Heroes of Newerth trial

Heroes of Newerth has just opened up their latest trial to everybody to join in on the fun. Apparently it only allows 10 matches to play but I cannot confirm that yet. For those that do not know, HoN is heavily based on the Warcraft III scenario Defense of the Ancients. What this means for us Linux gamers is that it brings a very competitive real time strategy game to our lovely platform of choice. With graphics as amazing as this and game play as fun as it is you really can't go wrong. Give it a whirl at Heroes of Newerth Trial Sign Up.

Source: Linux Gaming News

Lord of the Rings Online - Free to play!

So today is the big day, unfortunately yesterday was barely a day to me but today is great! Remember my post a few days ago at this point? Yeah it came true at long last. As the title says, Lord of the Rings Online has finally gone free to play.

What this means for us Linux folks is that we now have an MMORPG that doesn't stink on ice free and usable in Wine quite nicely. I'll give you folks a quick run down of how to get it working properly.

First off you will need to make sure you have glx support on your system. Open up a terminal and type "glxinfo | grep rendering" press enter. You should be seeing "direct rendering: Yes" if you see nothing or a No instead you need to install the proper GLX drivers. Look to the upper right hand portion of this blog for the drivers if you're using an nvidia card or AMD/ATI card. Installing those should set you up with direct rendering no problem.

Secondly, get yourself a bottle of Wine. This involves going to WineHQ and going to the download section and following their instructions on getting Wine for whichever distribution you are using. I'd offer screenshots of what you need to do, but the download page at the WineHQ site does quite sufficiently for that.

Thirdly you'll want to trick out Wine with Winetricks. Open up another terminal screen and go to a folder you use for downloading various programs (I like ~/Downloads personally) and type the following into the prompt:

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks 

This will download Winetricks to the directory you're currently inside of in the terminal. The download shouldn't take long and once it's complete you need to install a couple of tricks for your install of Wine. Installing these tricks is as simple as typing :

sh winetricks vcrun2005 vcrun2005sp1 d3dx9 d3dx10

What this command will do for you is install the Visual C++ 2005 libraries, DirectX 9 and the DirectX 10  libraries. This enables you to play games with DirectX 9 and 10 graphics which Lord of the Rings Online is a game that uses DirectX 9 at minimum.

After you get the tricks downloaded and it sets them up its time to install Lord of the Rings Online. If you happen to have the DVD's on hand then you are lucky enough to be able to do this with Wine. If however you need to use the download launcher from turbine this part requires an install of Windows. If you don't have the install DVD's go ahead and head to Lotro Download and select which version you want to install on Windows. What you'll need to do is download the whole thing on your Windows machine/install and copy the folder over to your Linux box once its done. If you dual boot Linux and Windows this is easily handled because you can just direct the launcher to the install directory on your Windows partition.

UPDATE: I just found a site that provides a link to the full client for Lord of the Rings Online which can be installed from within Linux. Head on over to LotRO: SoA & MoM client and download the file, its approx 9.2 GB but it should get you going rather than using a Windows install. Thanks go out to ajackson on the Ubuntu Forums and his work on PyLotro. This download will need to be patched significantly once downloaded.

While Lord of the Rings Online is downloading you'll want to do yourself a favor and create an account.  This should be able to be done from within the launcher itself. If not please respond and I'll find the proper solution for you. 

So now you've installed Wine, Winetricks, Lord of the Rings Online and you've created an account. You are almost done w/ this crazy guide wrote by a mad man. The last step left to getting Lord of the Rings Online working on your Linux box is to install a working launcher for Linux called PyLotro. Head to Lotro Linux and go to the download page there. Once there follow the instructions based on your distribution, if you are on a Debian based install it gives a pretty good amount of detail. If you are not on Debian you may have to get the source and compile it but being the lazy gamer I am, I would recommend you get the standalone version. This is a .exe file which is a Windows file so it works from within Wine. I had to use this for a while because of a weird problem on my system installing the PyLotro launcher from the repositories. 

Once PyLotro is installed you'll need to set it up to read your install directory for Lord of the Rings Online and doing that is quite simple. Select "Tools > Settings Wizard" from the menu up top. This will let you find the install of Lord of the Rings Online automatically, however I'm not sure it'll work if you installed it within Windows.  Go ahead and select Wine and Lord of the Rings Online like below and then press Find Games. If it found your install, select the install and press Apply then follow along below.

If this works for you, great it made the next step easier. If this did not work for you, you'll need to enter some information manually in the next screen. Close that screen and select "Tools > Options" which will open up another window. From within this options window there are a few things to enter. Here's what mine looks like.

In the WINEDEBUG section enter "fixmeWINEPREFIX section enter your Wine install directory. Typically the Wine install by default is "/home/user-name/.wine" for example my name is James so it shows "/home/james/.wine". The next section is the most important, if your install was detected in the previous window it should be filled out already for you. If its not filled out or is filled out improperly you'll want to select the "..." button and navigate through your drive to the install directory. Once you find the install directory press Open. The Hi-Res Graphics section is based on which version of the installer you selected earlier, if you selected Standard select "Disabled" otherwise select "Enabled".  Press Save and you'll be back at the main PyLotro screen.

One last step I forgot to mention is to go to "Tools > Patch" in PyLotro  on the new window press Start and let it do what it wants. The patch process will most likely take a while unless you already did this at some point in the past either on a Windows install or a previous Linux install. 

That's it for setting the game up. Now all you need to do is select your realm and then enter your account name and password you made earlier. Press Login and you should be in the game. It might crash on the initial loading because it is creating the config files necessary for it don't be alarmed. If it does crash just open PyLotro again and give it a whirl. Hopefully all goes off without a hitch.

Good Luck and I hope you enjoy.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is released!

At merely $20 USD who can ask for more? This game is looking fantastic and I can't wait to try it.  Here is an excerpt about the game:

"Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a first person horror game with a focus on immersion. It is a game where atmosphere and story comes first. We hope that the game will be a breeze of fresh air, in a genre otherwise populated by "one-man-army action hero" sagas. In Amnesia you are almost completely defenseless, something we believe not only makes the game a lot scarier, but also gives a vastly different experience."

Multi platform game developers have come a long way and are definitely helping us along in this everlasting battle for quality games with tux by our sides.

Source: http://www.amnesiagame.com/

Warsow

The ever so popular standalone first person shooter recently had some fresh screenshots of its upcoming version .5. Warsow is a game based on the QFusion engine, which is an engine based off of Quake II. What does that mean? A fantastic first person shooter experience thats totally free, our favorite price tag.

To see more, please visit their ModDB site and read up on it.

ModDB: ModDB - Warsow
Source: Planet Quake

On your right you will see...

Current Drivers. I'm sure some of you were wondering where my current drivers gadget was at, but I didn't forget. So there it is, I'm going to try to keep it updated and all that. Good luck, and get your game on in Linux!

Angry Birds Android

Not our typical desktop game here, however Android is my current favorite smart phone OS and so you have this.

Angry Birds has finally came out for the smart phone of choice for myself and many others. It's currently in beta form but it is still very playable and very fun no less.



One of my favorite people in the world currently, Kevin Rose creator of Digg, absolutely loves the game and i couldn't agree more. This is a fun game to kill time on the go and even when at home.

Get the beta of the Lite version on the android market.

Engadget App Review: Engadget - Angry Birds Review

Friendly reminder.

Update your drivers! Specifically speaking your video card drivers. I like I'm sure others out there have often times found ourselves with outdated video card drivers and wish we knew new versions were out and about. So here's what I'm going to do for us.

The Nvidia team recently released 256.53 for Linux, of course I only discovered this yesterday. When it was released? Aug 31st. I'm not perfect, but with my imperfection comes help for you. I will be adding a thing on my blog to link to newest drivers for both Nvidia and ATI (AMD will be taking the place on the next iteration of cards if I understand things properly)

The ATI/AMD team released version 10.8 for Linux most recently. Created on Aug 25th it is still quite new. I personally don't use ATI/AMD products at least not in a Linux environment so please tell me if there is other drivers out there that out perform the Catalyst drivers so I can look into posting those as well.

Hope this helps.

NVIDIA: 256.53 x86 , 256.53 x86_64
ATI: ATI Catalyst 10.8 x86 + x86_64