My first Android app is now in the [niche] Market (free):

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.wanderinghorse.android.hexish

It’s a utility for gamers which generates hex grids using a variety of configuration options. Very niche-market stuff :).

It “should” work on just about any Droid with Android 2.1 or higher (API level 7). (Well, it will once v20120614 is propagated… takes a few hours…)

Happy Hacking!

Recently i found SW “Empire at War” and its expansion pack, “Forces of Corruption”, for 10 Euros each at a local store (Galeria Kaufhof, in case it matters). While i don’t buy games for the PC often (primarily because i hate booting Windows just to run them), i couldn’t resist picking them up for 10 Euros. Also, i’m no big fan of real-time strategy games, so i hesitated twice - once because they’re Windows apps and once because they’re RTS. i prefer turn-based strategy games, because RTS is too hectic for me.

After playing EAW a bit, i got hooked. While it is RTS, it has a pause button (which i use liberally) and you can browse around your empire while paused (but you can only perform limited actions while paused). Unfortunately, it has no hotkey for Pause, which is at times really frustrating. But we’ll overlook that and assume the designers had a really good reason for wanting to to disuade the user from pausing the game.

After playing it for a few days, a couple things happend:

• While playing EAW, my nVidia 8600GT graphics card exploded. Literally. Part of it popped open and it caught fire inside my computer. i am extremely happy that the damage was limited to the card and that it happened while i was at home (as opposed to starting a fire while we were out). My PC came with an nVidia 8600GS, but at the time (March 2008), there was no Linux driver for the GS which supported 3D graphics. Sadly, i swapped out the GT for the GS and got back to playing. (EAW doesn’t need a powerful card, anyway - bought the GT only to try out some 3D games for Linux, none of which i still play (because i can only tolerate so much ass-kicking in first-person shooter games).)
• i got frustrated (again) with having to boot Windows just to play it, and started looking for a way to run it in Wine (which, to be honest, i didn’t think would work).

One of the reasons i’ve been using *buntu 7.10 (as opposed to 8.04) for so long is because i had such problems getting the PCI WLAN card and the nVidia stuff to play nicely, and i didn’t want to go through that again. When my GT card exploded, half of the reason for not upgrading was gone, so i went ahead and updated to Kubuntu 8.10. After only a very small amount of fighting, the WLAN was working (all of the necessary drivers were on the install DVD, so there was no fighting to get them on the PC. Last time i had to use a separate PC to get them, and transfer them using an SD card.), and i was happily surprised to find an updated nVidia driver which appears to work well with my GS card on Linux.

And that all got my curious about installing EAW on Wine. i had tried on my older Kubuntu installation, but the DirectX installation never worked, so i never go very far. DirectX 9c won’t install “out of the box” on Wine, and requires some “convincing” to help it along.

Yesterday i came across this excellent article describing how to install not only DX9, but also some other support required by other games (e.g. QuickTime and HTML rendering):

http://howto.landure.fr/gnu-linux/install-directx-9-0c-on-linux-using-wine

As fate would have it, the article covers *buntu 8.10, and i couldn’t help but try it out.

After following the instructions (that is, copying/pasting the (many) wine-related commands), we got to the Moment of Truth. With EAW installed, there was just one thing left to try - starting it. It runs! Not only does it run, it runs amazingly well. There is a tiny performance hit compared to running it under Windows (mostly in the form of small “hiccups” when lots of simultaneous explosions are happening), but certainly not enough to affect play. It has a couple other very minor problems, but nothing which affects play (e.g. the intro menu temporary hangs sometimes, and the Alt-click method of setting movement waypoints is suddently Alt-Shift-Click, and i’m not sure why). Last night i played a 7.5-hour game using the Forced of Corruption expansion and it neither crashed nor otherwise misbehaved a single time. (PS: the Rebellion won.)

Unfortunately, i haven’t been able to get Starwars Battlefront running using this approach. It’ll install, but the launcher screen is not usable (it’s blank, and clicking where a button should be causes the app to hang), so EAW will have to fulfil my SW craving for the time being.

If indeed you manage to get EAW up and WINEing, here are a couple tips:

• i haven’t found a way to switch back to my desktop without exiting the game. One workaround is to configure Wine to use an “emulated desktop” (run “wineconfig” and it’s one of the options), which restricts the Windows desktop to a given size. The end effect is that you can run EAW in a window. (It’s running here behind my browser, as a matter of fact.)
• If you are used to using Alt-click to set movement waypoints for your units, get un-used to it. On my system it’s suddenly Alt-Shift-click (this may be system/keyboard dependent - that’s just a guess, though). i only found out the new click sequence via trial and error - maybe this is a documented or configurable feature of Wine, but i didn’t follow up on it.
• The EAW intro menu sometimes goes all black and hangs for half a minute or so. Don’t distress - just move the mouse around a but, try changing to a virtual terminal and back (e.g. Ctrl-Alt-F2, then Ctrl-Alt-F7), and eventually it’ll come back. Changing terminals probably isn’t necessary, but when i see graphics glitches, that’s typically my first reaction (because it’s historically worked around several graphics-related problems). This problem has only shown up on the intro menu, not during play, and doesn’t happen all the time - i’ve seen it twice out of five or six startups.
• You may want to reduce the graphics detail to increase performance (see the Options menu). That said, i haven’t seen any notable peformance problems except for very minor “jumps” or “hiccups” when lots of action is going on. Turning off the in-game music might help eliminate the hiccups - my suspicion is that that’s where the hiccups come from, but that’s just a suspicion. (i find it psychologically painful to play any StarWars game without the John Williams scores playing.)
• When i click Start via the app launcher, it shows me a dialog box saying it cannot found the sound device and asks if it should start without sound. i believe this is a side effect of my particular audio card (a USB sound card), which works overall but i have never been able to get a mixer working with it (no big deal - i can change the volume and that’s all i want to change). In any case, clicking OK/Yes continues the app and the sound works fine (my Wine is configured to use the ALSA driver, by the way).
• No idea if multi-player works. Since i rely (very heavily) on the Pause button, and Pause won’t work in multi-player mode, i have no desire to try out MP.

In any case, have fun! And “may the Force be with you. Always.”