RPG Articles

That should actually read “sort of”. The new driver, which I just tried out, offers a lot better support of my crapesque Radeon x1600. Doubled my glxgears FPS, increased 2D desktop acceleration noticeably, and, in theory, allows the use of compiz without XGL, aka, the crappy x server.

While compiz would run, and wasn’t crushingly slow, it was too slow to use. Still, I wouldn’t have retreated from the driver if that’s all that was going on, because seriously, the extra 2D acceleration was very nice. The real trouble was when I went to test a game under wine. Screen would go black, and the cursor would change, then the video would go completely away. Too bad, since it sounded like it was cranking away faster. But, it makes me hopeful that ATI is finally getting its act together on the linux front.

So, I was trying to get some games running under wine. Now, with the new xserver, XGL is enabled automagically (this is Ubuntu Gutsy, btw), so you don’t need a special session. Fine. Cool. Now, I managed to install Dawn of War and Il-2 Sturmovik 1946. Il-2 ran fine. Dawn of War kept giving me a “spooge driver” missing error and suggesting directx wasn’t installed.

Finally it bubbled to the top of my brain that I had similar issues with games under XGL before, with or without beryl/compiz. Yeah, supposedly you can disable XGL from starting, but whenever I switched to metacity from compiz, it killed hardware acceleration anyway.

So I nuked it. Only way to be sure. This did cause me some issues. For whatever reason, metacity didn’t get set as the window manager, so my first reboot caused me to just not have a window manager. For those in a similar spot, open a terminal and use metacity –replace & to start metacity. I’m hoping it’ll stick, but if not I’ll be back with how to make sure it does.

I was struck by an idea for a Castlevania game the other day. One set in the future, with a bunch of new set material and whatnot.

Naturally I talked to my buddy Art about this, since he lives console games of all sorts. He informed me that Aria of Sorrow is in the future.

I was taken aback. I’ve even played part of the game! What the hell? Surely he’s wrong!

No. So I dug further. The game adds a pistol, and in Boss Rush a rifle. That’s the only difference between it, and previous incarnations. This made me look even deeper. I suddenly realized, and it made me feel slow that it’s taken this long, that since Symphony of the Night, those bastards at Konami have just copied and pasted the game over and over. Sure, dialog changes, but it’s usually just the same crap you’d get from bad (aka most) anime. Some, precious few, weapons get redefined. Bosses change in one way or another. That’s it! The MAP hasn’t changed in like 7 years. It’s a magical castle, you can do what you want with it. The basic enemies don’t really change either, and, most importantly, neither does any significant gameplay.

So. I’m going to re-write my idea to not have anything to do with it.

I’ve played games that were longer.

Games that were more involving.

Games that had more variety.

But none of them were that disturbing and funny. And though I mention variety, I can’t properly express the sheer awesomeness of the game. It has the reverse problem of Shoot ‘em Up, in that no matter how I describe it, it sounds boring. A straight linear game where you don’t shoot anything. That’s an eye catcher.

The game is short. I’d say 3 hours is a fair estimate, though you could hone yourself into some kind of retard ninja and do it in 2. Yet, it is damned near worth the price, all by itself.

Here’s hoping for a sequel.

The cake is a lie.

So, ATI bit me in the ass again. I decided to update from Feisty to Gutsy today, and my working just fine, direct rendering ATI setup went kablooey. There was apparently some customized XGL stuff in Feisty (aka- hacks), that was corrected in Gutsy, but led to this issue here because of the malformed configs from Feisty. Make sense? No? Good, that means you’re paying attention.

Anyway. I just finished a clean install to a drive my roommate had given me. Installed, as per normal, and unlike Feisty everything just worked well once I enabled the restricted driver. So, hurrah.

Now to copy the important stuff from my home directory. And skip installing the MS Core fonts. This looks a lot better. I’ll just cram that junk into wine.

So, following a crazy sidebar link from Aaron’s blog, I found this awesome stuff.

Now, I understand that people tend to be conservative and everything. It’s their right to be jerks and I’m not saying that shouldn’t be able to say “hey, stop that”, but this line is killer-

“We also view this kind of rogue advertising as environmental damage ”

….what?  They do this by cleaning grime. What? This is why retards take up faith in senseless things, they just aren’t capable of actual learning. If someone is drawing on your face, complain about that, the thing that’s happening, not how fake fur is cruel to animals, or whatever it is someone may have told you, or your fevered little brain conjured up.

Right here in River City. Apprater.

For the nobody that looks at this blog, I apologize that the new link has malformed the nav box on the left. I’ll fix it soonish.

There’s a deb file for Feisty on the main site, which is great to see. Also nice to see some furthered linux support from Skype.

So, here’s a quick rundown of my experience so far.

Good
Install. Duh, it’s a deb file. Double clickety and install.
Seems smoother overall than the previous version I was running, and I haven’t had to restart it to fix the sound yet (unlike the previous version, which had insane clipping issues after being on for a few hours).
Picked up my old Skype profile, no problem.
Option to make a test call in the audio device settings.
Call quality seems nicer overall.

Bad
The previous version had a way more sensible audio device selection menu. It showed me the available devices as seen by OSS (ugh) and ALSA. This… well.. doesn’t make it clear offhand which is which, and a tangle of multiple listings makes it messy.
Make a test sound, while a nice idea, plays the sound out of my desktop audio device, regardless of the settings in Skype.
Stupid call status window. Previously you could close every Skype window and the call would still be on, since Skype was still running and you hadn’t ended it yet. Now, there’s this little status window which offers practically nothing and must remain open, leaving me with a pointless window. I’d have much preferred a call control context menu from the systray icon, or just the old method.
Call quality, while nicer overall, would get grainy periodically. Before the sound was like a POTS call over an old line, it was very steady.

Overall
I’m sure some of this will just take some fiddling, and was way worth it. The call window is my biggest gripe, since it’s just, in my opinion, a bad UI decision.