Sims 3 Wii - Fire Hazard Glitch

This is a note on the fire hazard glitch when playing Sims 3 Wii Edition. If you buy the house and lot of the villa at the corner right area of the map, the game automatically jacks up the fire hazard up to half and there is no real way of bringing it down, even if you sell every little damn thing. The game will eventually put the fire hazard meter to maximum after a few seconds and all the pieces of furniture will put the meter over. The next item you attempt to buy will result in an error message that tells you that you've broken multiple fire codes and triggers a fire outbreak.

If you buy a blank lot and attempt to pick the luxurious house art styles, you will get the glitch as well. I'm not sure which ones but the Adobe Estate and Desert Retreat styles definitely exhibit this problem. The Trailer Home style doesn't trigger this glitch. I have attempted to buy furnished versions of Deco Elegance and Habitable Lighthouse and haven't gotten problems.

False alarm!

For some reason, I decided to reboot the computer to see what would happen. The scratchy audio went away. Phew!

Wine Pulse Audio Regression

This is an awful regression. Wine now has very horrible scratchy sound and it's very annoying. This could not have come at a worse time with the Star Wars beta.

Backports done!

I left the building overnight as Firefox8 didn't seem very fast to build. When I did install it, I managed to get through a few quirks in the install. It's some dependency on installed packages that were about to be overwritten anyway, so I added packages to install until dpkg didn't complain anymore. Here are the ones I added:

• firefox
• firefox-3.5
• firefox-3.5-branding
• firefox-3.5-gnome-support
• firefox-gnome-support
• firefox-branding

Firefox 8 is running here on Karmic. I went ahead and updated firebug as well. This is sweet!

1 down, 1 to go...

Thankfully, yasm-1 was not a pain to backport. I checked the versions and it was fine. Building only took a minute or so and now Firefox8 is building. We'll see how that goes.

Ack! More backporting!

Man, one website that I use for work has decided to block me from using it because my browsers are too old. Google Chrome doesn't seem to support Ubuntu 9.10 and Firefox is just too old. I'm not a fan of downloading Firefox from the website if I can get the deb packages to work. I think you know where this is heading.

Yes, I decided to yank Firefox8 from the launchpad ppa and do my own backporting to Karmic. You can get the packages I used here. I did the usual to prep up my build machine and I also double checked the control files just to make sure nothing was wrong. I thought the versions of the libraries was fine and hoped this would be a painless exercise, but that wasn't to be.

Building the deb package, I realized that apt-get build-dep for Karmic missed out the following.

• libcurl4-openssl-dev
• xvfb
• imagemagick
• yasm-1 (>= 1.1)

The three of them I could install just fine, but I found yasm-1 to be an oddity as I'm pretty sure yasm packages were built without the -1 suffix. I decided to take the risk and build it too hoping it's not too much of a big deal. We'll see how that goes.

Wine backport 1.3.33 Notes

I did a backport using the oneirc package that is available on Launchpad here's a few things I noticed:

1. ttf-symbol-replacement-wine1.3 has been removed.
2. wine package doesn't seem to be requiring gcc4.
3. removed oss4-dev (just like the last time).
4. changed debhelper version from 7 to 5.

Seems to be working well. Will be doing more tests.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Hmm... beta testing, eh? Interesting times. :)

Even better solution - ICONV!

Well, that was fast. I figured a better way of dealing with this. Codepage 936 is Simplified Chinese and BIG5 is the traditional one.

iconv -f cp936 -t utf-8 chsimplified.srt >& simplified.srt

iconv -f cn-big5 -t utf-8 chtraditional.srt >& traditional.srt

These will convert the codepage subtitles to utf-8 which is something Ubuntu (and mplayer) can figure out much better. Now to back up these subs!

Subtitles Mayhem - Finally Solved!

God damn it! This has taken a long time to figure out! I was trying to get Chinese subtitles to work on mplayer and everytime I tried it, I get crazy garbage text. After installing truck load of language packs on Ubuntu, I am not successful. One guy suggested loading up specific a codepage for the subtitles but I had no clue what the encoding was for my srt subtitles.

After taking a couple of months break from it, I decided to start looking again and this time, I lucked out. Someone suggested to use smplayer instead for the subtitles and it only took a few clicks on the preferences to make it work. I changed the fonts on the preferences to use Code Page 936 Simplified Chinese for the subtitles. Voila! Subtitles are appearing there!

Unfortunately, I tried to use it on mplayer, I still get garbage text. Whatever. As long as I can read the subtitles, I'm fine.

DCUO Update

Okay, this game is completely unplayable by the mere fact that it keeps crashing outside of Gotham Police Station. Well, if anything, I can at least send some messages to my buddy there.

DC Universe Online

I'll keep this very brief. DCUO has just gone Free to Play and seeing as one of my buddies is so addicted into this game he doesn't even go online on chat anymore. I tried my hand and saw if the game worked on Wine.

Basically, the winehq entry says it works and I simply followed the instructions to install ie8, xact and vcrun2005 using winetricks. The installer is freely available on DCUO's website and it only installs a launchpad program that will grab the actual game. For the most part, the installer installs all other prerequisites like flash. When the installer runs, it fails in Wine dropping into the debugger, but this didn't stop the installer from proceeding. I guess no harm done.

I had a problem with the launchpad program because it wouldn't get me the actual login. The forums discussion on it helps a lot as it told me to edit the Launchpad-user.ini to add the 'curtain=disable' setting.

One 14.1 GB download later, the game is up and running. The mouse implementation is pretty bad, but otherwise, it runs fine. I'm not sure if it's a Wine issue or a game issue, but be warned when playing.

Anyway, it seems like a generic MMO with lots of killing. *Yawn*