Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning demo revisited

I had only one purpose for revisiting the demo and that was to get the Chakram Launcher for Mass Effect 3.  I went about downloading the demo but the game refused to log me into Origin.  Fortunately, I found a fix here.  Go to Documents then My Games then Reckoning and look for the personal.ini file.  Edit the file and remove blaze_email=your@email.com.  Then restart the game.  It should all be fine.

To get the Chakram Launcher, play the demo and until you speak with the fateweaver in the overworld.  The demo will tell you that you have a 45 minute window to play the game.  Finish that 45 minutes and you'll receive the DLC.

Mass Effect 3, Origin Cloud and Wine

So, I had installed Mass Effect 3 on my Windows Vista laptop and also on my Wine Linux box and I decided to use Origin cloud to sync up everything so I could play on the go on the laptop and at the Linux box when I'm around.  On Vista, it picked up my Mass Effect 3 saves from Wine, no problem.  Apparently, I had issues when I was syncing my saves back to the Wine box.  At first, I simply chalked it up to Wine's own deficiencies and moved on.  When I went around to copying my saves from the Vista laptop to my Wine box however, I noticed that all the files touched by Origin's cloud save on Wine had 000 file permissions.  I also checked that the files were of the same size as the Vista files I copied.

I infer that this means the cloud sync actually worked but only the file permissions were goofed up.  Next time, I will try to simply chmod this.  As an additional side note, cloud syncing on Wine only works when launching Mass Effect 3 since Origin in Wine cannot detect when the game is finished running to sync back the progress.  The only way around this is to exit Origin, then restart again.

Mass Effect 3: Multiplayer Error

I had one nasty instance where when I loaded the multiplayer on Mass Effect 3 PC version, the game froze when switching character classes.  After I forcibly killed the process and restarted the game, everytime I went to multiplayer, the game would load forever.  I tried to repair the install but that didn't work.

The only fix that I could do was pull out my backup install from an external hard disk and replace the installed copy with that backup.  I was then able to fire up the game and play multiplayer.  Note that the game did crash once after this replacement when selecting multiplayer.  Restarting the game went into multiplayer just fine though.

Wine-ing About Everything

So, the past few weeks of using Wine was interesting to say the least.  I had not realized how big this post was going to be until it was all done, so I'm putting this all after the jump!

Origin on Wine and the Preparing Download

Well, I've gotten stuck on Wine and Origin's Preparing Download and had forgotten to patch Qt5Network.dll that had been overwritten by several Origin updates.  I'm fortunate that the patch is still in my Origin install folder so I backed up the new dll and re-ran the patch to fix it.  Details on this issue are on this Wine Bug thread.

Mass Effect 1 was pretty good and I finished it entirely in Wine/Linux.  Awesome!

Mass Effect 2 and sudden poor frame rate

My friend was going through Mass Effect trilogy and suffered sudden drops of frame rate in Mass Effect 2 mid-game and we were going through possible workarounds to solve her problems.  After all the tests, it turns out it was as simple as disabling the Origin overlay.  Damn crazy!

Starting EA Origin in Offline Mode

From this forum thread, the parameter is "Origin.exe /StartOffline".

Using Origin on Wine is BAD NEWS... maybe not?

It seems that most of the issues with this are due to the fiber optic line that broke causing internet issues and DLC authorization errors.  Make sure that all Origin executables on Windows is in your antivirus/firewall exception list.

I'll keep this brief. Over the past days, I had issues with Origin when playing Mass Effect 3 online where connectivity is just shot. I would get errors where Origin would complain not having internet connection.  Mass Effect 3 wouldn't go online either which caused DLC authorization errors.

As it turns out, I started logging into Origin using my Wine install and I noticed doing this would create connection issues on Origin. Once it all got sorted on Windows, using it was fine. So, I deleted Origin on my Wine install. Never again.

Playing Sims 3 on Origin Offline

I'll keep this brief.  I lost my internet connectivity all morning and thought it was a good time to test Origin and Sims 3.  All that I've seen online suggests that Sims 3 will only work online due to Origin's insistence of logging in when running the game.  So when I ran Origin, it gave me a login window and a note that Origin was not available (due to the internet).  I logged in anyway, and then Origin went to my library but also setting the client to Offline mode.  I was able to launch Sims 3 and Mass Effect 2 like this without issues.

A small note on Mass Effect... you will not be able to connect to the Cerberus Network.  You will get an error message but you'll be able to load your save just fine.

F You EA...

Once upon a time, I chuckled over the news that Electronic Arts was named 'Worst Company' by Consumerist Readers for a second year in a row. Over blown? At the time, I would think so, yes. My first hand experience leads me to believe that there's more truth to this than I originally expected.

This all started with me downloading Mass Effect 2 on Origin Games. The game started without much issues but when I attempted to register the product code to BioWare's social community website, the code was rejected. Not much of a big deal, but I figured I could slip in a ticket to see if EA could lend some assistance while I plow through the game. Looking back, I probably should never have.

EA did come back with a response and after a few back and forth response and some verification questions answered, they supplied me with a new product code that BioWare's site happily accepted. What I did not realize was that they had added another copy of Mass Effect 2 in my Origin account. What's the big deal? Lots.

This new copy was wrecking havoc with the license activation in my laptop. When I launch the game, I am greeted with this "Invalid License Reason Code = Invalid Cipher (0x0006)". Well, isn't that nice?

I scoured the web for solutions. I also reopened my ticket with EA pertaining to this issue and the only thing they did was delete the ticket. Yes. Delete. Gone. Needless to say, I was infuriated by their actions and submitted another ticket. That one did not fare any better as EA just decided to close the ticket with an empty promise of coming back to me with 'expert' assistance.

I've found out that EA holds its license files at C:\ProgramData\Electronic Arts\EA Services\License\*.dlf.  I've tried deleting the dlf file and repairing install but to no avail.  I also went through the trouble of redownloading the game which failed to make any difference.  Finally, I had a eureka moment when I realized I was doing all this hullabaloo with the new and faulty Mass Effect 2 copy.

I shut down Origin.  I deleted the dlf file.  Turned Origin back on and then used the old Mass Effect 2 game and repaired the install.  It threw a couple of errors a couple of times before finally working.  The game downloaded an additional 60 MB of which I have no idea what they are.  Then, the game started.

No thanks, EA.  Your help site is convoluted and crappy.  Your assistance broke more than fixed things.  I... FIXED my problem.

EA Origin Store Client on Wine

I have had some issues with Origin beginning last year where the client would just crash and crash.  No matter what version of Wine I used, it wouldn't run at all.  I moved through different Ubuntu distro versions and still no luck.  The crash point is C:\Program Files\Origin\Origin.exe: double free or corruption (!prev) and it seems to happen sporadically. After poking through the wine bug entries here and here, I figured out how to get the client to run reliably.

Since I installed my Origin client on a 32-bit Wine prefix, the commandline you'll see here is specifically for that.

WINEPREFIX="/path/to/wineprefix/of/origin" WINEARCH=win32 taskset -c 0 Origin.exe

Try it and see if it works!

Sims 3 Teaser with Wine Direct Sound Test

I did a quick test to see if the scratchy audio in Sims 3 Teaser would disappear by forcing the default sample rate and default bits I used in Mass Effect 2 and that didn't work.

Sims 3 Teaser Update!

I'm going to keep this very brief. I've basically updated to 1.3.29 and boy it really eliminated most of the graphical glitches on the game. It basically runs very well although it still gets some minor culling problems. Works very well!

The Sims 3 Teaser on Wine

When EA unveiled a Sims 3 demo that could run on your browser through the Gaikai service, I thought it was a great way to provide cross-platform Sims gaming. After all, the Sims Social facebook game was utter piece of crap. I figured I'd give this game a go to see how everything worked, but as it turns out Gaikai deemed my area too far from their data centers. I guess that was it as far as running it from a browser went. Time for plan B on playing Sims 3.

I checked out EA's online store Origin and discovered there that if you have Origin setup on your computer (please guys, read the Terms and Conditions for some nasty I surrender my PC to EA banter), you can add the game to your account and download the actual teaser. Sweet.

I did try to install Origin on Wine (version 1.3.11) but everytime I tried to log in, Origin would say 'Login Failed'. That did not work the way I had hoped for sure. The only sure fire way to get Origin to work was install it on my throwaway XP box and I managed to get the 2.5 GB download there. It was time to plan on how to transfer the game into Wine, so I started poking through the innards to figure out how it could be done.

Basically, the idea is to fool the game into thinking that it is installed with all the proper registry entries slipped in. To perform this surgical operation, I exported several registry entries out of my XP box. Look at "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software" and grab the following keys:

• EA Play
• Electronic Arts
• Origin Games
• Origin

As far as I could tell, the rest are either miscellaneous or not related at all. Truth be told, I wasn't entirely sure that the registry entries are necessary, but I used them anyway. Aside from the registry entries, I also snagged these folders off my XP box and dropped them into my Wine virtual drive.

• C:\Program Files\Origin Games\The Sims 3 Teaser
• C:\Program Files\Common Files\EAInstaller

After putting these into the proper install paths, I tried to run the game on a 1024x768 virtual desktop and although the game didn't immediately complain about install corruption, it was complaining about msvcrt80. To fix this, I ran 'winetricks vcrun2005' to make wine install the proper libraries. I imagine that installing 'vcrun2005sp1' would be a better idea though.

The end result is that the game did run, albeit not perfectly. There's very apparent problems with the Z-buffering rendering causing the game to cull incorrectly. Several objects were de-rendered incorrectly causing Sims to turn temporarily invisible. Tweaking the OffScreenRenderingMode on Wine Direct3D settings to FBO did not help either. On the Wine console debug printing, I see plenty of Stencil Buffer errors and fixmes so this is definitely a Wine deficiency.

The next step I plan to do is to update my Wine libraries to 1.3.29 and hope for the best. I will post back results as soon as I have them.