Friday, March 30, 2012

Tomb Raider: Underworld Wii vs PC

I managed to finish the Tomb Raider: Underworld PC demo and it made for an interesting experience for someone who has played the Wii version.  Obviously the graphics on the PC version are way better.  The Lara model always looked cheap to me on the Wii version and the face in particular seems to have been altered quite a bit from the HD editions.  A few minor details were strangely omitted in the Wii edition like the Video Cam Overlay during the opening cutscene of the Thailand level.  

There's way more enemies in the HD version (Sharks!  haha) while the Wii version has almost none.  I always preferred Tomb Raider with less enemies as I enjoy the climbing and leaping more than the shooting.  The levels are actually comparable.  Similar, but not exactly the same.  I'm honestly more surprised at how close the Wii levels resemble the PC ones.  The Wii edition seems to have regenerating health which points to a game that is much, much more forgiving.  Lara also seems to have more moves and acrobatics than on the Wii version.  Interesting, but at the same time, largely useless when you have pistols.

Different games, yet very similar.  That's interesting.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Tomb Raider: Underworld and Wine: Update

Well, I've been fiddling with this for some time and have seemingly fixed some of the audio issues I have.  Nope, not by using pasuspender which did absolutely nothing for me.  I started trying to use padsp but strange enough the padsp/oss combination doesn't work.

First thing I did was remove audio from the equation to see how the game genuinely worked in my system.  The game stuttered quite a bit so I had to bring down the effects.  I think most of the slowdowns had to do with shadows but for documentation sake, I ran with a resolution of 1920 by 1080 with "Enable Fullscreen Effects" and "Enable Water Effects".  My texture detail was high and texture filtering was trilinear.

When I got the game reasonably running well (or tolerable), I began to fiddle once again with my user.reg.  Here is what I came up with.

[Software\\Wine\\DirectSound]
"DefaultBitsPerSample"="16"
"DefaultSampleRate"="44100"
"EmulDriver"="N"
"HardwareAcceleration"="Full"

[Software\\Wine\\Drivers]
"Audio"="alsa"

[Software\\Wine\\Drivers\\winealsa.drv]
"DefaultOutput"="{0.0.0.00000000}.{B55AC68F-A179-4DC1-BD39-199D8419B343}"
"DefaultVoiceOutput"="{0.0.0.00000000}.{B55AC68F-A179-4DC1-BD39-199D8419B343}"

The winealsa.drv registry settings points to my digital out from HDMI.  I suppose that makes some sense.

I then ran the game: WINEPREFIX="/homedir/.local/share/wineprefixes/tru" wine path\\to\\tru.exe

Truth be told, I don't know why padsp is needed here (or if it is really needed at all!).  I will likely try it without the padsp wrapper to see if setting the winealsa.drv devices is enough.

I played the game for a full hour and it seems to work fine.  I'll be sure to post back when I find out what caused the buffer underrun issues.

UPDATE:
As suspected, padsp is not needed.  I will amend the entry now.

Sims FreePlay

I've been playing Sims FreePlay for a while now on my Acer IconiaTab A500.  It's a nice decent game that isn't quite Sims-ish if such a word exists.  I think a lot of people are at arms with how it's real time and you have to literally wait 6 to 7 hours for your Sims to wake up from slumber.  Me?  I'm not that peeved, to be honest.  It seems that what I've done pretty much in the game is to give them really long tasks, sometimes tasks that take a day to complete.  Doing this seems to have several advantages.

First off, the game gives plenty of XP and money (provided that the task does let you earn) returns for completing tasks.  Second, while your sim is locked in his or her task, your Sims's needs do not go down. If you give him or her a 7 hour task and come back later, the needs (hunger, cleanliness, etc.) should still be relatively intact, which makes looking after them quite a breeze.  Just be the task master!

Another oddity I noticed is that to maintain your Sims's needs, you really should look into the following to bring it back up quickly.  For hunger, you need a refrigerator.  Using only a couple of seconds, you can satiate your Sims's hunger rather quickly.  For cleanliness, you should just use the sink which I find is the quickest way of bringing that statistic back up.  A shower is fine if it's really low though.  For sleep, use the couch for daydreaming.  A minute is all you need to satisfy that need.  For the social need, you can either interact with another Sim or use the phone.  For entertainment needs, just about anything your Sim interacts with should be fine.  I usually go with baking or gardening since that gives money.  Lastly, we all know what the toilet bowl is there for.

If you're the kind not to care about the goals, you'll be fine with the game and the daily grind you put your Sims into.  It's when you start wanting to 'advance' so-to-speak where the freemium aspects of the game can get grating as you feel the need to spend real money on Lifetime Points.  Me?  I'm not one to care.

Oh, and invest in a dog.  Really.

Wine and pasuspender?

I am about fed up with PulseAudio in Ubuntu.  Since day 1, my problems with it just won't end and this is the closest I've gotten to embarking into ripping it out and going back to plain old Alsa.  This has been a real utter pain in the neck so far but I've been reading on pasuspender as some means to get audio working.


I hate PulseAudio.  I hate it with a passion.  Unfortunately, I picked Ubuntu when I should have gone Xubuntu.  Now, I hope this can solve some of the woes I'm having with wine and Tomb Raider (as well as other Wine related software).

Tomb Raider Underworld and Wine

Well, I gave the demo for a spin because I did enjoy the game series on the Wii. It does look like Wine can handle the game properly, but the sound is incredibly choppy and it bogs everything down. I suspect this has something to do with the blast pulseaudio that is really giving me quite a headache. Maybe it is time to rip it out and install alsa!

Monday, March 5, 2012

The Reversion Movie: "The End is only The Beginning..."

The Reversion Movie: "The End is only The Beginning...": Welcome to the official blog page for our animated short film, REVERSION. REVERSION is the first 11-minute animated film for hobbyi...

Friday, March 2, 2012

So the key repeat workaround didn't actually work...

After testing out Colin McRae 2005 with the key repeat turned off, I realized it doesn't actually stop the issue from happening. The good news here is that apparently, I can just slap on my USB gamepad and the game picked it up just fine. Wine has come a long way now. Good stuff!