George Files

Playing Counterstrike Condition Zero over Hamachi through a router

Marc’s got his collegemates to join him for a nightly match of Counterstrike:Condition Zero by linking them all on a VPN using Hamachi. I joined them for a couple of days, it was quite a lot of fun, but after a while things got repetitive and I don’t feel like playing CS anymore, maybe another game, maybe Team Fortress Classic or Q3F, now that can be fun with a lot of people and there are more than 10 players now and then on the server. Or maybe we could all play an MMORPG. I don’t know, there’s not much to do stuck here at home. Them docs don’t even let me drive.

Getting Hamachi to work through a router:

Simple enough. First setting the Hamachi side:

• Hit the gears icon to open the settings.
• On the first screen there, you’ll see a ‘Detailed Configuration‘ button.
• Hit that to get a screen which allows you to set which ports Hamachi uses.
• Ask it to use a particular UDP port, say 13000. Then just save the settings.

Now to set up the router:

• First go to the router’s setup page. Usually located at http://192.168.1.1/
• Find your port forwarding page.
• Set up a port-forwarding rule with the following settings:
  • Start Port: 13000
  • End Port: 13000
  • IP: Set this to your IP, my computer is 192.168.1.5 so I set it to that
  • Check Enable
• Now go disable your firewall. Don’t forget to enable it again once you’re done.

Now all you have to do is restart Hamachi and try connecting again.

After that, it’s best you follow Marc’s HowTo.

Stats:

We also have a couple of stats programs running. Here’s how the StatsMe plugin looks like in-game:

And post-game, the PsychoStats program compiles the statistics into a MySql database to view at http://ampli5.org/stats

Posted by roshan.george under Friends, Games, Internet | Comments (10)

Football on the beach

I went to play football today with my old classmates from school. It was fun, but I learnt that I’m hopelessly out of shape. Less than 30 minutes of running and I was completely out of breath, not to mention I was starting to get a headache. I’m middle-aged at 19! I’d also like to complain about buses and the way they don’t like to show up on a Besant Nagar bound route for more than half an hour, no good sirs, that’s simply no good.

In any case, Karthik dropped me home. I don’t know if I could’ve made it back by bus, I was so tired. Anyway, my phone camera is useless for anything but daylight photographs. The moon was so low today, it was like it had come closer to Earth or something and it was reflected in the water so brightly it seemed like there were floodlights on the water. Amazing sight. Simply amazing.

In other news, it’s John Thanky’s birthday today. I met him on the way there. Wish him :)

Posted by roshan.george under Games, Madras, Musings | Comments (17)

OpenTTD - New graphics engine

A long time ago, back in the 90s, when I had my first computer I used to play cracked computer games in the summer while I waited for the other kids who lived around to finish their term. We worshipped TDU-JAM because they brought us all those games that we just didn’t have money to pay for. One of those was Transport Tycoon, later followed by its improved successor Transport Tycoon Deluxe, or as it’s more commonly called, TTD.

After a while, I found TTDPatch which had all this cool functionality added on. The guys who wrote it, including the creator Josef Drexler, must’ve been some programming geniuses because they modified the original game and added all sorts of unbelievable additions, all in assembly code. Anyway, after a while, along came Ludvig Strigeus and he used a disassembler to convert the entire code for TTD from Assembler to C, OpenTTD took off from there.

Now there’s a new thing going on at TTForums’ OpenTTD Graphics section where they’re making new sprites for the 32bpp mode that OpenTTD has recently implemented. When it’s all done, which doesn’t seem like too long considering the rate at which new sprites seem to be coming, I’m going to give it a spin and see what it’s like playing that good old game. It’s aged well. You can look at all the new graphics at the Exhibition Page on the wiki, along with a comparison with the original graphics.

Posted by roshan.george under Art, Games, Internet | Comments (5)

Little games I play with via graphics on linux

Some months ago I figured out just why I couldn’t get direct rendering in Ubuntu despite all the xorg settings being what other people had claimed worked. The big difference was that I was using too high a color depth and resolution and reducing that brought me into magic DR world again. So now I can finally play a couple of games on linux (the VRAM isn’t enough for too much, so only some simple 3d), and there’ve been so many in the repositories that’ve been fun.

Still, despite the low VRAM, there’ve been quite a lot I can play at the moment.

• Unreal Tournament - Old favourite of mine, pulled out the CD, a little hop over to Loki Installers for Linux Games and the installation went smoothly and the game runs wonderfully. I’ve done the installation before on Red Hat 9, (I remember having to boot into Linux to play the game, Windows 98 only used to let me use UT Safe Mode whatever the settings), so maybe that’s why I didn’t have any hitches. The game runs really well, and is fun for a couple of matches now and then.

  My brother’s really taken to it, and lately I don’t hear as many snide comments from him about how ‘linux is useless’.

• Neverball and Neverputt - These two come together in the neverball package in the repos, and frankly I liked Neverputt more than Neverball, though having your ball bounce all the way to the bottom from right near the goal hole was really annoying, though there is consolation in watching your little brother replicate that.

• X Moto - Haha, this game is hilarious, and really lots of fun…until you get stuck at some level or the other. You control a guy (who exhibits weird ragdoll physics) on a little motocross bike and try to collect strawberries (waypoints sort of) and then get to a flower (the end mark). The funniest part is the way the guy works, leaning in front just when you don’t want him to, bouncing his head into the wall just when you think you’ve cleared and other crazy stuff.

• Cannon Smash - A pong game. No, real pong, ping pong, table tennis. Pretty cool, interesting way of playing the game. It’s fun, hard in the beginning, but the default difficulty is pretty easy soon after you figure out how to play the game. Switching the player style means you have to relearn how to play though, because each style uses different ways of scoring.

• Scorched 3d - Back in the day, there was Scorch (Scorched Earth), and we used to use a complex sequence of methods to get the triple-turreted tank. Scorched 3d is the 3d version of that classic tank game. It looks pretty good, and plays well, but aiming can get tough at certain angles …and where’s my ‘lazy boy’ targeting?

• Chromium - Ah Chromium, the first game I ever played on Linux, back in the day when I still used the old Red Hat 8, ah, good times. This one is good, very professional looking at all stages. I just wish it had a little more variation. That’s the only thing missing, after a couple of months of playing it whenever you need a little break you get bored of it. There’s not much variation in enemies or weapons, but it looks good and the only reason you would want to play it is because you wanted a short break from working on whatever you’re doing. I start it up sometimes, but it gets rarer and rarer every day.

• Frozen Bubble - Remake of that classic game where you shoot coloured bubbles at an array of other coloured bubbles and your objective is to make them drop by sticking 3 of the same colour together. Gets really hectic playing with another player and with ‘chain reaction’ on.

That’s as much as I can remember off the top of my head. I’ll add in some screenshots later.

Oh, and for those who came here for Via. Direct Rendering was supported out of the box in Dapper for me, but if you use too high bpp and resolution it’ll get turned off. Mine works fine at 1024*768 and 16 or 24 bpp and it’s a VT8378 Unichrome.

Posted by roshan.george under Games, Tech, Ubuntu | Comments (4)

Ryzom - An MMORPG blessed by the Free Software Foundation

Ryzom is an MMORPG with a rather strange story, good graphics and a GPL’d engine, NeL. Recently, Nevrax, the company behind NeL and Ryzom, went bankrupt and Ryzom will soon be sold off to the Chosen One. As with most GPL works, there’s a happy little community around the game, and they didn’t want to let go. In fact, they were willing to actually buy all artwork and data for the game and that’s where the FSF stepped in with 60,000 USD pledged for a total of upwards of 140,000 USD to the cause.

The game is free (as in open-source), and if the deal does come through, the game data will probably go under a Creative Commons or freer license. What this means is that though the official server will have a pay-to-play model, any of the private servers will be able to work legally and use all of the work done by the community while being able to easily modify the game if they so wish to. The possibilities are endless! To you freeloaders out there, there you go!

Also, this isn’t just any old game that died out of it’s own lameness. It’s ranked up there with the giants (Everquest, EVE, Guild Wars) and beats out some of the most-touted games there (City of Heroes, WoW, for example) at #4 at mmorpg.com. Also, the game supposedly only needs a steady bitrate between 2500 B/s (on a highly populated scene) and 250 B/s (on an empty scene) and that should be easily available on the lowest of broadband connections. The graphics are pretty awesome and the provided Ryzom Ring encourages user-made maps and scenarios and in the original game, these were actually accessible on official servers through terminals ingame.

Hopefully, there will be a native linux version if the whole thing works out. Sure it works in Wine, but why not go the whole hog and support that last 3% of the desktop market too :) Well, okay, may be it’s just me being selfish. Still, I’m a long way from playing that game as long as I’m stuck with my graphics card. The game requires a card with atleast 128MB memory. Ah well, perhaps later.

Posted by roshan.george under Games, Internet | Comments (8)