Final Post on Star Wars: The Old Republic (Probably)

I just checked the Winehq Appdb entry and it looks like people have been able to get it to work on vanilla wine.  Check out here and here.  I used Play on Linux all this time so I was stuck with 1.5.0 forever.  Hope it helps whoever wants to run the game on Linux.

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.

*UPDATE* Star Wars: The Old Republic Free to Play Emotes

UPDATE:
Well, as it turns out, clicking the upper left corner lists down the emotes you can do, which renders this list pretty much obsolete.

I figured it would be helpful to provide a list of the emotes that the game provides free players since it seems that when you try to type something, you get the "Restricted to Preferred and Subscribers" message.  The list of emotes was derived from this original list I found: Click Here.  It is unclear if it is an exhaustive list or not.  Either way, the list after the jump.

*UPDATE* Star Wars: The Old Republic - Free to Play - Script Helper

*UPDATE*
The script has been updated to handle multiple running SWTOR processes.  The launcher was updated to also run the server side process that runs the game (although it still freezes on the splash screen).  This update will get the appropriate SWTOR.EXE process' arguments and terminate the running copy.

I wrote a bash script that will help with those pesky arguments when getting the game to run on Wine.  Run the launcher, and click Play.  Then run the script and copy the arguments.  Paste it on Play on Linux and then enjoy the game.  The script is quick and dirty.  As usual, no explicit warranty.

Bash Script *version 2*

A Few Wine Thoughts...

I've been sinking my teeth on the Free to Play SWTOR for about a week now and the Wine workarounds are fairly reliable.  One word of advice is to avoid logging back into the game using Windows as you get stuck again with some insanely long loading times.  The game runs pretty fine, but the map and the mouse roll over on objectives are major cause for game freezes, so avoid using them as much as possible.  Also, I'm on the verge of quitting because the Sith Inquisitor quests have become next to impossible.  If this doesn't change anytime soon, I will purge this game and never look back.

I've also tried the following games on Wine and Steam: Mark of the Ninja, Just Cause, Velvet Assassin, and The Walking Dead.  They all work splendidly and without issues whatsoever.  Of the four, Just Cause is just plain crap.  Velvet Assassin is good, but insanely difficult even on the easiest difficulty setting.  Both Mark of the Ninja and The Walking Dead are crazy good and deserve some serious kudos.  I'd give all four games the platinum ranking!

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.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

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