Impressions from skyrim

Mass Effect 3 - online HUD

Timer displays remaining time to reach mission goal or for shuttle extraction.

Mass Effect 3

Wohooo, Mass Effect 3 is finally here.

Mass Effect 2 in english

How to change the language settings of Mass Effect 2:

Edit "%CommonProgramFiles(x86)%\Steam\SteamApps\common\mass effect 2\data\sku.ini", set it to INT for English.

[SKU]
SKU=
VOLanguage=INT
TextLanguage=INT

Available languages:

• FR - French
• IT - Italian
• DE - German
• SP - Spanish
• INT – English

Ubisoft and their newest DRM at work

The new DRM scheme Ubisoft introduced in «Assassin’s Creed II», «Silent Hunter 5» and «Settlers 7» was not well received by many potential customers. All 3 games are offline games, but they will only work with a permanent online connection.

Savegames, for example, are backedup to ubi servers, but there seem to be permanent online checks going on to see if the game is «genuine». The game will pause if the online connection is lost (in an offline game, WTF). Many internet connections are quiet unreliable (since the introduction of the so called "Unlimmited" contracts).

Critics of this system have pointed out, that this will introduce a single point of failure. Ubisoft was quiet confident that their system is stable. Turns out it's not. Today the authentication servers went down. Ubisoft first reported they are working on the problem and now state (via twitter) that they are victims of a DDoS attack. Whatever is true seems to be irrelevant from the POV of a customer.

Ubisoft has put in quiet a lot of money to get this DRM stuff running (extra development, running distributed servers which are prone to a high load [peak times] and all the attacks which are run against any internet connected server) and it is only a matter of days now until the finished crack will be released. Circumventing the DRM might be legal in many (if not all) all European countries.

Punishing paying customers with this crap is not acceptable. Downloading a (so called) pirated copy is:

• more convenient (fire up bittorrent, download and play)
• no check if the CD is in the drive or if some servers are available
• cheaper

Buying such product involves:

• go to store (most people still buy a box)
• install
• find no-cd/no-drm crack
• install crack

Downloading illigally (although I do not recommend it) is just plain more convenient. I guess that the young ones will not have the money to buy the game anyway (probably the customers which would make up the highest volume in sales). So they eighter download or let it be. Guess what they do? The downloaded Version has the DRM already stripped. The publisher doesn't get the money anyway. So why punish the legit customer with this is beyond my understanding.

I, for one, have decided long ago not to play any of these games, although I would have bought all of them.

Civilization -- Freeciv as Browser Game (canvas / SVG)

Yay the joy, I have just discovered that Freeciv is now available as SVG / canvas game.

A browser game with reasonable performance (when using a modern browser) and this game is using open web standards.

From some tests ... FF 3.x on a fast computer is pretty laggy, but FF 3.5+ is very responsive. it feels like an X11 app over a not so fast connection. I am sure this will improve once the javascript implementations gain more performance and the canvas tag matures. After some webgames, this technology seems to be much more capable for games than html, css and javascript alone. Maybe a mix of canvas and html could bring some performance boost.

Freeciv.net seems to perform well on safari, chrome (et all), opera and firefox (< 3.5 recommended) but does not work well on IE8 (unusable, older IE versions are worse).

NOTE:
Chrome and Chromium users can use the --kiosk switch to start the browser in fullscreen mode (not well documented), example:
$ chromium --kiosk http://freeciv.net

Unfortunately on my gnome installation I cannot switch to other windows while chromium is running in fullscreen mode :-/

Installing WarZone 2100 v 2.2.3 on Jaunty

Description:
In Warzone 2100, you command the forces of "The Project" in a battle to rebuild the world after mankind has almost been destroyed by nuclear missiles. The game offers campaign, multi-player and single-player skirmish modes. An extensive tech tree with over 400 different technologies, combined with the unit design system, allows for a wide variety of possible units and tactics.

Needs to be compiled from source if you want the latest version. Here is a deb for Jaunty:
http://spliffy.freeshell.net/warzone2100_2.2.3-1_i386.deb

required libraries include (but probably not complete):
libsdl1.2debian-all,libopenal1,libcoin60,libpng12-0,libvorbis-ocaml,libvorbisenc2,libopts25,libphysfs-1.0-0,libsdl-net1.2,libwxgtk2.8-0,libfreetype6,libfontconfig1,gettext

Don't forget the high resolution addon "sequences.wz", it can be obtained from the download page.

$ sudo apt-get install flex bison libsdl1.2-dev libopenal-dev libpng12-dev libvorbis-dev libpopt-dev libphysfs-dev libsdl-net1.2-dev libwxgtk2.8-dev libfreetype6-dev libfontconfig1-dev gettext

Download and install OpenGLC from:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/quesoglc/QuesoGLC%20free/0.7.2/quesoglc-0.7.2-free.tar.bz2?use_mirror=surfnet

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr && make && make install

Then download warzone source at http://wz2100.net/download, unpack and enter the directory.

$ ./configure && make

$ sudo checkinstall

0 - Maintainer: [ root@localhost.localdomain ]
1 - Summary: [ In Warzone 2100, you command the forces of "The Project" in a battle to rebuild the world after mankind has almost been destroyed by nuclear missiles. The game offers campaign, multi-player and single-player skirmish modes. An extensive tech tree with over 400 different technologies, combined with the unit design system, allows for a wide variety of possible units and tactics. ]
2 - Name: [ warzone2100 ]
3 - Version: [ 2.2.3 ]
4 - Release: [ 1 ]
5 - License: [ GPL ]
6 - Group: [ checkinstall ]
7 - Architecture: [ i386 ]
8 - Source location: [ warzone2100-2.2.3 ]
9 - Alternate source location: [ http://wz2100.net/ ]
10 - Requires: [ ]
11 - Provides: [ warzone2100 ]

Ikariam, IkaTrader

i have written some greasemonkey scripts for ikariam.de. These help to get a better overview for trading: listing incoming ships, linsting all your ships (in-/outbound).

These scripts are written for firefox 2 utilizing the greasemonkey etxtension.

More about the features and downloads for IkaTrader.

Ikariam grease monkey scripts

Autologin grease monkey script for Ikariam:

// ==UserScript==
// @name           IkariamAutologin2
// @namespace      Ikariam
// @include        http://ikariam.de/
// ==/UserScript==

var SERVER = "s5.ikariam.de"; //Nur die Zahl verändern s1 = alpha, s2 = beta
var USERNAME = "username";        //Hier deinen Username eintragen
var PASSWORD = "password";    //Hier dein Passwort eintragen


document.getElementById("universe").value = SERVER;
document.getElementById("login").value = USERNAME;
document.getElementById("pwd").value = PASSWORD;

var url = "http://" + document.getElementById("universe").value + "/index.php?action=loginAvatar&function=login";
            
document.getElementById('loginForm').action = url;
document.getElementById("loginForm").submit();     

Metropolis - Open SimCity

SimCity was was released as opensource project with the code name Metropolis by Don Hopkins. There is not a lot of information available yet, i have skimmed the wiki so far.

Unfortunately, it does not work on Ubuntu Gutsy, this is what I get after installing the x86 build on my 32bit ubuntu install (i had to install yacc and libxpm-dev manually).

$ sudo apt-get install -y yacc libxpm-dev

I can only get to the main menu, it looks like this:



When I run the game the game starts but does not react to any user input:

spliffy@splatter:~/Desktop/micropolis-activity$ sh ./Micropolis -S
Starting Micropolis in /home/spliffy/Desktop/micropolis-activity ...
Welcome to X11 Multi Player Micropolis version 4.0 by Will Wright, Don Hopkins.
Copyright (C) 2002 by Electronic Arts, Maxis. All rights reserved.
sh: Syntax error: Bad fd number
sh: Syntax error: Bad fd number
Adding a player on :0.0 ...
Cool, I found the shared memory extension!

Micropolis has been terminated by a signal.
Pick a window -- you're leaving!


spliffy@splatter:~/Desktop/micropolis-activity$ sh ./Micropolis
Starting Micropolis in /home/spliffy/Desktop/micropolis-activity ...
Welcome to X11 Multi Player Micropolis version 4.0 by Will Wright, Don Hopkins.
Copyright (C) 2002 by Electronic Arts, Maxis. All rights reserved.
sh: Syntax error: Bad fd number
sh: Syntax error: Bad fd number
Adding a player on :0.0 ...
Cool, I found the shared memory extension!

Micropolis has been terminated by a signal.
Pick a window -- you're leaving!

Does someboy know how to fix this? i am really looking forward to play SimCity :)

Screenshot:

Silent Hunter 4 - Screenshots

Screenshot gallery

Silent Hunter 4 - Wolfes of the Pacific

Ok some more details about the game. Here is a list of pros/cons if you consider buying it:

Pros

• very realistic graphics - highly detailed graphics, even the crews of destroyers and battleships walk on the ships.
  
• crew management - you can assign crew members to vital positions or replace injured crew members.
• many playable ships - altough most of them "feel" the same (might be my lack of understanding/experience)
• interesting dynamic mission builder for online missions (will create random formations at random places in the pacific)
• navigation tools - on the map you have a pencil, a ruler and a circle which help marking spotted ship's paths. This could be done by the program but adds some more realism to the game.

Cons

• bad quality - patch 1.2 was released not so long ago and there are still many vital bugs which should be fixed. ubi has not yet made a statement if there wll be a patch 1.3
• missing online game lobby - it is possible to join online games trough the built in ubi lobby. The problem is that no chat is available nor a list of connected players. Usually there are zero servers waiting for players, thus many players think it does not work.
• The campaign is somewhat boring after some time. The missions are automaticly generated, however it happend to me that I had to play the same mission over and over again (maybe 30 times) then I quit the career.
  

Silent Hunter 4 » Saipan mission

Recently I have bought Silent Hunter 4, a submarine simulator for Windows XP. It is the 4th version of an old sequel (when I was a kid I used to play Silent hunter 1).

Graphics are pretty detailed, the game is nice to play. Unfortunately the game has no real game lobby (no chat and many players complain that they cannot host games).

Here some screenshots: