First, let me detail the hardware I’m running – that MAY be a key to my success. I’m running an old nForce 2 based motherboard supporting an Athlon Xp 2800+ CPU and a gig of PC3200 ram, a Soundblaster Live 5.1 soundcard and a GeForce 7300 GT video card with 512mb of VRAM. The video card is a newer addition, prior to it I ran a Radeon 9800 Pro – I was running that card when I tried WoW on Edgy. After upgrading to the GeForce the game was playable, but I also had just installed Feisty.

Assuming you have Ubuntu installed already, an exercise I leave to you, the first thing I did was download Envy. Envy is a nice little script that will fetch the latest video drivers for your particular model of video card (nvidia or ati). I’ve used it several times with great results each time. Of course, your mileage may vary so don’t blame me if it doesn’t work for you. Once I had the driver installed I rebooted, I then checked to make sure the driver was working by issuing the following command:

glxinfo | grep rendering

which resulted in this:

Direct Rendering: Yes

if it doesn’t say YES there, then something is wrong and you need to troubleshoot that.

Since mine said yes, I proceeded with the install. First you have to install WINE, which is a compatability layer that allows SOME windows applications to run natively under Linux. WoW happens to be one of the programs that runs just fine using WINE. You can install WINE by going to add/remove programs and searching for it, checking it and installing it.

After it’s installed, it’s a good idea to run the command “winecfg” from the terminal, that will initialize WINE and get you on your way.

Once you’ve got WINE installed and working, it’s time to do the WoW install – this will require a good deal of disk space.

I created a temporary directory on my hard drive and copied the files from each cd to that directory. The exception to that being the Installer.exe – copy that only from Disk 1, not from any of the others (if you overwrite the one from disk one your install will fail – I found this out the hard way). Once you’ve copied all of the files over, simply run the installer with the command “wine path/to/Installer.exe”, making sure to change the path to where you copied the files to.

The installer should run, and install WoW on your machine. You’re not finished yet, though.

You now need to edit the config.WTF file in your WoW installation. Typically this is found in /home/<username>/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/World\ of\ Warcraft/

(if the file doesn’t exist, run the game and log in to a character, that will create it). Open the config.wtf file and add the following to the bottom:

SET gxApi "opengl"

SET SoundOutputSystem "1"
SET SoundBufferSize "150"

That will set the rendering to use OpenGL instead of Direct3D, while Direct3D also works fine for me it does NOT for most people so it’s recommended that you use OpenGL in Linux. The other two lines set the sound system up to work better in Linux, you don’t technically HAVE to add them but they improved sound quality for me.

After that I tried playing but found it to still be kind of slow, I decided to check into it and see what, if anything, I could do to improve things. I found the following:

There’s a registry tweak that will greatly improve performance. To make the tweak you need to open the registry by running the command “regedit”.

Navigate to the following key in the registry window (using the + symbols to expand the trees until you find it): HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine

Right click on the Wine folder and select NEW then KEY.

rename the newly created key “OpenGL” minus the quotes.

replace the “new value 1″ with “DisabledExtensions”, again minus the quotes.

Finally, double click anywhere on the newly created key, it’ll bring up a value box. In that box put “GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object”, minus quotes.

Save everything and close the registry editor. You should now see significantly better performance.

The last thing you need to do is to create a launcher for the game.

First, download a WoW icon suitable for this. From a terminal run:

wget http://kde-files.org/CONTENT/content-files/41569-wow-icon-scalable.svg

sudo mv 41569-wow-icon-scalable.svg /usr/share/icons/wow.svg

gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/wow.desktop

In the window that opens now, you should put something like this:

Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=World of Warcraft
Name[hr]=World of Warcraft
Exec=wine /home/<username>/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WoW.exe
Icon=wow.svg
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Application;Game;
StartupNotify=false

replacing <username> with that of your linux user. Save that and close, and you should have a nice new launcher.

You can optionally change the WoW.exe with Launcher.exe, which will run the WoW launcher prior to the actual game. Since this launcher sometimes (at least for me) has downloaded patches for me when it ran, I choose to do that.

Patches and everything else should run just fine by themselves just as if you were running windows.

If you want to install Burning Crusade, you can follow the same install process I listed above for WoW. You won’t need to do the tweaks again – just install and run and you’ll be fine.

That’s how I got WoW installed and running in Ubuntu. It may not work for you, it may work perfectly. I make no guarantees and take no responsibility if it doesn’t work. If you can’t get something to work you can leave a comment here – I’ll try to help as best I can.

I found a lot of the same material here on the Ubuntu Wiki, which is also a good place to look for help.

[tags] World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft Ubuntu, WINE, Ubuntu, Linux Gaming, Gaming [/tags]

I’ve found, upon further thought on the matter, that I’ve not been really satisfied with a game in a long time. The two notable exceptions being F.E.A.R. and World of Warcraft. The older games, from the early to mid (and in some cases late) 90′s, seem in my mind to be superior to those today. There’s no concrete evidence that I have to back this up, mind you, just the feeling / opinion I have. Games like System Shock (and it’s equally cool sequal System Shock 2), Xwing (and it’s equally cool if not cooler sequal Tie Fighter), Rainbow Six (and a few of it’s sequals, though the series is losing it’s way fast), et al. have provided me with hours upon hours of gaming fun, which in turn gives me many fond memories of my gaming days.

I’ve not really been much of a gamer for a few years now. I like to blame College for this, as I like to pretend I spent all of my time in college being studious and learning. That’s a complete load of bullshit, though, and I’m not sure why I believe it every time I tell myself that. The reality is I still game, just not nearly as much as I did when I was younger. Part of that is because I’ve become bored with the games that are out now. It seems like a lot of them focus almost entirely on graphics and technology, and not enough on character development and/or storyline. A notable exception to that that i’ve played recently was F.E.A.R., which had some really neat maps, an intriguing story, some great scripted sequences and some truly frightening encounters. The high quality graphics certainly allowed for some of this, but other games have pulled off the same things without the very high end graphics engines. Take, for instance, System Shock 2. SS2 gave the players a great gaming experience that immersed them into a truly scary environment. A ship where something has gone horribly awry, trying to figure out what happened. It was a great story, and had pretty decent graphics for its time, but it didn’t rely on graphics to provide the only lure to get people to play it. Doom III, however, seemed to me to be mainly about the graphics. The story was there, and I guess somewhat plausible (certainly it could have been worse), but most of the game in my opinion was dominated by showing off it’s graphics engine (which I will admit is damn impressive), and consisted a lot of the time by being surprised by demons and monsters appearing out of nowhere for the scare factor. The story wasn’t that deep, and certainly failed to immerse me. It did provide some cheap thrills, but not enough to compel me to play it again.

As Matty P so eloquently put it, the main thing sacraficed for these advances in technology is the gameplay. Games were more fun back then to play, had deeper stories and more character development, great control schemes and some really neat fringe features because they had to. Graphics alone weren’t ever going to draw someone to play the games, and so they had to go farther to develop the other aspects of the game to make them compelling enough to appeal to gamers. Add to that this god awful obsession game companies have with console systems. I’m sorry, but I find it very hard to stomach that every year or so a new console comes out that I have to buy to play the games. Add to that the controllers, which IMHO suck ass compared to the mouse and keyboard combo a PC has. Plus, if you want to play some games you have to buy different consoles. What a crock of shit. With computers I could play any of the games on the same system. Sure, upgrades were needed sometimes but a lot of times it meant upgrading a certain component, and not the whole system, and even then seemed fewer and farther between than the new consoles seem to be. I’ve been running on the same hardware in my PC for years now, and haven’t had a need to upgrade yet. In case you couldn’t figure it out, I abhor consoles. I feel the gameplay is dumbed down to the point of being annoying in a lot of cases, and in a lot of other cases you end up with games that are essentially clones of each other.

So, what does this all really mean? It means I’m saddened by the current state of the gaming industry. There are a few bright nuggets here and there, but they seem to be much fewer and farther between than they were in the 90′s. There’s a distinct lack of decent flight simulators out there, and the space combat genre that was once topped by giants like TIE Fighter, seems to have disappeared alltogether. Instead you have games like Battlefront II which promises you the ability to fly fighters in space combat, yet the implementation is so abysmal that it makes me hurt inside. Deep inside. In my soul. But maybe that should say something to me. Maybe the masses don’t want deep stories, well developed characters and downright great gameplay. Maybe they want technologically adavnced steaming piles of shit. You can up the graphics and details, make it look really flashy and full of neat new tricks, but in the end if the game fails to have a compelling story and engaging gameplay, it’s still going to suck. I find my outlook on the future of gaming unfortunately kind of bleak.
Bonus points to anyone who can tell me where the title for this post came from. A Hint: It is from a game.

I was intrigued, to say the least, when I heard there would be a sequal to X-Wing. As many know, sequals are rarely as good as their predecessors. The sequal, called TIE Fighter, would take the same idea as X-Wing, except apply it to the Empire. You found yourself not a rebel starfighter pilot, but rather an imperial pilot. The game progresses through campaigns and storylines that treat the rebels as the bad guys , trying to undermine the peace and stability brought by the Empire. It was beautiful. It was a masterpiece!

I fell in love with the game right away. The gameplay was instantly more accessable and less puzzle like than X-Wing had been (X-Wing missions often revolved around figuring out which ships were the key ships and had to be destroyed, which often meant dashing from one side of the battle to the other, as you couldn’t ever count on other rebel ships to destroy the enemy). You have a sense of being part of something greater than just yourself, and it’s easy to get caught up in the story that is being woven by each mission you fly. The missions often have primary, secondary and secret objectives associated with them. The primary objectives allow you to move to the next mission, the secondary gain you extra awards, and the secret objectives open up a subplot line that takes you into and through a secret imperial society, where often you will talk to envoys of the emperor who give you other objectives than those your flight officer will give you. Completing those objectives allows you to move further into the subplot.

As you progress through the campaigns, you go from being a normal recruit, flying the SFS TIE Fighter to flying some of the most advanced fighters ever conceived. As you move from mission to mission, you’re trusted with the better, faster, and probably more expensive fighters, like the TIE Interceptor, TIE Bomber and TIE Advanced (Avenger). This in and of itself gives you a sense of accomplishment.

I can remember in one campaign, I was assigned to a ship under the command of an Admiral. Right before my mission, I had the opportunity to talk with one of the Envoys of the emperor that I mentioned above. The message was cryptic: I was told I was in danger, and that I must be careful. My mission was simple enough: clear a minefield. Normally you’d get a fighter that has sheilds to do that, as minefields are made up of mines that have laser cannons on them that constantly shoot at you. One or two hits from one of those in an unsheilded craft and you’d be toast. I was given a TIE Interceptor, which has no sheilds. After clearing the minefield, which was tough in and of itself, my wingmen targeted me and tried to kill me. It appeared someone on the ship wanted me dead. I was saved by a frigate that jumped in specifically to rescue me from the traitors. It turned out that the Admiral was defecting. Plot twists like that really served to draw me into the game and make me feel like I was part of something bigger.

Sadly, games like TIE Fighter aren’t made anymore. TIE Fighter was followed up by X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, which was mostly based around multiplayer with no real singleplayer gameplay. The graphics were lightyears better, but who really cares if there’s no meaningful gameplay? After XWing vs Tie Fighter came the last game in the series — X-wing: Alliance. It had a very rich story, following a freighter pilot turned rebel pilot in the time frame from just after the battle of Hoth (empire strikes back) through the battle of endor, where the player gets to fly the Millenium Falcon into the second death star. It’s been years since XWA came out, and no more will likely be made.

So, you may be wondering why I bring any of this up. Since I started college, I’ve been unable to play these games. They were DOS based (except XWA, which I could play, though I’ve lost the disks), and didn’t run at all in Windows XP. I remember having tried to get them to run numerous times back when I first started using XP, and failing. That was a sad day for me, realizing I could never again play a game I really loved. That, however, has changed! I found last night a DOS emulator that will allow me to play the games again in all their original glory.

Yes, I’m a geek. But I’m a happy geek!