Friday 6 February 2009

Pic of the day: Crimson Star Fighter is loosely based on the anime character Astro Fighter Sunred (Tentai Senshi Sunred). My imaginary female companion is Hayako, loosely based on Sunred's live-in girlfriend Kayako. Also the name is a pun on the Japanese word hayaku, meaning "fast", "quick", "hurry". There is a reason for this.

City of Heroes under Linux

City of Heroes is still one of my favorite games. Unfortunately, there seems to be some problem between this game and Windows Vista. Or perhaps that's just Windows Vista on Hewlett-Packard computers, but I have tried two of those and got the same problem: The game crashes after a few minutes of play, and the operating system informs me that the video driver had to be restarted. This is a problem, because you can't choose when it happens. You could be in the middle of a fight where your whole team depends on you, and then suddenly your character stops responding. This will not make you popular.

I have known for a couple years that it is possible to play City of Heroes under Linux, but it supposedly required a commercial program called Cedega. When I am using a free operating system, I hesitate to use commercial programs to run other commercial programs... in that case, I might just as well use a commercial operating system and cut out the middleman. But by now, I was getting pretty fed up with having the game crash on me. I managed to keep it crashing only a few times each evening, by running the game in Windows XP compatibility mode. But I still couldn't predict when it would crash. So I decided to give Linux another look. I had already installed Ubuntu Linux in a corner of the Vista computer, so that I choose when I start the computer which of the two operating systems to use.

Well, there has been progress while I was looking away. The free Windows compatibility environment for Linux, WINE, now supports City of Heroes. Probably many other programs as well, but unfortunately not Sims2. Otherwise I might skip Vista altogether, do all my gaming under Linux and just keep an XP machine for speech recognition (until Linux catches up there too).

Installing WINE is ridiculously simple, at least under Ubuntu, and probably in most other Linux versions as well. I had already told the system that I was using third party software, since I prefer the browser Opera instead of the more popular Firefox. All I had to do now was to choose "add programs" from the menu and add WINE. (If that doesn't work for you, use your favorite package manager such as Synaptic or Aptitude. But I prefer my operating systems to be simple and do most of the work for me, and when it comes to adding programs -- or even removing them -- I have found Ubuntu Linux to be even simpler than Windows.)

WINE creates a fake Windows environment complete with a fake C: disk station with a Program Files folder. I started the City of Heroes updater from a backup on an external hard disk. (The 1 TB Western Digital that I bought last year to back up all my computers. It hasn't exploded yet.) The updater then downloaded the rest of the game over the Internet. I could have copied the entire folder from the backup disk if I had known where it would install it, but at the time I have not yet figured out that it imitated the Windows directory structure. Anyway, even with broadband it took its sweet time. But in the end the game was installed completely and automatically and was ready to play.

The game does not crash when played in Linux, and also seems slightly faster when loading, both at the start of the game and when changing zones. However, everything is not perfect. A couple times I have experienced that my game character is unable to move from its starting point. I can move a few steps forward but then I may just be I jump back to the starting point as if pulled by a rubber band. No matter which direction I go the same thing happens. I had to boot the computer to get rid of the problem. Still, this is less of a problem because it only shows up at the start, before I actually start playing. It does not endanger the other heroes like a crash during battle. It also seems to be fairly uncommon. The first time, the computer was waiting for a reboot because of a massive update, so I thought perhaps that was the problem. But it has happened once or twice later too.

But more important than solving my little problem is what this predicts about the future: The stranglehold on the gaming market is failing, and with that quite possibly the future of Windows in the home. For many years, Windows has been the preferred platform for home computers because you could run so many games on it -- particularly large, complex games -- which would not run on other operating systems. As more and more of these games can be run on the Linux, people will begin to hesitate to pay for a bigger, slower operating system when Linux is free, small, fast and in some ways simpler to use. After all, most of us don't sit and stare at our operating system. We want it to start programs, occasionally copy files, and otherwise get out of the way. And if it can do that for free, so much the better.