Category Archives: The Android’s Hardware (Tech)

The Android's Hardware (Tech)

In Which Pike Destroys Her Expensive Mechanical Keyboard

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This, my friends, is a sad tale of foolishness and folly, and I share it so that you may, perhaps, learn from my own mistakes.

Three months ago I splurged and got myself one of those super fancy mechanical gaming keyboards. I reasoned that it would be a good investment that would last me forever, and also function as a consolidation prize for having to send Mister Adequate back to England after a nice visit of his.

And oh, it was a lovely keyboard and made the most wonderous clickety-clackety noises when I typed! It was, I was sure, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Until yesterday, when I somehow managed to knock a full glass of chocolate milk right onto the thing.

Basically.
Basically.

As you can imagine, watching chocolate milk seep into all the little nooks and crannies of my prized keyboard was horrifying and put me right into a terrific panic. Unsure of what to do, I unplugged it, dragged it over to the sink, drained out the milk and then gave it a shower. At the time I was fully aware dousing it in water might just have been putting the nail in the coffin but I had no idea how to approach this whole situation and I figured that time was of the essence.

After this I let it sit and dry for a while and then plugged it in and gave it a shot.

The keyboard worked… sort of. Certain keys gave ridiculous results; for example, anything on the numpad gave me “abcdef” and the shift key gave me “333333333”. After a while everything quit working UNLESS I WAS WRITING IN CAPS LOCK. Then nothing would work, and then everything was normal for about three minutes before the keyboard started to press random buttons at random intervals, shutting down various programs against my will.

After several hours of trying to salvage this situation I gave up and bought myself a new keyboard. One which was just as expensive as the first.

Mon visage quand.
Mon visage quand.

Why am I telling you this sad, sad story, dear reader? It is so you can avoid this fate. Eating and drinking at our computer is, for many of us, a fact of life, but I’ve already ordered this keyboard protector because I am clumsy and really should have done that a million years ago. In the meantime, because I am paranoid, I have saranwrapped my super expensive keyboard. Yes, it’s silly. I don’t care. Typing on a saranwrapped keyboard is a lot easier than you’d think and I sure as hell am not going to let this happen again.

Friends. Do not let this happen to you. Get a keyboard protector and/or be careful where you keep your drinks. Just… trust me.

Trust me.

The Android's Hardware (Tech)

Linux Gaming Has Come a Long Way

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Any of you longtime readers who have followed me here from Aspect of the Hare, that blog I started writing some seven years ago or so (any of you guys left? One, maybe two of you there in the back? Hi!) will remember that my operating system of choice was Linux and I was very proud of the fact that I played World of Warcraft exclusively on that system. As a matter of fact I continued to use Linux either exclusively or near-exclusively for a very long time, until probably about a year or two back when I realized that Windows 7 was actually a pretty good OS and I switched to that– largely for the ease of gaming.

Well, on a whim I decided to reinstall Linux today. The first thing I noticed is how easily Steam installs, and the second thing I noticed is that I have over 80 games in my Steam list that I can install on Linux.

Damn.

I remember when Linux gaming involved either playing copious amounts of Frozen Bubble, KSolitaire and SuperTux and then calling it good, or wrangling with Wine for hours on end. And here I am, able to play fantastic games like Europa Universalis IV, Crusader Kings II, and Awesomenauts natively on Linux! And what’s more, they run beautifully too!

Pretty much.
Pretty much.

So if any of you guys out there maybe gave Linux a shot once upon a time and then decided that it wasn’t worth the effort because you wanted to play games, now’s a good time to give it another whirl. And as far as I’m concerned, the future is only bright – now that Steam and the SteamBox are really pushing Linux gaming, things are really starting to get super exciting. Just think where we’ll be in a few more years!

Hail the penguin!

The Android debates Pepsi vs. Coke (Console warring), The Android's Hardware (Tech)

XBox One, but actually XBox three

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Yeah I went to see Iron Man One recently it was a pretty great conclusion to the trilogy AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGG WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU MICROSOFT. Anyway with that out of the way we’ve had our presentations on the next gen consoles, the PS4 and XBox FUCKING THREE. The WiiU also exists I guess but that’s “next gen” in a strictly chronological sense only. But don’t let that scorn mislead you – I’m not insulting Nintendo because I prefer one of the others. No no, this coming generation doesn’t seem to be offering an obvious place to plant one’s flag, and if you’re an idort who gets every console then you’re just getting suckered out of even more money – the difficulty choosing doesn’t stem from multiple excellent options. Quite the opposite.

XBox VI’s presentation a couple of days ago was maybe a little better than the PS4 presentation that took place awhile back, because they actually had a console to show and the whole thing seemed to hang together a bit more professionally than the Sony affair. Unfortunately they didn’t leverage that into provoking even the tiniest bit of excitement about the thing!

If you’ve not yet seen it, here’s the Microsoft presentation in full:

They did mention a sports game that wasn’t Cawladooty, but it was something weird called Quantum Break that provided no information whatsoever on what the hell it is. At first I actually thought it was some crazy successor to old-school FMV games which would admittedly be rad as hell, but the confusion doesn’t exactly serve to sell games or consoles.

Microsoft did announce 15 exclusives in the first year of release, of which fully 8 are new IPs – and that part is interesting and positive. Perhaps among those will be some good games that make genuinely innovative used of the new hardware. But between the pseudo-always-on requirements and the shenanigans to fuck over used games, I’ve got very very little interest in getting one of the things. I’ve got very little interest in any of the new generation in fact – someone’s going to have to impress me at E3 if they want my moolah because otherwise I’m just going to upgrade my PC.

What do you folks think about it all? Am I being too harsh on the next generation? Are you similarly dissatisfied with the state of console gaming today? Do you, like me, already have an XBox One sitting right there in your house WHAT ARE YOU DOING NO MS I WON’T CALL IT THAT, I WON’T

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Hardware (Tech)

Things Pike Does When Her Computer No Longer Runs Crusader Kings 2

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My computer is a hulking six-year-old leviathan that is turning into more and more of an eldritch horror as the days go on. Recently it decided that it was no longer going to run my beloved Crusader Kings 2 without throwing a major fit. I’ve been going through several phases of emotions and actions since then, like a twisted grief cycle:

  • Denial
  • Trying the game four times in a row (each one resulting in a major crash)
  • Playing Sonic 2 while waiting for my computer to run fsck and dskchk
  • Reattempting Crusader Kings 2
  • Playing Sonic while I reinstall EVERYTHING because CK2 crashed again
  • Retrying CK2
  • Playing Victoria 2 when CK2 crashes again
  • Feeling dissatisfied with Vicky because it’s not The Sims Medieval CK2, and giving it another shot
  • Playing more Sonic while waiting for my computer to check itself again because it crashed again

And so forth.  So… basically I never got past the denial stage.

Twilight: Me, Scootaloo: Anyone who knows me

Really, I think I just need a new computer.  You know you’re having problems when a.) you can’t run a simple map-painting simulator game because it eats up all of your RAM, and b.) you can’t add more RAM because your computer throws a snitfit.  Unfortunately getting a new computer is much easier said than done, especially when you’re busy saving for other things, so I’m trying to talk myself into playing other games while I wait.

…stay tuned for “Things Pike Does While Trying to Talk Herself Into Playing Games that Aren’t CK2.”

The Android's Hardware (Tech), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World), The Android's Universe in a Jar (Sim)

SimCity

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So, though there’s not a huge amount of information yet, the new SimCity looks like it has potential! Here is the good stuff we know so far:

Curved roads.
PC-only.*
Modding supported.

Launch Arcologies

And the GlassBox engine seems to have a great deal of potential for detail. Here is a link to a GamaSutra interview regarding it, and I’ll quote one of the most interesting parts. It may look a little intimidating if you’ve never seen code before but if you take a minute to read through it you’ll see it’s really rather simple and intuitive.

Here is an example of a unit rule, showing a chaining effect: as a sim consumes mustard, they create an empty bottle, which then adds to a city’s pollution. If mustard is unavailable, they then go buy more mustard.

unitRule mustardFactory
rate 10

global Simoleans in 1

local YellowMustard in 6
local EmptyBottle in 1
local BottleOfMustard out 1

map Pollution out 5

successEvent effect smokePuff
successEvent audio chugAndSlurp

onFail buyMoreMustard
end

Map rules are simpler than that. In this example, grass will grow only where there’s soil, water and nutrients, which are all depletable resources

Putting aside the amusing image of your Sims eating an entire bottle of mustard and nothing else for a meal, I don’t know if that is the actual way GlassBox stuff can be written, or if modders will have access to this side of the thing, but if it is it will be simple for modders to wrap their heads around but have a great deal of potential for changing how the game operates. It does sound like, hopefully, they are aiming to have a level of detail and fidelity that even SC4 fell far short of, and that in turn should help the development of natural looking cities.

If that still doesn’t make sense, take a look at these videos from the GDC giving some examples of how the engine works:

One
Two
Three
Four

Pretty impressive, right?

Of course these are early days. There’s a great many ways this game could go wrong, and there are already things I’m wary of, such as the DLC elements already announced, and how multiplayer is involved. Nonetheless, although rather cautiously, I do have a smidged of confidence that this game will be a worthy update to the series – and if it isn’t, that modders will be able to fix it! What do you all think of what we know so far?

*I have nothing against console games, it’s just that a game as complex as a good SimCity is something that no right-minded company should consider porting to a console.

The Android's Hardware (Tech), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Significant Develapements

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I look at gaming currently and I look at gaming in the past and I just see such a big gulf in terms of how important the “big new things” are. Maybe I’m somewhat abalone in this but I just can’t work up a lot of excitement over recent developments. The iterative process of making computer hardware more powerful continues, as always, and is not used for terribly much aside from better graphics, as always. But I’m thinking specifically here about control schemes.

When I was but a lad, when there were only 151 Pokemon and arcades hadn’t quite died out yet, we were very impressed by the move to 3D and saw that it had potential. (Also screw Mario 64, Jumping Flash was the best 3D platformer ever.) But what was just as amazing was this newfangled thing called a DualShock, or more properly Analog control. We sometimes forget this today but there was a time when controllers did not have such things as analog sticks, just the D-pad and some buttons. Now it’s not like analog control itself was a new thing – heck, even Pong’s paddles probably count. Not to mention the PC joysticks and meese and trackballs, all commonplace at the time; but on consoles this was something else (If you mention the neGcon I will find you and punch you).

But Sony weren’t content with just having a new thing. No, they knew they needed something to show it off, to demonstrate why this new thing battered. They needed…

And now the true purpose of this post is revealed; Puns.

Ape Escape (Another platformer better than Mario 64 incidentally) wasn’t just a great game, and it wasn’t just a demented dose of Japan for my quaint British brain, it was a game that did – or at least convincingly pretended it did – something that you could not do without analog sticks. And that was the key. Not just selling a game that needed a DualShock controller to play, but one which showed you why you needed it, why it was a serious development that would influence games. So it did. Can you imagine a console today without analog controls? Everyone who didn’t already have it on the drawing board scrabbled to ape Sony. As for the cusomters, well, it might have cost a few squid to get the new controllers but tanks to Ape Escape it was demonstrated to be worth it.

See, this is what new motion controls have failed, and are failing, to do. They aren’t showing us what they can do that our existing schemes either outright cannot do, or can only do to a much lower standard (DooM was ported to the SNES remember, no analog there!). There are games which you can’t play without the motion controller but the few which seem to actually do anything that is both a) fundamentally new and b) fundamentally engaging. It doesn’t take a brain sturgeon to see all this! Actually, we can go back to the verboten neGcon here; it offered analog controls but who the heck even had one? Now the Wii and Kinect might be successful but that is very much more down to marketing than having an actual solid library of games backing them up. The few attempts to do something that can’t be done elsewhere, like Red Steel, just seem to consistently be macaquehanded.

Of course it’s not that these things don’t actually have some potential. Wired has covered some pretty amazing things done with the Kinect. They just aren’t getting translated into games like Ape Escape. This is a real shame because gibbon half a chance these new systems could actually be the revolutionary ones they are trouted as being; or at least be a very nice compliment to what we already have.

I’m so sorry but when the opportunity arises I can’t kelp myself, no matter how out of plaice the puns might be. I will try to keep them to a minimum but I can’t promise this will be the sole post packed to the gills with such awful puns! But I shall at least try to keep them to a minimum. Shall we agree to no fish puns on any day of the week, barramundi?

… Address all complaints to – ahem – Pike.

We're not foals. We know what the mane attraction of our blog is.
The Android's Hardware (Tech)

Gaming on Linux

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Back when I was a WoW blogger, I made no secret of the fact that I played WoW on Linux. In fact, my main was level 70– the then-level cap– before she even saw daylight on a Windows system.

Since then, I’ve managed to wheedle a select few other games into working on Linux (Kubuntu 10.04 is my current distro, before you ask) as well. It’s not always the easiest thing in the world, since getting games to work on Linux often feels like trying to push two similarly charged magnets together– they just seem to repel each other– but sometimes you can pull it off.

Which makes Pinkie happy.

Here’s my advice if you want to try:

1.) If you play a lot of PC games, have a working Windows install somewhere, either on another computer or on another partition. This is because, let’s face it, you’re not going to get every game working on Linux. Heck, you’re doing really good if you get over half of them working on Linux. I’ve got a Windows partition on my computer which I’ll switch to when I want to play certain games.

2.) Check the Wine AppDB. Wine is the name of the program you’ll probably be using to run your games with– there are other programs, as well, but they aren’t as widely used and I don’t know as much about them. The AppDB is an extensive catalog of what applications (mostly games) will run in Wine, sorted into groups based on how well they run. Note that the database isn’t definitive, as every individual computer setup will get you different results, but it will give you a good rough overview at how tough of a fight you’re up against. Use the search box at the top to find your program out of some 17,000 they’ve got cataloged in there.

3.) Install Wine. Pretty readily available on most distros these days; use Google to find the instructions for your specific distro. On Ubuntu it’s just a “sudo aptitude install wine” away. (Last I checked it was, anyway.)

4.) Install your program! How you accomplish this varies from program to program. If you have an .exe file available you should just be able to run it through Wine and it’ll install. You can find more application-specific or detailed instructions on Google.

5.) Run your program and see if it works!

6.) Mess with winecfg if it doesn’t work or if you have other issues. You can get to it by simply typing “winecfg” into a terminal. Mess with your settings. Audio settings are often going to make or break you so try different options there. Occasionally you’ll have Library overrides that you’ll have to tweak; the Wine AppDB comments will help you here.

…aaand that’s pretty much it. If you’re having trouble running your game, Google will often be your bible here, particularly for more popular games.

And now a small list of things that I’ve personally gotten to work in Wine on my Linux install:

  • World of Warcraft – runs flawlessly most of the time once you’ve got your settings and config file properly configured
  • Starcraft 2 – albeit with some sound issues
  • Civilization 4 – runs flawlessly after messing with some libraries in winecfg
  • SimCity 4 – Works fine; there are a couple of very minor graphical bugs
  • Most anything I’ve tried released by Valve, including: Portal, Half-Life 2, and the Steam program itself– all work with minimal problems
  • Age of Empires 2 – worked with few problems
  • Warcraft 3 – worked last time I tried, although it was a few years ago and I think there were some sound problems

And now a couple of other games that I don’t need Wine for!

  • X-Com: UFO Defense – runs flawlessly with DOSbox.
  • Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire – If you can get a hold of the old Linux-native version it will run perfectly on modern Linux distros with a bit of dedicated tweaking.  I describe how I did it here.
  • Minecraft – Runs in java right from your desktop.
  • A whole bunch of indie games because making your games work on Linux is the “in” thing to do right now

So!  As you can see, I’ve got a pretty good library available to me while on Linux.  Granted, those aren’t the only games I play, so I’ve still got to switch over to Windows on occasion (Paradox I’m looking at you nice and hard now), but I think people are often surprised by what you can get on Linux.

In conclusion! Obviously this is all a bit more complicated than I make it sound in this very, very basic guide. If you want to try running games in Linux, you’ve got to be willing to spend some time on Google or various forums and you’ve also got to be willing to accept that it might not always work. You should also keep in mind that results vary from system to system. But Wine is getting better every day, Linux is getting more and more stable every day (the Ubuntu of today is hardly recognizable from the Ubuntu of years past when I first started), and I know that this subject continues to be one that people are interested in so I figured I’d toss up a quick post on it.

Questions? Comments? You know where to leave ’em!