashes on launch with Proton 9.0 (Beta 11), but works with Proton 8.0-5 (bad performance though. I believe due to the graphics API -> DirectX 7)

Reproduction

• Just launch the game

[ranplayer]

I've found out a clue about what makes this game's performance bad with Proton 8.0-5. It seems the game's surface is updated several times per frame. I don't know where I could report this since the game uses Direct3D 7. A possible workaround is to use dxwrapper to redirect calls to DXVK.

Steps:

1. Download this dxwrapper's release
2. Extract ddraw.dll, dxwrapper.dll and dxwarpper.ini files to the game's installation folder
3. Edit dxwarpper.in and set Dd7to9=1 and DdrawAutoFrameSkip=1 (this fix the performance issues. More on that here).
4. Edit the games Launch Properties to WINEDLLOVERRIDES="ddraw=n" %command%

This workaround currently doesn't work well for the campaign's custscenes (they are not rendered correctly. They work fine with WineD3D)