Random thoughts...

Dug up a bit of the fglrx woes with my laptop and I figured that this was caused partially by bad code on AMD's part (what else is new?) and the regressions on the intel driver.  Truth be told, I don't know whether my laptop uses the hybrid method of Intel HD and Radeon 7670m but that seems to be the case judging by the Xorg logs.

I saw on the logs "screen 1 deleted because of no matching config section" and seemed to ramble on about some intel stuff that I was not aware of.  This launchpad bug seemed to corroborate with the evidence thus far.  From what I gather, fglrx is 12.9 which doesn't seem to support the Xorg version that my Ubuntu install came with.  

At the end of it, it really comes down to simply being happy with the open source radeon drivers.  I know never to trust AMD cards on Linux.  This just proves me right once more.

Moving on, a few days ago I quit Star Wars: The Old Republic.  The grindy gameplay and the overly negative community accelerated my exit.  Part of me felt like I wasted the months of play away.  Part of me felt sad to leave the splendid story unfinished.  When I moved to Walking Dead however, all that evaporated.  Walking Dead was a refreshing change to that game and provided me with what I thought was a great representation of modern point and click adventures.  Telltale has finally redeemed themselves after the utterly boring Monkey Island games and the insulting Back to the Future game.  Good job, guys!

A few thoughts...

My DSi XL suddenly refused to connect to my WiFi even though it works on all my devices including my old banged up DS (circa 2004).  After a short check with Nintendo's site, they recommended a Quick Power Cycle (QPC) of the router.  I unplugged my DSL modem (disconnected while playing SWTOR!!!) and my router (for 30 seconds) and hooked everything back.  My DSi XL connected once again fine.

Been slowly pushing my graphics detail on SWTOR while still playing on Wine and am noticing a few things.  Unlike Witcher 2 where I played on horribly low resolutions, I couldn't take 800x600 on SWTOR.  Adding Bloom and High Shader Complexity slowed the game down too much, but setting the Shader Complexity to low gave the game a nice layer of polish while not compromising too much in terms of performance.  Still managed to play the game at 1024x768 on Wine.  So, nice!

Star Wars: The Old Republic and Wine Update

From last night's update, it seems that SWTOR has been improved to a point where the game actually starts from the launcher window.  I am unsure as to whether or not it's a fluke, but when it did, I got the Star Wars splash screen but the game did freeze after that.  I then went ahead and used the same workaround to get the game running, but I will perhaps improve the script to make sure it's getting the right hash, if it turns out the launcher just doesn't work at all even with this new progress.

Star Wars - The Old Republic Free to Play on Wine

Time and time again, I've tried to get this blast game to run on Wine.  As fate would have it, no such dumb luck for me.  I knew it was only a matter of time before the game hit the free to play model, and it happened.  So after some more fighting and tussling, I finally got the game to work.

This is also my first time using PlayOnLinux and it's a splendid tool that makes maintenance of my Wine builds easy.  What you need to do to get the game to work is run the script after downloading the exe installer from the main website.  This should pretty much run without issue.

If you run the launcher afterwards, all you'll get is a black screen.  You can set your Wine virtual desktop to 1000x600 to get the launcher to appear.  The game won't run afterwards, so I had to poke around a guide.  This one from the SWTOR website was extremely helpful.

Essentially, you'll need to get the password hash and other parameters of swtor.exe that the launcher runs and create your own shortcut that runs the exe directly.  My guess is that the long winded paths are messing up the game if executed by the launcher.

Performance seems OK, but it's only the starting planet.  Hope this little entry helps.