World of Warcraft
Yes, I’m still alive and kicking. Been really busy at work and haven’t had the time or energy to write anything here. I have however kept my New Year’s resolution of reading a book during lunch break every day! I’m currently reading 2 books at the same time (check what other books I have read and those I have still waiting on my queue in the front page of my blog):
- For The Win by Cory Doctorow
- The Fourth Part of the World by Toby Lester
I feel that it is impossible to read Doctorow’s book and not feel the urge to play World of Warcraft (WoW). Impossible! I think the last time I played this game I still lived in Northern New Jersey and was an Ubuntu user (yeah, I’ve matured since then).
So I wanted to play WoW really bad after reading a chapter but wasn’t sure how to do it since I only run GNU/Linux and didn’t feel like setting up a Windows VM just to play a game! Talking to my long time friend Vinny I suddenly realized that I never tried to run the game using Wine, so I decided that once I got home I’d take it for a spin.
After downloading a 3.3MB installer from Blizzard, and installing Wine (sudo conary update wine), I went ahead and ran wine TryWoW.exe. What followed was a series of screens where I simply accepted the defaults and clicked my way through. There were times when a dialog with no messages popped up where all you could do was click on the OK button… so I did.
The installation did require access to the internet and a bundle of approximately 35MB was downloaded in the process. Once the wizard finished I had the option to play the game right there and then! How exciting!
The game takes a few extra seconds to start but eventually I was face to face with the login window. However, I noticed that I had no audio and the video quality lacked a bit. Googling around brought me to these instructions. So I modified my configuration file to include:
SET gxApi “opengl”SET Sound_SoundOutputSystem “1″SET Sound_SoundBufferSize “150″
Hey man. Serveral months ago I got the WoW itch as well. I use PlayOnLinux to install all of the Windows games that I play (was playing SC2 Beta until they ended it the beta this week). So you might want to check it out.
http://www.playonlinux.com/en/
Also, if you don’t want to pay the crazy monthly fee, then there is a private server option. I played on inner-realm’s for a few months. I think they have a strong community whom seem very helpful.
http://inner-realm.net/index.php
You are not alone. http://www.wowwiki.com/World_of_Warcraft_functionality_on_Wine
I’ve been playing it for a few year on Wine now. Regular Wine from WineHQ+WinePulse patches (if you have PulseAudio) works best. I use the ‘windowed, maximized’ setting in WoW, so that when I switch virtual desktops WoW does not know about it and keeps everything running instead of pausing some actions like if you were tabbed-out in Windows.
Before engaging in wow spending (i was a wow addict too), try allods.gpotato.com. youll be amazed. its a free for life mmorpg much alike wow but with its own “twist”, features and community, play it and be amazed. i was
feel free to tell me what you thought of it 
Try out WoW in windowed mode; works like a charm (aside from non-aspect-preserving resizes).
Also, as a fellow WoW player, I have to warn you that it *will* take as much time from your hands as you are willing to offer it, and then some. Player beware
Pity you’re in the US tho.
Wine is getting pretty good. I was able to use it to install Qt-Win32 on ubuntu and crosscompile Qt apps for Win32. Very nice job on their part.
quiero puro jugar el juego
A few things I can personally attest to (I’ve been playing WoW under Wine for over two years now, with a *heavy* addon load, currently under Wine 1.1.42):
1. The best centralized source of info on all this is likely http://www.wowwiki.com/World_of_Warcraft_functionality_on_Wine
2. Be careful playing it on a 64-bit system, esp. with the nVidia drivers; Wine emulates Win32, and hence the 32-bit memory map, and this can lead to memory conflicts between Wine and other services (most notably the video drivers), leading to crashes (esp. at load screens, for some reason). There are numerous claimed workarounds; I haven’t found a single one that actually works–yet. YMMV.
3. If you run a distro based on PulseAudio, get the patched build of Wine (the one supporting the PulseAudio backend). The other workarounds that are floating around out there are awkward, annoying and flat-out don’t work half the time (with the notable exception of simply disabling PA altogether).
3.1. Relating to this, if sound drops out while using PA, go into the Audio Preferences in WoW and toggle the “Enable sound” checkbox–that usually fixes it for me.
4. If you run a distro with multiple monitors, I suggest running Wine in a full-screen managed-desktop mode (otherwise it may try to stretch across all monitors, which will likely drag performance down badly).
5. Set it up in it’s own prefix. That’s a bit more complex, but well worth it.
6. Don’t bother trying to run WoW under Wine 1.0; it’s just got too many problems worth fixing.
7. You might want to investigate getting the patched build of Wine that supports a hardware-based OpenGL cursor; the native OpenGL driver in WoW does not, at least not the way Wine handles it. Probably not worth it if you’re not a heavy player, though.
8. Framerates in Dalaran … suck. Don’t spend too much time worrying about it; it’s probably not worth it.
Oh; one other thing; the memory load crashes generally only happen if you have a heavy addon load (as I do); you can frequently fix it by scaling back or eliminating your addons.
Several of them are just too useful, though.
Sorry; missed that someone already posted that URL
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Anyway, the crash issue usually only happens if you have a heavy addon load. You can usually fix it by scaling back on or eliminating your addons.