Legacy AION clients (mostly used on private servers) tend to not work properly with WINE. This launchers provides fix for 2 of the 3 issues I've identified to make the client run flawlessly. The 3rd fix is a kernel parameter and requires manual user intervention to make it work. See below.

• wine
• winetricks
• GCC (or a working C compiler)

# Copy hg_aion_linux.sh and `aionfix.c` to the HiveGamez folder
cp hg_aion_linux.sh aionfix.c AION_FOLDER

cd AION_FOLDER

# Before starting the client you need to initialize the WINE environment
./hg_aion_linux.sh setup

# Launch AION client
./hg_aion_linux.sh start

List of issues that are addressed by the launcher.

Most AION private servers use a hacker version.dll file to trick the client to allow it to connect to their servers. WINE by default uses the built-in version.dll file, which obviously doesn't provide this functionality.

To use the client's version.dll file, the WINEDLLOVERRIDES variable must be set as follows:

WINEDLLOVERRIDES="version=n,b"

Some AION clients issue an excessive amount of calls to NtReadVirtualMemory(). This is most apparent during tab-targetting where it causes massive lag spikes.

`NtReadVirtualMemory() is Windows kernel system call that allows a process to read the memory of another process. However, in this case, it seems to be used as some sort of anti-cheat mechanism where the client reads its own memory (probably for the purpose of scanning for well-known hacks).

The issue with WINE is that the system call is implemented using ptrace(), which is a rather expensive operation. So for each call to NtReadVirtualMemory(), a ptrace attach/read/detach is performed which is extremely slow.

The workaround is to actually use ptrace() on the AION executable, so when WINE tries to ptrace() it, it actually fails. This causes NtReadVirtualMemory() to fail as well, but the anti-cheat code doesn't seem to be bothered by it.

This is what aionfix.c is for.

I've also implemented experimental WINE patches that bypass the ptrace() codepath when a process calls NtReadVirtualMemory() to read its own memory (instead it reads the memory directly). This gives the best overall performance, but requires a custom WINE build.

If you're still experiencing FPS drop after using the launcher, check your kernel log messages that look like the ones below:

[ 9920.972119] umip: XXXXXXX[25225] ip:14d481e87 sp:327358: SGDT instruction cannot be used by applications.

In that case, you need to add the clearcpuid=514 to the kernel parameters.