BenV's notes

Earlier I reported on my first World of Warcraft under 64 bits wine experience. It somewhat worked but couldn’t play the game because it got stuck on the loading screen.
Just now I decided to give it another shot and pulled the latest wine from git. Currently we’re on wine version 1.4-rc4. Before building that I upgraded my NVIDIA driver to their latest as well, 295.20.

After compiling and installing the new wine release candidate the results are in:

So it seems like the guys working on Wine did some good work!
Loading the initial screen is still a bit slower than the 32 bit version, but apart from the it seems good. Haven’t tried any dungeons yet, so I have no reports on ingame performance, but I might complain on that later if it sucks 🙂
If not I have another reason to move my old 32 bits slackware partition to the shredder.

With the release of patch 4.3.2 the still biggest MMORPG they finally decided to go the 64 bit route.
Through the forums a 64 bit client can be downloaded and placed next to the normal one, with a bunch of warnings and stuff that doesn’t yet work obviously. Yay. (continue reading…)

This morning my mailbox opened up with an email inviting me to the Diablo 3 Beta. After checking the headers
to make sure it wasn’t another battlenet phishing scam I noticed that the Received headers really came from blizzard.com, and they even signed the mail with a domainkey. Also they didn’t include some link but simply told me to go to battle net and get the goods there.

Surprisingly they state:

We also invite you to share your Diablo III beta experience with the world! All participants can take screen shots, capture video, and/or publicly disclose information about their beta test experience.

(instead of the usual non-disclosure agreement). So thanks Blizzard and a friend who works there who is no doubt responsible for getting me this invite in the first place 🙂 (continue reading…)

And here we go again (and again!)!

Get 5 games, donate to charity / the EFF, and support developers at the same time. Or only get the games. Or only support the EFF. Or whatever 😉
Do it now! Humble Bundle 3 is here!

The games this time: Crayon Physics Deluxe, Cogs, VVVVVV, Hammerfight, and And Yet It Moves.

The last one has an interesting graphics style: it looks like it’s all put together from ripped up magazines.

As for weird graphics, the first one features drawings made of crayons… which you draw yourself!
Here’s a video of it:

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

The rest you’ll have to find out for yourself.
Did I mention you get them on Steam / Desura as well for that price? 😉

Obviously when something is really successfull there will be a second version of it.
Whether the motive is pure profit or for the greater good of $omething, I can only applaud it.
Especially when they promote DRM free games on linux. (and they provide the mac and win32 versions with it as well)
So The Humble Bundle is back with part 2!

This time the games offered are: Braid, Cortex Command, Machinarium, Osmos, Revenge of the Titans.
Just Machinarium alone is worth the money (if you like puzzle games and artsy graphics), and the others that I’ve played so far are good as well.
Some games are still being developed (Revenge of the Titans), but you’re eligible for future updates. (last time they even added the bundle to Steam after a while).

Like the previous Humble Bundle, YOU get to choose how much you want to pay them.
This obviously means that if you’re a windows user you pay less than when you’re a mac or linux user 😉
And then you get to decide how much of that money goes to charity (EFF / Child’s Play) and how much of it goes to the developers. (and how much the humble bundle guys get… for bandwidth etc I’m sure).

So go get it!. Even if you don’t care about the games, you can give some money to the EFF instead 🙂

This game has been released a couple of days ago, and if you’re a fan of Baldur’s Gate and such games (like Neverwinter Nights) I’m sure you’ll like this game. So when we heard it was released we immediately moved our computers together so we could play a game just like how we spent countless hours playing Baldur’s Gate. (continue reading…)

A while ago I talked about emulators and my quest to run them on 64 bit linux.
Today I stumbled upon pcsx-r or PCSX-Reloaded. Basically the same thing as the old pcsx emulator, only better 🙂
Why? First of all it builds and runs on my slackware64 without 32 bits garbage attached to it. Second of all, someone is actively developing it which means it’s still being improved. Finally, the interface is slightly better.
I know it’s good since slackbuild compiled it without problems 😉
Here’s the thing running on my slackware 64 install:

I loaded final fantasy 8 on it:

And to prove it does more than just the intro screen, here’s a shot from the intro movie 😉

Offtopic: Do you know what really annoys me in games?
UNSKIPPABLE CONTENT!
In this case the intro movie, but it goes for countless of things: cutscenes (either ingame or fmv), “game over” screens, long talks that I don’t give a damn about when I already know what they’re saying… I’m sure there are plenty more examples of this. If you’re developing a game, make sure you don’t force your gamer through this nonsense. Yeah, it’s cute, and we understand that you spent countless of hours wasting your time on fancy graphics, but after the first time I really don’t want to sit through it again. Especially if I just died and am forced through it -again-.

So now that I had it running in the background and could rant while it showed the intro, here’s an ingame shot 😉

Keep up the good work PCSX-Reloaded guys!
And fix your homepage.
Things that are currently wrong with it:
* It doesn’t tell me anything ABOUT the product, except for that it’s a fork/branch of PCSX
* It doesn’t have any screenshots (what is it with graphical programs that don’t have screenshots on their website? That’ s a FAIL right there)
* It doesn’t have any information on requirements etc, I just tried to compile it on 64 bit linux because I hoped it would work, not because your site tells me it does.

Lately I’ve heard some rumors about this new mmorhghhghg coming up called “Aion“.
Fileplanet (you know, the cancer popup site you sometimes get when you need to download a game patch and then need to click through 23894723897 registration things etc… which is barred from bugmenot…. *sigh*) handed out open beta keys. So I got one. And so did lotjuh.

Did I mention my machine doesn’t have windows? Makes it… interesting.
First we obviously tried wine. Well, it installs without much hassle, which is a good thing.
However, it doesn’t launch. Some piece of garbage called GameGuard doesn’t work on wine. And because it doesn’t, neither does Aion.
Great going Aion guys! Needless to say they couldn’t be arsed to write a linux binary for it, so they SUCK per default! They couldn’t even be arsed to write a Mac binary for it. Pffrt.

However, to make an interesting attempt to test out Virtualbox’s 3d acceleration support, I decided to install Aion in a virtualboxed windows xp that I “borrowed” from lotjuh.
Virtualbox is at version 3.0.6 these days, so first I installed the latest version.
The installation went fine:

Not only the installation, but also the updater ran fine:

Then the gameguard part came, it looked promising:

However, to all good things must come an end. So it dies because of hardware acceleration issues. No real surprise, but too bad for Virtualbox. Not there yet.

Maybe it’ll work one day when Virtualbox gets their direct3d working as well as wine has it working.

Anyway, from what I’ve seen of the game (it runs ‘fine’ on lotjuh’s PC with her “Seven” failure install), it’s a World of Warcraft wannabe.
Graphics are a lot better, they put in some cute stuff like when it rains and the character idles it’ll put a leave over their head. The movies are cute, the quests sometimes even show you stuff (like a little ingame movie of the target area) to go along with the text. But all in all it doesn’t look like a wow killer. No linux support (not even with wine), no mac support, and so far I haven’t seen a major reason for people to switch from wow to this game, except for the graphics. Then again, I’ve only looked at it for a short amount of time, maybe it’ll get better 😉
I’m sure they’ll get a decent amount of players though, it’s a good wow clone.
Story wise the game is fail, I could sum it up with “There were gods, and a planet, and now the planet is split in 2 half planets and the ‘people’ on those halves fight eachother”.

It asks for a stellar converter if you ask me. (master of orion 2 reference, can’t find a good image/video on google)

Since I quit playing World of Warcraft again a while ago (seriously Blizzard, what are you doing to that game?) I find myself enjoyed playing tons of other things. Funny thing is, most of the games I play are ancient. Games from the DOS era (which means DOSBOX, I love that product) like Master of Orion (and it’s sequel), Master of Magic, Paratrooper, One Must Fall: 2097 (which is freeware these days! Download it here), X-Com, System Shock, and the list goes on and on. Yeah, come to think of it…. the games they made back then were pretty brilliant, and it’s not just nostalgia. (continue reading…)