Posts tagged dota

DotA Alternative

Sep 10th

Posted by John Jiang in Thought

6 comments

Before you shitheads go pointing and laughing at me for still playing the game that ruined people’s HSC, let me say this…

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fuck you.

Anyway, so lately there’s been many developments in the gaming community revolving around making a “Dota alternative” to free the current game of its reliance on the 7-year-old Warcraft 3 engine. First there was Demigod which is pretty poor. Too graphics intensive, felt like you were controlling a single pathetic unit in a RTS game.

Then you have League of Legends which has the original DotA developer on their development team. I recently got an invite but haven’t tried it yet probably won’t since HoN is so much more awesome.

More recently I’ve been playing Heroes of Newerth (HoN) which ismore or less identical to DotA. All the items are based off the ones in DotA Allstars, same recipe cost, statistics and ability, just different name and icon. Heroes resemble closely to Dota with some new heroes and some ability alterations. Even the map is more or less identical.

Before you calling it a “dota rip off” you should try it first. I haven’t had a single bad game. When I say bad game…I mean, ragers or laggers or douches in general. But that will probably change once they release it to the wider public.

I would like to just point out several key benefits of this game.

Firstly, the hosting is conducted server side, meaning that you don’t actually connect to a host. This means that anybody can host. Thus, you don’t get the “Waiting for player:” dialogue which is oh so common inside Warcraft 3.

Secondly, there is a rating system. Every time you play a game, you gain points for winning or lose points for losing. Because of this there is also an auto-balance feature  so you don’t get “imba teams”.

Thirdly, there is leaver protection. The system records every time you leave a game. Thus if you leave enough games you won’t be able to join certain games. However, if you do happen to disconnect from a game for whatever reason, HoN allows you to rejoin the game! As long as it’s within 5 minutes. Enough time to reboot the router and rejoin :)

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, there is a “concede” option. Players vote if they want to forfeit the game. How is this important? This means that you don’t get douches rage quitting a game because they feel that the game is gg.

I have 5 4 3 2 0 invites available. If you wish to play let me know and I’ll send one your way. :)

Here’s a trailer.

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Tutorial: Hosting/Playing Warcraft 3 Online in Ubuntu…Perfectly

Jan 15th

Posted by John Jiang in Tutorial

12 comments

This post is now deprecated as I no longer maintain this. Comments will be closed.

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I’ve read too many tutorials on how to setup Warcraft 3 on linux. However, the tutorial usually just ends there. Sure, you have a working version of Warcraft but when it comes to playing online it’s a different matter. Current versions of Wine do not have a working implementation of AcceptEx, this causes in game chat to be broken in battle.net. So when you’re playing team games that could be a problem. In addition, until recently there has been no linux compatible delay reducer. What is delay reducer? Warcraft 3 sets a predefined delay of 250ms for battle.net and 100ms for Lan. Generally 250ms for battle.net results in games with delay and/or lag. If you need more information check out this blog post.

In this tutorial, it’ll be divided into two parts. I’ll be showing you how to setup your system so that you can play and/or host Warcraft 3 games online painlessly and I’ll be showing you how to host Warcraft 3 games under wine.

Whilst there is no stable implementation of AcceptEx at the moment, there is AN implementation available. Thankfully, somebody decided to patch Wine with this implementation and setup a PPA repository. If you want to compile your own version of wine with the patch you can also do so by downloading the patch from the reference link below.

  1. In terminal type 
    gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
  2. Add the following line changing intrepid to name of your version of Ubuntu. 
    deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/starfall87/ubuntu intrepid main
  3. Update apt with latest change from sources list: 
    sudo apt-get update
  4. Remove current version of wine and install the version from the PPA repository: 
    sudo apt-get remove wine && sudo apt-get install wine

Now that you have the correct version of Wine installed, I’ll show you how to host a game.

  1. We need to download Delay Reducer that’s compatible with Wine. Download
  2. Extract the file somewhere
  3. Run it by typing inside a terminal after you have had Warcraft 3 running: 
    wine W3DR_CLI.exe 80
  4. If you require additional hosting abilities like banlist, autorefresher, custom kicking then read on, otherwise you can stop here…
    We can install a program called Snoopy which is developed for Linux for hosting games in Warcraft 3. To install it type inside a terminal:

    sudo apt-get install snoopy-wc
  5. Snoopy should now appear under your Application list inside Games.
    Snoopy comes with many functionalities and options. Please read this guide on how to use snoopy.

You should be all set now!

If you’re just interested in playing Warcraft 3 online, you only need to run Warcraft and get on battle.net. Otherwise turn on delay reducer and run snoopy to begin hosting a game!

If this has helped you in any way, please take the time to drop a comment!

Edit 19/02/28:
Here is an alternative PPA repository for a patched version of Wine for those who want the latest version. Be warned, this has not been thoroughly tested.

https://launchpad.net/~pxc/+archive

References:
WineHQ Bugzilla – Bug 9787 – Warcraft3 Battle.net Doesn’t work (Needs AcceptEx)
Delay Reducer For Wine
Official Site For Snoopy

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