What’s that I hear you say? You use a 64-bit Linux distribution? Have no fear…

$ file *.so
npquakelive.i386.so: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, not stripped
npquakelive.x64.so:  ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, not stripped

Frag on! If you already have Quake Live, here’s my profile — feel free to add me if you’re somewhere around Australia or know me. I’d love to play!

I’d previously played the Penumbra tech demo, which didn’t have any storyline, but showed me that the game had a big emphasis on physics and interaction. The actual Penumbra game makes very clever use of physics to create a very interesting and challenging puzzle game, with game graphics, including awesome shadow effects, that create a very spooky atmosphere.

Turns out that they have a Linux version of the game, so of course that is what I bought for the special.

Penumbra is a horror series, which, I have to admit, is not my cup of tea. I cannot play scary games in the dark, and the slightest noise or puff of dust makes me jump. However, the intriguing storyline kept me playing. A friend of mine, Josh, who also bought the series about a year ago, tells me that the storyline is very Lovecraftian. Having never read a Lovecraft book, I will have to trust his observation.

Throughout the series, you navigate areas which are mapped out and labelled. Unfortunately, after you get near the end of the series, getting to a new area, and being presented with a new map feels like eating stale bread — rather repetitive.

Throughout Overture, the first episode of the series, are savage dogs that guard many of the areas. The dogs were the only real enemies in Overture, and the only creatures that you could kill. Killing the dogs was painfully repetitive — I would throw an object at it to stun it, and then hack at it with the pickaxe until it died.

However, I did like many of the puzzle elements of the series. Having to decode morse code coming in through the radio, and working out how to open a door without the key in it come to mind immediately.

The horror elements of the game were certainly well done, and actually served a second purpose: I dreaded going on to another area because I knew there would be more horrible surprises waiting for me, so I spent more time in existing areas paying attention to detail, reading notes, trying to find additional clues, etc.

Black Plague, the second episode, I felt had more variety, but the addition of Clarence, an alter ego voice inside your head that is apparently a symptom of your ‘infection’, kind of spoiled a lot of the sequences. It was interesting that though the storyline was wrapped up in the end, it wasn’t a very happy end. Josh tells me that is typical of Lovecraftian stories.

Not only that, but Black Plague was plagued (heh heh) with bugs. There was an area where you would walk into a small room, and the door would close behind you, trapping you in with a giant worm that you had to figure out how to kill. The door, however, got stuck (or possibly moved the wrong way), and didn’t close.

Also, in another area, I had to lead a zombie into a room full of cyanide gas and trap it in. However, the door failed to close (I checked walkthroughs later on, and the door was definitely meant to close), and just shuddered and made a looping sound. Luckily, the zombie disappeared anyway, as it was scripted to do that. In the same area, I had to program computer “interface cards”, and slot them into a “server” to activate a computer terminal. Unfortunately, the interface cards kept getting stuck in the slots on the server, so I had to keep reloading from a saved game until it worked.

Requiem is mainly focused on puzzles, so I haven’t played much of that yet. Penumbra minus the storyline is only half the game.

All in all, I think Penumbra is a great series that despite not being made by a zillion-dollar company has realistic horror, an engaging storyline, challenging puzzles, and satisfying physics.

It’s meant to be a remake of the classic Lavacap, which is an old DOS game that I loved playing when I was younger.

It’s coming along slowly but surely. The code is on Launchpad. At this stage, I’m not sure if anybody is interested in working on the game or even playing it, so I’m just throwing this out there to let people know. To try it out, first install Pyglet (package python-pyglet in Ubuntu/Debian), and then run:

$ bzr branch lp:~jeremy-visser/+junk/volcano
$ cd volcano
$ ./volcano.py

The game is not fully functional yet. You can lay out pipes, and it has some unfinished path tracing algorithms, but that’s pretty much it. To get an idea of what I’m trying to clone, run the original Lavacap in something like DOSBox.

The game is written in Pyglet, which is not the most resource-friendly way to write apps. However, it should be fairly easy to retrofit it onto a GTK+ GooCanvas or other application. If anybody is interested in helping out, then let me know (and bzr branch is your friend).

Well, my bandwidth usage for April so far was…(drumroll)…405 GB!

I couldn’t believe it! Both March and April were that high — about 40GB a day was the average. (Thanks to John who kindly lets me use his DreamHost account which has unlimited bandwidth.) How could that be? Well, I checked the access logs, and 99% of the access log is filled with basically the following, which sure surprised me:

201.221.x.x - - [23/Apr/2009:16:03:14 -0700] "GET /jeremy/releases/Wesnoth-1452.xo HTTP/1.0" 200 80241354 "http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/All" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008072400 OLPC/0.4.6-1.olpc3 (XO) Firefox/3.0"

Wow! Everyone is downloading Battle for Wesnoth for OLPC that I ported! I had no idea it was so popular.

Most of the user-agent strings contain “OLPC/0.4.6-1.olpc3″, which gives a pretty good indication that people are downloading it straight onto their XO using the built-in browser (which is contrary to my recommendation, but anyway). The majority of IPs are from Uruguay, so I suspect it is spreading like wildfire among schools there. Who says Linux doesn’t have viruses?

To continue to keep the Children of the World entertained, I have already ported Wesnoth 1.6a to OLPC, but I haven’t released it yet. Hopefully I will release it to a testing audience in the coming weeks.

Thanks to the OpenGL support in VirtualBox, and the awesome WineD3D work by Robert Millan, Freelancer, which is a 2003 Direct3D 8.1 game, runs perfectly in VirtualBox.

All you need is the latest VirtualBox (2.1 or 2.2 will do), a copy of Windows to run inside it, and the latest WineD3D for Windows. I tested on both XP and Vista — it ran smoother on Vista (ironically), but both were playable.

Freelancer has worked in Wine on Linux without virtualisation for some years now, but multiplayer support is something that has never worked properly. With virtualisation, Freelancer can use the native Windows networking, and thus works perfectly with multiplayer.

(Well, actually, if you use Windows Vista, you have to disable IPv6, otherwise multiplayer doesn’t work, but that’s a different story.)

The game runs much smoother than back when I ran it in VMware: the speed was inconsistent, and I used to get booted off multiplayer servers for allegedly using “speed mods”. With VirtualBox, performance is extremely consistent. (Although Moore’s Law may have something to do with that.)

Have fun!