So after the Adobe Cancer experience yesterday I still had to install a bunch of other things for the helpless windows user.
After I was done with most of that (of course, the good stuff always comes too late) I ran into this tool: Ninite.
They call it “The easiest way to get apps”. Well, from the screenshots it certainly looks that way. No cruft like toolbars and updaters and junk installed, just the application.

On their page you simply select the application you want installed, including the obvious things as Firefox, OpenOffice, Cancerbat^WAdobe Reader, and even Avast antivirus. The only thing really missing from their list is Total Commander (yes, I stuffed it in their suggestions box ), which is pretty much the only application I really miss on linux.
After selecting all the rubbish the user might need you downloader their installer. When you run the installer it downloads and installs all the selected applications.
Easy huh?

The installer looks like this:

Ninite installing opera while downloading the rest

Ninite and Wine

Now for the fun part. Let’s see how it works under wine
Knowing Putty should work under wine, I selected that and winscp on the website.

Ninite download for putty and winscp

However, trying to run the installer fails after it shows the progressbar bouncing a few times with a useless error:

Ninite wine error

That was with wine version 1.1.40. I even tried installing wininet.dll through winetricks, but then it fails with a slightly different error about an invalid server response.
Oh well, too bad for that (it was just for fun anyway), but it’s a great tool for windows
Keep up the good work Ninite guys!

Dragon Age and Wine

First I decided to check it if the game would run in Wine. The appdb has some info that doesn’t sound too terrible, and since the latest git builds sometimes give better results I needed to test no matter what the test results said. So I built the latest git version of wine (which should be version 1.1.33 by now, but since they had WineConf it’s still labeled 1.1.32) and fired up the installer in a new prefix. I always install games in their own wine prefix so they don’t bug eachother with dlls and hacks needed to get them running. The game seems to need a few hacks from winetricks, specifically gecko and vcrun2005. Without the gecko component the Dotnet part of the installer crashed for me (it takes forever to install though). You might also want to install physx, since the game uses that as well. (and a lot of ppl had the physx installer fail through wine, good thing it’s in winetricks now). Finally I also installed d3dx9 just to be sure, since it needs DirectX to run.

Installing using the Installer

The installer should now come up, like this.

Dragon Age - Installer (wine)

Dragon Age Installer Adminerror (wine)

Dragon Age Installer under wine (2)

Dragon Age – Manual installation

Since the installer is pretty much a bitch, and I noticed it didn’t do much except for bitch and wine and unrar some packages, I tried to see if I could get it to run without needing the installer. Here goes! (you need the rar utility for this).
I created a new wine prefix and installed the required winetricks parts as above, but instead of running the installer I did this:

After this you should have a directory listing that looks very much like after using the official installer. The only worry I had was the game looking for registry entries, but it seems like those aren’t needed that much. (read, for me it started without asking stuff).
In fact, what baffles me is: this way it doesn’t even ask about a CD key. Very very interesting. However, I did need to use a no-cd patch to get it to run under wine (for both installation methods). Meh, nothing new there.

Running it under wine

Starting up the game will probably give you a black screen that does nothing until you click/bash your keyboard a few times. This is because the intro movies don’t work under wine at the moment.
However, you can disable those movies in the .INI file:

(or use a text editor).

Dragon Age Title Screen (wine)

For me the flickering was basically gone (during gameplay at least) when I reduced the graphics detail to “low”. (I could have Framebuffer effects enabled and also texture details set to high).
What helps is basically lowering the graphics settings:

• Lower the resolution
• Don’t run fullscreen

Anyway, that makes it playable under wine.

BenV’s opinion on the game

It’s a very worthy game to play if you’re into Baldur’s gate etc. The graphics are very nice compared to what I’m used to (especially under windows ) and the interface works properly.
The intro story is completely different depending on the race, class, and background (noble or commoner) you pick. I played as a casteless dwarf rogue and had the intro story living in the slums of the city, my sister being a whore trying to marry her way up to the noble class, while thieving and robbing my way around myself. Needless I butchered my way through the intro, cheating my boss out of some money and fighting a lot.
On the other hand my girlfriend started out as a human mage and had a lot less fighting and a lot more blabla and stuff from dreamworlds etc and could talk her way through a big part of the intro. (of course she also ran into the necessary fights, if it were only to teach the combat system of the game).
Speaking of which, the combat system is also well done. The party can be told to hold ground and they will actually stay there instead of having your archers/mages being raped in the front. Stealthing around and backstabbing also works very nicely

No LAN games

Anyway, I’m sure you can read enough reviews about the game that explain all that in much more detail.
But the one thing that is very very bad is the lack of multiplayer LAN games.
If there’s one thing we loved about Baldur’s Gate it was the ability to play the game with 3 computers all controlling the very same party, all players with their own character.
So why is it not in this game? I’ve seen a lot of BS on slashdot and other sites where the basic arguments are:

• It would take too much time to implement and therefore reduce the quality of the single player game
• It’s not possible without having a linear story / it would need a completely different story not geared to “the one”
• UI must be more complex for multiplayer
• I’m a fucking retard

Well, I think:

• Adding multiplayer would require LAN support which is extra code (but they already need that pretty much because of the DLC garbage). However, it’s not THAT MUCH more. A few screens to setup a game and deal with permissions together with a few tweaks to deal with synchronisation. That’s all. Peanuts compared to the rest of the game.
• See Baldur’s Gate, we -loved- that kind of multiplayer. Doesn’t need a different story at all, exactly the same story was excellent.
• The UI can be exactly the same, worked fine for Baldur’s Gate. There are however a few details that are nice to have when doing a multiplayer game, like people still being able to walk around and do stuff while others talk to NPCs, but no major overhauls.
• Yes, you are.

I’m sure most people who scream “NO” to the multiplayer support (and I wonder why) assume that big changes are needed to the game to make it multiplayer. Perhaps they have the wrong idea about what kind of multiplayer makes us happy.
However, since EA games got involved (see the whole DLC fiasco) there’s little hope that it’ll be changed.
Pity. Anyway, it’s still a very nice game. Time to play!