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Hello, 

I bought Assassin's Creed II on Steam but it's giving me a hard time to install it. This is what happens:

-I install Steam via POL.

-I deactivate dwrite so that Steam is able to display text.

-Steam downloads the gamea and is starts to install it. Ubisoft game launcher updates and tries to start. At this point I get a message that UbisoftGameLauncher.exe had problems and had to be quit. If i click on details it shows me this:

backtrace.txt

I found some posts which suggested, that crypt32.dll would be neccessary to launch Uplay but I tried different Versions of crypt32.dll (from Windows 8.1, XP and I downloaded one following THESE instructions) and set it to native but it didn't change anything.

I tried to download and install Uplay seperatly which works fine. But when I start Uplay (either via Steam or on its own) i get a Uplay window which says: "Looking for updates" and an error message wich says: 

"Uplay has detected an unrecoverable error and must shut down.
Crash dump created at C:/Program files/Ubisoft Game Launcher/crashes"

The Wine Debugger gives me the following:

WineDebugger

I uploaded the dmp file to get it analyzed at osronline.com and got this report:

dmp report

which says pretty much nothing to me. 

Can someone help me installing the game?

I'm using Arch Linux x64 with Gnome Shell, wine-1.7.24.

Thank you very much in advance!

Try this. 

Delete the virtual drive first. This is important. 

Install assassins creed, and install crypt32.dll like this:

PlayOnLinux -> Configure -> select AC2 virtual drive -> Install Components tab -> crypt32 -> Install

That should install crypt32.dll, the one that is supposed to be used with that. 

Booman should be around here somewhere, and he is the one that would know for sure what to do to get it to work. 

Thanks for your reply!

I'm sorry, I forgot to mention that I did try what you mentioned. With no success. I still get that error when Uplay tries to look for updates.

Any other suggestions?

Hmmmmmm. Ok. Booman will see this post soon. He frequents this forum. I will shoot him the link for this and see if he can help. He knows this particular game like the back of his hand. 

Ok. I'm a little bit closer now... I figured out that I had to install the game with an earlier version of wine (1.6 or lower). Than i had to install crypt32 like booman explained in his AC2 thread. 

But: When I click on "Play" in steam Uplay does its logging in stuff and launches the game. Then it crashes again saying it has detected an unrecoverable error etc. The created minidump shows the following: minidump

The game launches nonetheless, shows the ubisoft logo and the disclaimer and then sends me back to the desktop. This is the Debug.

Any ideas?

Thanks for your help!

What is odd, is that function does the same thing that booman's manual install suggests. POL_Install_crypt32 is the same file that he was using to get it to work. I wonder what is different. 

Wine 1.6 does not work with Steam. It crashes. You will have to use a new version of Wine. At least that is the issue that I see. My eyes are tired today, so I may be wrong. 

wine 1.6 seems to work with steam for me. steam works perfectly fine. the errors occur a few seconds after starting uplay (doesn't matter if i start it via steam or seperatly). but anyway it seems that the crashing of uplay is not directly correlated with the game quitting as there are at least ten seconds between both events. 

Well, Steam crashing on Wine 1.6 would be specifically because of it's overlay renderer, so it would start when that starts. 

This is something that I just noticed:

libpng warning: Application built with libpng-1.2.49 but running with 1.6.12 

 It seems you don't have the older version of libpng. I would install libpng12 and lib32-libpng12 onto your system (I do not remember the exact names of those packages, but that should be close enough to find them), as that is the only actual wine err that I saw pop up in there. Give that a shot and see if it helps. You should for sure install the 32-bit version as well as the 64 bit version, and make sure that it is libpng 1.2.x, as that is what it seems it is crying about. lol. 

wine 1.6

Again, you will probably have issues with Steam causing crashes with overlay errors. You will either need to use a newer version of Wine or disable the Steam Overlay in Steam's settings. But for sure, try the libpng thing first. :)

yay! one step further (somehow)

installing libpng12 brought up the uplay panel after clicking on start. so now i'm free of uplay errors.

but the behaviour of the game is still the same. it shuts down after the disclaimer (by the way: its not a sudden crash, the screen fades out...) 

(and it's saying me "Thank you for playing Assassins Creed II" after the game shuts down) :)

And here's my debug. There's something new now: 

[0909/190158:INFO:CONSOLE(0)] "Undefined handler for message MessageGameStateUpdated," source: uplay://localhost/ui/js/common/Delegate.js(13) 

Edited by gyptii

I'm sorry I forgot to mention yesterday that I had to install d3dx9 to get the game started. 

What type of graphics card do you have and are you running the proprietary or open-source drivers for it? That may be causing an issue. 

It's a Radeon HD 7790. I had the proproietary driver installed but it was a huge pain to keep it working after every system update, so i switched to the open source driver a few months ago.

Edited by gyptii

Install the proprietary driver and the 32-bit libraries for it, and see if that helps. 

yay! it's running! thank you very much for your help! the proprietary driver did the trick!

thanks a lot!

YES! Excellent! I am glad

**PLAYS THE WINNING BATTLE SOUND FROM FF7**

It turns out Wine 1.7.24 now allows Uplay to work.  So Now you can install Uplay, then install Assassin's Creed II and it will automatically appear in your Uplay account, or you have to active it with the key.

I just confirmed that Brotherhood and Revelations works as well.

Thanks Wine!

Oh yeah! I forgot about that when we were testing that crypt32 function. I will make sure to keep that in mind. 

We should update those scripts so that we do not have to always do manual installs (yes, I am being a broken record). 

Actually, I am just going to use the manual install instructions to make scripts. There is no reason not to. lol. Automation-nation. I bookmarked those and am going to churn those out next week. 

edit: wow. the brotherhood guide has almost 50 steps in it.

Booman: From the guide, it looks like it will need a uplay installer created (which I think would be good to have anyway), so that I can call it from inside of the assassins creed script, in the same way that we would call steam from within a game installer. That Wine version is not patched, right (I read the guide, and it doesn't say it was, but I am just checking.)? I may actually knock out the uplay installer this weekend when I get a little extra time. That should make it fairly trivial when the actual game installer needs to call it. I think that I may actually play Revelations on POL instead of my modded xbox. :D

Edited by RoninDusette