Thoughts on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory DS

I finally got through this game and it sure is a respectable port though it definitely has some serious issues. It's tough to get around with the frame rate issues and the overly complicated controls, but if you find yourself forgiving enough, you might stumble upon some fun in it.

From a controls point of view, it's bad enough that the game demands you use the entire DS for just about everything. It's really difficult to wrap your mind around controlling Sam Fisher on it and being a lefty makes things even worse. Unfortunately for us lefties, the game is only designed for right-handed players. Controlling the camera while moving Sam was a chore. Eventually, I figured something workable for me. By placing the thumb strap (remember that from the old DS?) on the index finger of my right hand, I could manipulate the camera like using a touchpad of a laptop while having the stylus ready with my left hand for the lock picking parts. Fortunately, because Splinter Cell is a deliberately slow-paced game, having to change gripping positions for camera and the action buttons doesn't penalize me.

Having that out of the way though doesn't put you in the clear. There's so many game glitches and the frame rate is very atrocious. The game even refuses to save on the final checkpoint of the game! All annoyance aside, I had a good time with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory but I certainly wouldn't recommend this game for purchase. Rent this game first before deciding!

It's fixed! libGL confusion!

After some searching, I began to understand the nature of the problem more. Basically, the build-dep pulled in a truck load of libraries for me to build Wine and one of them slipped this in:

/usr/lib/mesa/libGL.so.1.2

nvidia has their own libGL.so.1 that sits in /usr/lib but no matter what I did, ldconfig insists on using the latest version (and gets it wrong) by asserting the use of the mesa one. So, even though nvidia starts up just fine, the library it's using is wrong. That means that I don't get the hardware acceleration at all. Lesson learned.

For now, I created a .usr_lib_mesa folder and dumped libGL.so.1.2 in it so that if I ever need it, I can put it back. But immediately after removing it and having ldconfig rebuild, everything has been fine. The games run and glxinfo is now reporting what it needs to.

Goodness!

Credit to this post.

Oops! Black Screen of Death!

I didn't realize how much my build-dep istall messed up my system until after a reboot when I was greeted by a black screen with a mouse pointer after logging in from GDM. It took a while to figure out what exactly happened and I've also read people blaming PulseAudio for their cases.

Mine, as it turns out, is a different issue. It seems that after all the installing and backporting of Wine, Compiz broke down and everytime I try to start it up, it goes to a black screen. I was ever a huge fan of Compiz/Beryl because the desktop effects just seems useless to me. I was able to fix it by going to Failsafe Gnome Session and then selecting the appearance not to use any desktop effects. I may go around to looking at why Compiz broke, but as for now, I'm just happy to get my desktop back.

Update:
It seems that it's much more serious than I thought. My nvidia drivers, even though they are loading up fine, is not giving me direct rendering. Going to try and install the latest nvidia-glx to see if it helps...

Wine and Pulse Audio Update

Backporting a newer version of wine right now... and I bumped into a problem with mpg123 because of the 32-bit vs 64-bit references on /usr/include/mpg123.h.

I'm using the patch from this thread to get around that and I'm using the packages provided by Rune Svendsen to build this.

UPDATE:

It works! Running a game without having to use the Pulse Audio wrapper is a good thing. Begs to question why Ubuntu did not include the WinePulse patches in their releases.

Fixing Wine and Pulse Audio

Well, I'm pretty much fed up with Pulse Audio. I'm not sure why Ubuntu ever went this route when it has caused so much audio incompatibilities with applications and games. Hacker Evolution: Untold and Trine are just a few games that lose all sound with this audio system and there's pretty much nothing I can do about it. (Side note: Cogs works splendidly well and it's a very good indie game).

After reading about winepulse, I'm about ready to backport some newer Wine versions with WinePulse integrated in it. We'll see how it goes, and hopefully everything works fine.

Steam Servers Are Too Busy...

Recently, I received a guest pass for a game on Steam which is certainly a welcome surprise (Thanks Anton!). As you may or may not know, Steam's guest pass allows recipients to play the full retail game for a couple of days. In this case, I have 3 days (I think!) to play this new title.

Fire up Steam, and I immediately jumped into this deal, but as I tried to download the game, I noticed something woeful. Each time I tried to install it, I get Steam Servers are too busy. Okay, so maybe after a few minutes. Again, I get this problem. Hmm...

As it turned out, I had spent the entire morning trying to grab the game, compounded by:

1. Steam Servers are too busy errors...
2. Steam freezing on me...
3. My internet disconnecting.

Steam was kind enough to explain to me that the license expiration begins the moment I enable the guest pass key. Splendid. Now, I get to try and download this game and if I'm lucky, I might get a minute of play out of it. What a great deal!

Programming 101 Note

I've had the displeasure of having to sift through someone else's code and trying to fix some really serious kinds of bugs that has spawned from very, very poor programming practices. I've dealt with this code structure many times in the source and I just really want to vent out.

Code like the one below should not be tolerated at all times.

try {

//some code here.

} catch { }

Please, if you're a programmer, DO NOT DO THIS!