Showing post in category: Games
Ever since my guild in World of Warcraft first introduced a system for raid sign ups I wished that it was integrated into the forum so I wouldn’t have to login to the forum with one user and the raid sign up system with another (and into the dkp system with a third).
Anyway a little over a year ago I became responsible for the guild forum and looked for a mod for phpBB so raid sign ups would integrate well with the forum. I couldn’t find anything usable at the time so I decided to try write my own phpBB raid sign up mod.
Apart from being fun this little project kept my php skills from rusting totally and I also learned to use Bazaar (a version control system).
Just wanted to blog about it because I think it turned out quite good even though its small. Sure there is room for improvements but hey… the source is there for everybody – change it if you like 
Tags: phpbb, world of warcraft
After my server was restarted twice by my hosting center I decided to make sure Teamspeak would start automatically.
I read a few posts on how other people did it but in the end I decided that I created my own minimal script.
My two goals with this init script was:
- Run the Teamspeak server as an unprivileged user.
- Make sure the Teamspeak server starts up after reboot even though it wasn’t shut down properly
- A little bonus was that it reuses much of the init script that is bundled with the installation
Init script (/etc/init.d/teamspeak):
#!/bin/sh
TEAMSPEAK_DIR=/usr/local/teamspeak
TEAMSPEAK_USER=teamspeak
# Make sure that Teamspeak starts even though it wasn't closed nicely last time (ie. by a power cut)
if [ $(su - $TEAMSPEAK_USER -c "ps ux" |grep tsserver2.pid|grep -v grep|wc -l) -eq 0 ] && [ -f ${TEAMSPEAK_DIR}/tsserver2.pid ]
then
rm ${TEAMSPEAK_DIR}/tsserver2.pid
fi
cd ${TEAMSPEAK_DIR}
su - $TEAMSPEAK_USER -c "./teamspeak2-server_startscript $1"
cd -
Today I got dual screen in Ubuntu working… I have been fiddling around with it a few times before but nothing seriously. Never got it working the way I wanted. Earlier I edited the xorg.conf by hand while following guides from the internet and yesterday I stumbled upon a graphical Nvidia X configuration tool by accident… the solution was a bit of both.
The tool is called nvidia-settings and looks something like the image below.
As far as I know there are 2 ways of doing dual screen in Linux. Either you can use Xinerama or the Nvidia built-in feature called TwinView (I might be wrong here :D). Anyways I chose TviewView because that was the default in the Nvidia config tool. After making X aware of my second monitor with the Nvidia tool I saved the X configuration and restarted the X server with the new (Nvidia generated) configuration. The Nvidia generated configuration had 2 problems:
- It removed my danish keyboard
- It made my old monitor and the VGA outled the default monitor.
I want my new monitor on the DVI outled to be the default.
By hand I added the danish keyboard configuration which I copy-pasted from the old xorg.conf:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
Option "XkbLayout" "dk"
EndSection
To force the DVI to be the primary monitor I used the following:
Section "Device"
Identifier "NVIDIA Corporation NV43 [GeForce 6600]"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName "GeForce 6600"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "NoLogo" "1"
Option "TwinView" "1"
Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP, CRT"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "LeftOf"
Option "MetaModes" "DFP: 1600x1200, CRT: 1280x1024"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "NVIDIA Corporation NV43 [GeForce 6600]"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection
First I don’t want to see the Nvidia Logo when X is started… it is a nice logo though 
TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder is the important part because this makes sure that the DVI is the default monitor. You can read more about all the possible options for the Nvidia driver on Nvidias homepage.
My only “problem” is that the background image is streched out on both monitors, but I guess I have to make a custom background image for my dual screen setup. Now I can play World of Warcraft in a dual screen setup in Linux as well which was one of the only things that kept me booting into Windows. To bad performance drops a bit in Linux 
But I have a strong feeling that we are to blame Nvidia for that rather than Wine… but its just a gut feeling.
… down a drain called World of Warcraft.
As a few people have pointed out, I havn’t blogged for some time now. I spend most my evenings playing World of Warcraft and havn’t really used my spare time on all sorts Open Source stuff as I used to.
This is my character so far. It is actually now pretty easy to get WoW running under Linux with WINE.
But at work I have tried to update our Instiki installation to the newest 0.11 version which wasn’t as easy as it may sound. I finally got all the old stuff migrated and all seemed to work until we tried to proxy from our DMZ to the internal Instiki wiki. Instiki didn’t like that… I is some time ago now so I dont have the error message. But if I stumble upon it I’ll put it here.
Instead I found a Media Wiki altered by MindTouch called dekiwiki.
The cool thing about that wiki is they made a page where you can get you own public readable wiki, I already made my own at emcken.wiki.com. Not much for you guys, but now have a place for all my notes and shit which usually just lie around on my disk until it dissappears in all the other mess.
After the 1.8.0 patch World of Warcraft doesn’t work for me again. I’m unable to click on things ingame (This applies to the latest 1.8.1 patch too).
This sucks because now I have to boot into Windows again.
Anyways, I have played alot the last few weeks and have become level 53. I might hit level 60 before Christmas… YEAH! I’m not going to set higher goals… my girlfriend might not like it 
I have been reading more on the items and quests in the game, and I’m begining to realize that I wont ever get near some of the really cool stuff
Some time ago a friend of mine introduced me to Pure Pwnage, and yesterday I took the time to watch all episodes.
It is a video show about a “pro” gamer who totally own noobs… and stuff, LOL. First I was like, okay I’ll watch, but I know he dosn’t own as much as me – rite, then I’m okay he is cool and all – you know.
Okay enought of the wierd Pure Pwnage thounge If you are just a tiny bit into computer games, I’m sure you will find this worth while watching – ENJOY.
A few days ago i tried to make Sid Meiers Pirates run again with WINE.
As usual when trying to install the game I got the following:
Well that didn’t stop me this time. I started to copy Pirates from my Windows XP partition to my fake WINE Windows drive (notice the cool new GNOME 2.12 copy dialog.
Now I tried to start Pirates again but this time I got a message about missing 2 dll files:
You can find them by searching on Google
I copied the files to my fake Windows’ system folder ie. /home/je/c/windows/system.
Finally I applied a No-CD-patch and was now able to start the game, where I was greeted by a… black screen for a long time.
I’m serious…. a VERY long time.
I’m telling you – it’s still there
Then finally I was presented with the title menu. YEAH!
I think I fiddled a little with some settings before I dared try starting the game.
Now a long waiting time again. But you don’t wanna go fetch coffe because you want to see this
Woah, I see an ingame movie… cool. I was so quickly taking the screenshot, that the menu didn’t get time to disappear. They call my Lucky Luke
I’m actaully able to choose with whom I want to got to the new world. The grey man was a little to creepy so England it was.
Long wait time…. again, and no movie of me fighting the captain – perhaps I accidentally hit a key, dunno.
Well suddenly I saw a little ship sailing and joy filled my body – YES!… and before I knew it the game had crashed. Perhaps tweaking with the video setting and stuff might make the game somewhat playable
The few screenshots I created was worth it all. See you on the other side.
After reading a post on some Gentoo forum where someone said that they didn’t need the memory hack for Cadega to run World of Warcraft after using kernel 2.6.12, I gave it another shot.
The annoying not-beeing-able-to-click-on-anything-in-game-bug is now gone. So far I havn’t played more than 10 minutes but it seems the game just runs as it should
My danish characters has stopped working again, though. But I think it has something to do with Breezy because it worked in Hoary.
Well, running WoW with the newest WINE release and a 2.6.12 kernel in opengl works!
Over and out!
To night I tried to play a few games with WINE (NOT Cadega) on my Ubuntu Hoary system.
Here is what I found out so far:
World of Warcraft
NOGO
WoW version 1.6.1. Patches apply, game starts, you can login and select a character og play with it. But it there is a bug which makes it nearly impossible to click on any in-game items such as NPC’s, mailboxes etc. I read on some mailinglists that if you put the camara just right you are able to click on them. Preferable when you can have nothing but sky behind the object you want to clock at (yeah something like running around looking up in the sky all the time). From what I have read on the mailing lists it seems to be a Blizzard bug… a few Windows users suffers from this too.
Comon Blizzard… we are so close now. The game seems to run alot faster under Linux in WINE than on my Windows XP partition (though it havn’t been reinstalled for years now, so perhapes it isn’t a fair comparisson).
Update: It is actually a YEAH. Take a look at my post about WoW i Ubuntu Breezy
Sid Meier’s Pirates
NOGO
Can’t make the game install. I get an error code 1628 at once.
It seems that the game uses a MSI installer, but I havn’t found any guides (yet) on how you install the game, but perhapes installaing a native MSI would solve the problem (guide located in the bottom of this post).
Haven’t tried to copy from my Windows partition
Risk II
NOGO
Yeah this is an old game which I usually play with the guys when we make some of our small lan-parties. There is no visual evidence (spalsh screen, menu, mouse cursor etc.) that the game actually starts, it just dies almost before it is excecuted.
Warcraft III
YEAH
Remove movies from the Movies/ directory. Apply a no cd patch and the game will run with the -opengl option. Haven’t looked into playing on Battle.Net… yet.
Here is a few good reads:
After the World of Warcraft patch update today WINE 20050310 no longer runs WoW. Though it seems that there are already patches out there to correct the problem.
I’m no patch guy so I’ll await the next WINE release with patientce.
