Posts tagged linux

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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More efficient procrastination

Oct 5th

Posted by John Jiang in Thought

I upgraded my Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 beta recently. Here’s what I’ve noticed:

The good:

  • Network Manager has been significantly improved…although…the improvements do not affect me and I’m quite comfortable using the old version
  • More applications are being supported by Ubuntu
  • VLC 0.9.2 was included despite the feature freeze
  • Better driver support, my iphone is now successfully detected
  • Better xorg support, but doesn’t really affect me since I have it setup correctly anyway

The bad:

  • There is a “sound” lag, where the welcome sound would begin playing when my desktop has loaded rather than in the process of loading
  • The “shutdown” icon on the top right hand corner is no longer a “shutdown” icon but rather a “logout” icon, and I can’t seem to change it back
  • The desktop loading time is noticeably longer
  • Still the same old crappy NTFS support, I copied 40gigs worth of movies to my NTFS external hdd, safely ejected it, plugged it into a Windows machine and I had to conduct a detect and repair to be able to recover 70% of the files

Well, it’s still in beta so hopefully when the final gets released in 4 weeks time, it’ll be more solid :)

I also developed a more efficient method of playing dota :)

The problem that I faced was that Compiz doesn’t support full screen games that well, it’s extremely buggy. So what I had to do previous was:

  1. Open terminal
  2. Type in “metacity –replace”
  3. cd into the directory and then run wine on warcraft
  4. Type “compiz –replace” when the game has closed to bring back compiz

The problem was that sometimes when I close down the terminal it would revert back to metacity…or even have no window manager running.

Eventually it turned into this:

  1. Open up compiz icon
  2. Change to metacity using the drop down from compiz icon
  3. Open up terminal
  4. cd into the directory and then run wine on warcraft
  5. Change to compiz using drop down when warcraft ends

It fixed the previous problem, has one extra step, but it saves keystrokes.

I recently added some custom commands to my Ubuntu box.

Command 1: metacity –replace
Command 2: sh -c “cd /media/sda1/Program\ Files/Warcraft\ 3 && wine w3l.exe”
Command 3: compiz –replace

I had shortcuts affiliated with the commands being “Shift F#” where # is the command number.

So now my steps to run Warcraft three is:

  1. Shift F1 to change to metacity
  2. Shift F2 to run Warcraft
  3. Shift F3 to change back to compiz when Warcraft have ended

All I need to do now is work out a way in script form to run metacity and then Warcraft and only run Compiz once Warcraft has ended.

Edit 6/10/08:

I’ve now reduced the number of steps to running Warcraft to 1.

  1. Press Shift F2

The main problem I was facing previously was the fact that Full Screen Games refused to run in fullscreen under Compiz. But recently I discovered that you could setup Window Rules through Compiz. I setup a rule that forces applications with the title “Warcraft” to run in full screen. I also decided to disable some plugins…namely “Expo” and “Scale” to make running of Warcraft “smoother”. I never really used those two plugins, they were there mainly for show. But yes. I guess I have achieved O(1) procrastination. Yay!

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Tutorial: xorg Metamodes – Running Fullscreen Games on 1 monitor in a dual display

Sep 23rd

Posted by John Jiang in Tutorial

7 comments

A problem I’ve encountered since setting up dual display using Nvidia Twinview inside linux is that when playing full screen games I run into the problem where:

a) The game tries to run across the two displays but cuts off in the middle, so you only get the game on one monitor whilst your other monitor is naked

or

b) The game runs like it should on the primary monitor…however the window doesn’t capture the mouse and your second monitor is left open

It gets extremely annoying.

One workaround I’ve been using is disabling the second monitor and reenabling it once I’m done. Being a programmer…I thought…there should be a better way! So I googled a bit and found this solution which I will write up, for my own reference in the future should I encounter this problem and for anybody else who might be having the same issue.

So to sum up, this tutorial will allow you to play a fullscreen game on ONE monitor in a dual display setup.

  1. Open up a terminal
  2. First we should probably backup your xorg.conf just type ‘sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup’
  3. Type ‘sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf’ Replace vim with your text editor of choice
  4. Scroll down until you see the “Screen” block for your PRIMARY monitor. It should look something like this:

    Section "Screen"
    Identifier "Screen0"
    Device "Videocard0"
    Monitor "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth 24
    Option "TwinView" "1"
    Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-0"
    Option "metamodes" "CRT: 1280x1024 +1680+0, DFP: 1680x1050 +0+0"
    EndSection
  5. On the second last line which contains the word “metamodes” you’ll need to change it to this:

    Option "metamodes" "CRT: 1280x1024 +1680+0, DFP: 1680x1050 +0+0"; DFP: 1280x1024 +0+0,NULL"

    Replace 1280×1024 by the resolution of the game that you play on. However, EVERYBODY’s xorg.conf file will be different, make sure you adhere to the formatting of your file.
  6. Reboot your computer or simply press CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE to restart X
  7. Open the game you wish to play and hopefully everything is working

Feel free to post any problems you may have after following this tutorial and I’ll try my best to help.

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Tutorial: Hamachi (with GUI) in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron

Sep 18th

Posted by John Jiang in Tutorial

8 comments

Hamachi is a freeware application that initiates a virtual private network (VPN) between peers. This is extremely useful for initiating applications such as games over the Local Area Network (LAN).

For more information click here

This Tutorial is for setting up Hamachi with a gui based interface (optional) in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.

  1. Download Hamachi
  2. Extract it somewhere
  3. Open up a terminal and CD into the directory
  4. Run ‘make install’ or ‘sudo make install’ to install hamachi
  5. Run hamachi-init to generate crypto identity
  6. Download and Run hamachi-gui – x86 or AMD64

You’re done! Simple! Hamachi-gui should be under your list of applications now or simply run hamachi-gui inside terminal.

If you feel more comfortable at the terminal, here are some commands you can use to setup hamachi manually.

  • Run ‘hamachi start’ to launch Hamachi daemon.
  • Run ‘hamachi login’ to put the daemon online and to create an account.
  • Run ‘hamachi join <network>’ to join the network.
  • Run ‘hamachi go-online <network>’ to go online in the network.
  • Run ‘hamachi get-nicks’ to download network memberlist
  • Run ‘hamachi list’ to list network members and their status.
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