LA Noire - Poor Performance and Possible Solution

I had suffered through more than half of the game with such appalling performance on LA Noire on my aging Vista laptop.  I'm not one to complain so I chucked it off as just less than low performance.  It's almost like my Witcher 2 days coming back to haunt me.  On one particular case, the frame rate woes were really starting to get grating so I just had to dig up information on this.

All my graphical settings were set to low and I was playing on an 800x600 window and it was still stuttering.  The only option I didn't touch was 'Threading' which I left at Multi.  It seems like my research has lead me to believe that the game has issues with the threading on specific hardware (e.g. dual core processors) so I took a leap of faith.

Changing the Threading to Single was the kind of performance change I needed.  The improvements were dramatic and the game was playing fairly smoothly now.  I feel like a fool for even tolerating such poor performance.  Now it's time once again to find where the performance threshold is on my Intel Core 2 Duo laptop.  I hope this helps others who are suffering from performance woes.

Random Thoughts: 39 Steps and Rhythmbox

I've been playing a lot of Story Mechanics' 39 Steps which is a digital adaptation of the book of the same name (I presume).  Ever since I played Sega's 428, I've always thought that that presentation nails what a story adventure could be.  Story Mechanics takes the presentation style almost exactly the way I would have hoped.  I don't like so much the pixel hunting that happens in a few of the sections, but generally, this is bang on.  Good job on the game as I'm enjoying a lot of the experience.

Also downloaded their soundtrack for free but, it's a bit strange as the formats aiff and wav seem to play tricks on Rhythmbox.  Rhythmbox would not allow me to set the album details, and I had mistakenly set the album art for all "Unknown" works.  Bah.  I went to look at ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml to see if I could figure it out but there were no details on the album art.  

Turns out the album art is stored in a trivial database format in ~/.cache/rhythmbox/album-art/ and I just used the file timestamp to find the latest one and erased the file.  Album art gone and then I used audacity to re-convert the music files into mp3.  Love the soundtrack chaps!  Love the game too!

Brütal...

These past few days, I've been playing more and more of Brütal Legend and while I have enjoyed the action bits immensely, I am starting to see more and more flaws on this game.  When the game focuses on Eddie alone, things are fine.  When I got those idiot hair bangers, things get a bit more management heavy and overbearing with the constant use of guitar solos and troop management while being there in the battlefield with them.  After some failures, I got a bit of experience and pressed on.  Then... stage battles.

Boy, these blasted stage battles.  Now, instead of being an action game, I have resource management, commanding hordes of idiots, use the guitar solos and then figure out which of those fan geysers to get.  I absolutely did not enjoy them.  I thought they were a chore.  Guess what?  I play to have fun.  When it becomes an absolute drudgery to play?  I quit.  That Tim Schafer has to write an open letter to explain how this game is supposed to be played just underscores how out of place it is in this game.

Shame because the soundtrack is awesome.  The writing is silly and awesome as well.  I cannot tolerate the stage battles.  I just can't.  Uninstalled.

Public Service Announcement: Do not upgrade FGLRX to 13.9 STABLE

I've been on the fence on upgrading to 13.9 after reading that it's possibly based on an older driver.  Right now, there seems to be a clear sign that that is indeed the case.  Hang on till October, 2013 for the new driver release.  I hope they actually FIX the dual screen issues though managing code for 2 different graphics manufacturers (muxless hybrids) is quite a tall order.

Brütal Legend and Steam

So, after going through some really disappointing Indie games, I get to Brütal Legend which was a great surprise.  It works on Linux and it plays really well.  I had minor problems figuring out the controller support but this Steam thread should be helpful.  First thing is first though, you should configure the gamepad on Big Picture.  The shell script needs some Linux reworking to get rid of the dos \r stuff, but once you've cleaned it up, it will grab the SDL configuration for you.  The script is modified for Costume Quest (which funnily enough is modified from The Cave), but it's easy to change the paths for your install of Brütal Legend.

Good luck and save that SDL config file!

Random Thoughts: Dragon Age, LA Noire, and more...

Another edition of the Random Thoughts for me and it kicks off with Dragon Age: Origins.  I've finally gone through all the extra content the game had to offer.  I had played through Awakening, Golem of Amgarrak, Witch Hunt as the last pieces of unfinished business on that game.  So, here I am to ramble a bit.

Blasted Dragon Age Bugs!

My experience with Dragon Age Awakening sure is deteriorating.  First off, I got slammed by a damn bug that prevented Sigrun from taking the joining.  After reading wiki pages about the quest, I had to repeat the last part just so I could trigger another bug that would get her to do the joining before the conversation ever comes up to convince her to join the Grey Wardens.  After that, I thought it was going to be smooth sailing, but then, here comes another one!  Mischa is inexplicably missing in Amaranthine!  Damn it!  Damn it!  Damn it!

Random Thoughts: Google Hangouts and Dragon Age

Google forced the switch, abandoning Google talk in favour of this new Google Hangouts.  All I can say is that this app absolutely blows.  Suddenly, my chat list is populated by:

1. Acquaintances I don't chat with;
2. Mailing list e-mail addresses;
3. People I've only reached out via e-mail once or twice.

To make matters worse, the only way to fiddle the list is to go to another Google service and basically delete people you don't want to chat with.  The UI to get to the contact I want to chat with is also incredibly cumbersome.  Google?  This software is a piece of shit.  That is all.  Moving on.

Rune crafting sucks.  Don't like crafting.  Never did in any RPG.  To see that Dragon Age: Awakening doesn't have any vendors that sell armour runes better than novice ones suck.  Abso-freaking-lutely sucks.

While I'm at the 'This thing sucks' mode, I would like to say I never liked Dragon Age: Origins' cute puzzle to get the Sacred Ashes.  Awakening has a few optional ones, and I don't like any of them.  Still, BioWare did a heck of a game series and I'm still looking forward to Dragon Age 2 (despite the complaints of everyone who has played it).

Downgrading from 13.04 to 12.10?

Generally, 13.04 is fine for my nVIDIA desktop, but on my HP laptop, I'm very unhappy with it.  The lack of a dual head setup is seriously killing me (Thank you, AMD...) and after the recent updates, my touchpad click button is now playing tricks on me.  What do I do?  Do I downgrade to 12.10?  Will the next Ubuntu release fix all of these issues?  Hmmm...

I intentionally upgraded my PC first and give 13.04 a week on that machine to make sure everything was spiffy.  This grace period was for me to decide whether or not to upgrade my work laptop.  I see now that I should probably not be upgrade happy with my work laptop but that will mean I will get stuck with the same problem I had before, which is getting stuck on old releases forever.

It's been a rough week...

TCL and the Blasted Dates!

So, I've had a programming task to do on TCL that involves things that I don't normally use.  This one was basically to take the first Sunday of a specific Month and Year.  After some time of researching and testing, I figured it out.  This entry is just for archival purposes.

% clock format [clock scan {Sunday} -base [clock scan "2013-05-01" -format {%Y-%m-%d}] -format {%A}] -format {%Y-%m-%d}

Base sets the base time for clock and the format for the return can be tweaked to whatever you want.  It's also worth taking note that -format parameter on clock scan only works on TCL 8.5 and above.

Random Thoughts: Linux, and Dragon Age

First thing is the important part.  I don't normally do message sending on Linux, but lately, having to maintain servers, it's been a critical way of communicating with another user logged in so both of you can coordinate while on that server.  So, I will just leave this note.

Use the wall command which broadcasts messages to everyone logged in.  It's an extension of the mesg command (use man pages, mate!).  Type wall, then hit enter.  Then write your message (20 lines maximum).  EOF (typically CTRL+D) ends and transmits the message.

Second point.  Dragon Age Origins: Awakening which so far has been a cruel drag to play.  Something about the writing is absolutely uninteresting and the game really gets a bit more fun to play for me when I'm not having to deal with the main plot quests.  Ugh.  Plus, why is BioWare so keen on stripping my Warden of his gear to make me lose inventory items?  This happened twice now.  First with the damned Sacred Ashes quest and then on the Silverite Mines.  Bah!  Dragon Age Origins is great.  Awakening is teetering on the not-so-good area.

My Autodesk Sketchbook Express Workflow

This entry is primarily for archiving my techniques for finger painting on my Android device using Autodesk Sketchbook Express which I have learned to really like.  It is a shame that my WIP files are lost with my tablet's demise, but I still have a few of my works saved.  More of the guide after the jump.

Dead Iconia Tab

So I got the stuck Acer logo on startup after the tablet froze on me while playing Magic 2014 (awesome game, by the way).  From the looks of it, for whatever reason, the boot loader cannot get ICS running so it's always stuck on the Acer logo.  I've read dozens of articles for resetting the tablet using the Volume Button +, Power button and then flicking the flip lock screen and the first time, it got through just fine but I still ended up with the stuck logo (strangely enough, I used the Volume Button - for my device).  Second time resetting only got stuck with the "Bootloader v0.03.12-ICS: Starting Fastboot USB download Protocol".  Well, ain't that nice?

I'm bracing myself for a busted NAND memory.  It sort of makes sense that if the data is truly corrupted because of hardware faults, then the machine is toast.  It also doesn't look like I'm the only one suffering from this.  I love my A500.  It's a splendid tablet, but this just has to be grating to experience.

Sad day.