So yesterday morning I tuned in to EVE-Radio (live radio stream) to listen to some music and maybe hear some updates on the Alliance Tournament. I was not prepared for what I heard instead…
I logged in just as FunkyBacon had started talking about what has to be the biggest news in EVE-Online history. It’s even bigger news than the Peak Concurrent User record of over 47,000 users (achieved Jan 12, 2009) and bigger than the currently ongoing Alliance Tournament.
Or… Should I keep paying for Cedega? 
I have to start by saying I appreciate what Cedega does - thanks to them I can play Eve-Online on linux and was finally able to completely drop Windows… I still keep a dual-boot of Windows XP in case I need registry keys or something from a program, but otherwise I’ve been running pretty much 24/7 in Linux since last December.
I was going to babble on about the history of waiting for the latest (not sure about greatest, there’s good and bad…) Fallout, but that doesn’t have much to do with Wine vs Cedega in regards to Fallout 3.
When it finally arrived I popped the DVD in, auto-mounted it, set up a new wine directory using export WINEPREFIX=~/.games/fallout3
, launched the installer, installed everything, crossed my fingers, and attempted to launch it…
Talk about disappointment… I figured it was a long shot, but I was hoping it would work. I started googling and found forum posts on winehq and elsewhere with people trying to figure out how to get it to work…
I tried Cedega and ended up with nothing either - even worse, using the GUI to launch it gives me no feedback like when using wine from the console.
I resorted to using my Windows dual-boot in the mean time, promising to drop this stupid rebooting thing once it worked on linux…
A couple of weeks later I mentioned something about it in the #tulsalug on Freenode and somebody posted a link to Fallout 3 in the winehq’s appdb. Was I surprised - last time I had looked the only thing they had on Fallout 3 was the Van Buren demo.
The way to get Fallout 3 to work under wine requires a patched and freshly compiled wine. It gave more info on registry items to add in case of issues. I still haven’t gotten around to patching and compiling wine, but I noticed a wine update for ubuntu and installed it…
I deleted the Fallout 3 directory I had set up and started over, using winetricks to install directx9, and then installed Fallout 3 again… Oh so close - the launcher comes up pretty quick and it seemed to auto detect things fairly well. I clicked Play
, Fallout 3 launched, and got to the game menu. Clicking new
and then yes
gives me the loading screen and then at some point it seems to stick and never repaint itself, but the music keeps playing.
The sad part is an unpatched wine at least gets me that far. Cedega on the other hand takes forever to even run the launcher, detects my video settings fairly quickly, and then, when I click Play
, Fallout 3 doesn’t launch… Even though the launcher music plays I was getting an error stating that Fallout 3 requires audio in order to run… I changed a bunch of settings, switched from ALSA to OSS, switched back, checked and unchecked various checkboxes… Now I’m getting a popup stating:
Fallout 3 does not appear to be installed and the installer could not be found. Try exploring your DVD-ROM drive and selecting setup.exe to install the game.
Considering I can’t vote for Cedega to pay more attention to Fallout 3 at this point in time (they’re changing the voting system and it’s been down for a while)… Considering the only thing I’m using Cedega for at this point is Eve-Online via the Eve-Online linux installer (which you don’t need a Cedega membership for)… Considering most of the games I used to need Cedega for now run just fine under wine… Considering Cedega can’t even figure out how to tell Fallout 3 that I really do have sound (and this isn’t a problem at all under wine)… I’m really wondering if my $5 a month or whatever it is for Cedega is really worth it.
I don’t know about other people, but considering how bad and pathetic (or DRM infested - Mass Effect Reviews: An expensive game rental which installs malware and Rental versus purchase: Beware) most games are these days I don’t buy very many games any more… I usually find myself going through my old games and playing through them. This includes Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout: Tactics (all 3 Fallout classics for $5.99 each on GOG.com - yes, that’s the NMA link).
Hmm… Looking at the page again for GOG I think I might get those even though I’ve still got the CDs around… $5.99 for the original sound tracks in mp3 format is good… Now, if I could just find the Fallout 3 soundtracks, specifically the music played on GNR, for $5.99… I can get more of Pete hackin’, whackin’, and choppin’ at meat without having to reboot to Windows.
Maybe over Thanksgiving I’ll have enough time (and can be patient enough to wait) to compile wine with the patch…
I was catching up on my Order of the Stick (aka oots) reading and noticed a In Memoriam: E. Gary Gygax post under their News section. I couldn’t believe it so read through it and ended up at a Wired article Gary Gygax, ‘Father of D&D,’ Dies at 69
.
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I got sucked into WoW and something I found was that WoW has a directory for AddOns!
I couldn’t find something for a particular quest and started googling for it. As usual, someone was nice enough to list coordinates for the quest. It wasn’t until later that I discovered these coordinates are percentages from the top left corner of the map, but even so it’s nice to have something that will display these.
Apparently there are lots & lots of add-ons for WoW. One that a lot of people use seems to be QuestHelper. One of the pages for 1 of the quests I was doing pointed me towards Curse.com. Curse.com has a nifty downloader/installer/updater utility that works great on windows… Unfortunately I’m on linux - but I got it working!
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A couple of years ago my co-workers talked me into playing the World of Warcraft (WoW). I really wasn’t excited about this because it seemed to me it’d be yet another EverCrack (nickname for EverQuest - due to it’s addictive nature like a drug).
EverQuest was tons of fun… at least at the lower levels. Just like NWNo (wikipedia entry) and UO (wikipedia entry) before it, the major selling point on EverQuest was the social aspect. Unfortunately after a certain level the social aspect in EverQuest seemed to drop off unless you were doing a major guild event. Certain places were easier to find people to group with and others very difficult. In the early days pick up groups seemed to be pretty good, but as any game progresses the quality of the average player seems to decrease.
Back to WoW… So I figured since my co-workers were all playing I’d give it a go and see just how fun WoW was. It was kind of fun in the early levels, but got kind of boring and I got frustrated with certain things. My co-workers were already levels above me and I got some help, but not a whole lot. After a while of going around in circles I gave up and went back to my other games.
Here recently I’ve been wanting to find a fantasy MMO (in addition to the sci-fi space MMO I’ve been playing). The other day I got an email to try the new expansion for WoW - The Burning Crusade. I figured sure, it’ll give me a couple of days to mess around with a fantasy MMO again for free.
Ten days free trial - count them… 10 days! Once you click this button it will start your 10 day free trial and then you can download the client. Ok, so I click the button and download the small installer (maybe 1-2 meg). I start the installer which now has to download about 2.1 Gig via a torrent-like rip-off of a downloader - 16 hours to download. Great, so the first day of my 10 day trial I spend downloading the installer.
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Somebody posted a link to this image in IRC tonight (bad use of a JPG, should have been GIF or PNG probably), but I thought it was good. Players throw Game Masters (GMs) curve balls all the time.
Granted, programmers get thrown curve balls all the time as well. There’s a joke within a particular IT group in AT&T about the “6th Screen”. It’s been so long that I’m not sure if anybody remembers the details, but there was this project with only 5 or 6 screens, honest! Until the developer got into the guts of it & started asking “what happens if this is different?” questions… I think in total there was somewhere between 20-50 screens that were really required.
Later the person who originally created the specs & then all the subsequent specs for all the other screens joined the team. As a joke she found a pic of the kid from The Sixth Sense (1999) & mocked it up to say, “The Sixth Screen”, & below it said, “I see stupid people”.