Doom3 and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory Fix

Although I mostly still play Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, I have had Doom3 on my machine, and I recently downloaded the older Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.

The problem I was having, though is that for some reason — I think having 3 monitors — the mouse was all wonky. In the opening menus, it would jump off the screen. However, I recently got both these games working!

Penny Arcade Game

From time to time I will check out Penny Arcade, and I remembered that they had a video game coming out.

Today, I was pleased to find out they have a native linux version of On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One! There is a demo available, so I gave it a download to try it out.

3x the fun…Triple Monitor Gaming!

A while back I posted about Dual Monitor Gaming – it didn’t really work too well for the games I wanted to play, because basically you end up with the crosshair right in the worst spot possible – between the monitors.

However, I broke down today and added a second GeForce 8800GTS 512 card and a third iiyama ProLite B2403WS monitor to my rig. Sweet.

ETQW and Joystick

Just a quick note on this one! I wanted to try using a joystick in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. The joystick in question is a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro – a USB model with several axes and buttons.

Plugging the joystick in, it immediately appeared as /dev/input/js0. I vaguely remember having to “calibrate” a joystick, so I installed the jscalibrator package. Turns out this was a mistake.

Dual Monitor Gaming

The scenario:

Alright, now that I have two monitors and the basic screen stuff set up, the first thing to do is to try to get the games working.

There are a couple of possible ways to go here, where dual-monitors are the default set-up for “normal” computing: switch to one monitor only when gaming, and continue to use dual monitors.

Ubuntu Gaming: Lincity-NG

Today, I checked out Lincity-NG, a SimCity-style game for Linux. Simple to install, because it is already in the repositories, this did the trick for me:
sudo apt-get install lincity-ng

I can do it!

It took about 2 minutes to understand the interface, it was very well done although I did notice a couple of quirks:

1. In fullscreen mode, the view was shifted a bit to the right, about 10 pixels or so, which was just enough to half-way cut off a button or two in the bottom right of the GUI. This was not a problem when running in a window.

2. Some of the dialogs were strange. I think the first city I ran (into the ground) died and some dialog popped up with text like “message.xml: you have died@#” or something like that.

Good for what it is

Although the game played very smooth, had a decent GUI, and worked as expected I’m not sure I’ll be playing it more. For one thing, I often wanted to rotate the view because sometimes it is hard to see “behind” something in the fixed isomorphic view. Another thing is that the items are only clean-looking at one particular zoom level- moving in or out produces the jagged edges of re-sized graphics we all know and love.

Even as far as I got, a few things were unclear: I couldn’t exactly figure out how windmills supplied power, for example – it looked like it was working as I expected for farms, but not for residences.

In summary, my friends…

All that being said, Lincity-NG has that old-school SimCity vibe down pat and if someone was looking for that sort of game I would certainly recommend LinCity-NG.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

A bit of a diversion

As I was reading through some Ubuntu forums, I read that id software games generally support running in Linux natively. So, I thought I would give Enemy Territory: Quake Wars a try. The weekend/holidays are upon us, so now is a good time.

I wanted to try this for a couple of reasons: the main reason is I wanted to try out a “full-fledged” games in Linux (meaning not running under Wine like Team Fortress 2 does); and also because I really enjoyed the first Enemy Territory.

On the running of the game in Ubuntu

This was very simple: buy the game (get the Windows version). Then, download the Linux client from id software – this took me about 20 minutes.  The installation is graphical text-based, and very simple.  That’s it! I was up and running!

It looks great and plays very smooth.

I read you are supposed to disable the “desktop bling” of programs like Compiz Fusion, so I found a script to turn Compiz Fusion off, run ETQW, and then re-start Compiz Fusion when done. However there is one glitch to this: after ETQW is done, then AWM  icons appear in the upper left corner of the desktop, while the bar itself is in the proper place. Opening a window (like alt-F2, for example), re-sets the icons immediately.

On the playing of the game in Ubuntu

As I said, I greatly enjoyed the first Enemy Territory, although it was never one of the major online FPS games. I suspect a lot of gamers rejected it for the reason I most liked it: it was complex and required teamwork. I really do not like “deathmatch” mode, where there is no point save killing everyone else – why not just have a meter that fills up according to who can click the mouse the fastest?

I like a bit of strategy, tactics, and cooperation – and I like a diversity of character classes. (This is something that Team Fortress 2 does as well, though not to the extent that ETQW does.) ETQW takes all the features of ET, and expands on them – especially in differentiating the two opposing sides. The on-screen display is a bit confusing when getting started, but largely achieves its goal of presenting an enormous amount of information in an effective manner.

Verdict

I like Enemy Territory and if you like the more complex FPS, you might want to try it. It installed flawlessly and runs great for me, and I really like that – I was a bit happy and sad with the results of Team Fortress 2 under Crossover.

Again, I am using the handle ushimitsudoki out there if you want to say hello. I’m still learning the game and how to perform all the actions of each class, so don’t expect too much out of me!