Thread: OS of Choice - Part II

Originally Posted by Scatterbrain

That's exactly the guide I followed. For opengl to work I had to disable said effects (they're really minor things, but I think it's worth rebooting to xp to have them), I googled to no end and couldn't find solution for the crashes.

Try deleting your Wine registry (enter rm -rf ~/.wine in an xterm), reconfiguring Wine (enter winecfg), and reinstalling WoW according to the instructions on AppDB:

Open a terminal window, (konsole/terminal/x terminal etc..), type regedit and press enter. This will start the Wine equivalent of the windows registry editor. If you are familiar with using the registry editor under windows then this is pretty much the same.

1. Find HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\
2. Highlight the wine folder in the left hand pane by left clicking on it. The icon should change to an open folder.
3. Click right on the wine folder and select [NEW] then [KEY].
4. Replace the text "New Key #1" with OpenGL (CaSe Sensitive).
5. Right click in the right hand pane and select [NEW] then [String Value].
6. Replace "New Value #1" with "DisabledExtensions" (CaSe sensitive).
7. Then double click anywhere on the line, a dialog box will open.
8. In the value field type "GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object" (without the quotes).

Note: If you are unable to rename the newly created key "New Key #1" to "OpenGL" then expand the left hand pane of the regedit window using the vertical divider bar. You should now be able to change it. A known bug in Wine is causing this unwanted behavior.
You should see a significant performance gain.

I haven't read through that guide, so I'm not sure if the instructions do the same thing. But you might as well try with a fresh wine config.

Thank you for the help but to run the game in opengl with anti-aliasing on, it's a must to have the death effect turned off, and even then it has to be the anti-aliasing activated through the GPU options so the game will run slower (besides having no death effect). I don't really mind having to reboot just for playing anyway.

Originally Posted by ninja9578

Windows is going downhill for gaming, they're trying to force DirectX on developers and they don't want to do that because all the other major platforms are OpenGL only.

What do you mean by this..?

I've been looking around, but I can't find what this means, can you elaborate?

Lots of game companies are porting their big releases to non-windows platforms because of increasing number of users. Microsoft is trying to push DirectX 10, which has very limited backwards compatibility, so XP users are out of luck so no game developers are using it because XP is the dominate platform and they don't want to make Vista only games.

Because DirectX 10 has bad compatibility game developers are using OpenGL instead.

Another pull of OpenGL is that the most popular platforms are exclusively OpenGL, so why would they make DirectX ports when even Windows and Xbox support OpenGL too?

Like what companies?

Any companies that make games for the: Macintosh, Wii, PS2, PS3, Nintendo DS, PSP...

Correct me if I'm wrong the Wii and PS2 are the two most popular platforms. Both are OpenGL only.

yeah I think PS2 and Wii are the most popular.

I thought you meant PC games though, I thought consoles used totally different architecture.

bah you can see how little I know about this subject.

Most PC games also come out on these platforms and do much better there. The architectures are nearly identical to other computers, they just have some special stuff in them for rendering the graphics and the PS3 has the weird core processor. Their graphics cards are all OpenGL.

ok. thx for the help.

I am trying to talk to someone about this and I wasn't sure how to describe it, or if openGL is even commonly used for big level companies for computers.

If your graphics layer is well-written, it's not TOO horrible to port (comparatively), but games will definitely run better on OpenGL, due to the wider number of target platforms (since they will focus their optimizations there more).

Vista is sweet, don't know why every one is knocking it though, maybe they can't figure it out? My only complaint is it takes to much memory to run. I will fix it shortly by switching to 64 bit so it will recognize all 4gb of memory. Don't know what all will be 64bit compatible (game wise).

Originally Posted by Dreamaholic

Vista is sweet, don't know why every one is knocking it though, maybe they can't figure it out?

LOL, yeah, that's the reason.

Originally Posted by Dreamaholic

Vista is sweet, don't know why every one is knocking it though, maybe they can't figure it out? My only complaint is it takes to much memory to run. I will fix it shortly by switching to 64 bit so it will recognize all 4gb of memory. Don't know what all will be 64bit compatible (game wise).

Yeah, none of us can understand why Vista 64-bit can't run Vista 32-bit software. The Intel processors have a built in compatibility mode. Both OSX and Linux still have some old 32-bit programs and they run just fine. I'm really surprised that Microsoft didn't just rip off the compatibility code, both Linux and OSX are open source

Originally Posted by ninja9578

none of us can understand why Vista 64-bit can't run Vista 32-bit software.

crappy programmers who assume sizeof(pointer) == sizeof(int) and wonder why their program breaks on 64bit systems

Didn't they take CS 101?

It would still work if Vista would just set a few flags to let the processor know to run them in 32-bit mode.

To their credit, they DID beef up security a lot (though it's kind of annoying to use hehe).

It's a shame they only managed to release half the product.

though it's kind of annoying to use hehe

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...annoy-you.html

Windows XP.

Originally Posted by Pyrofan1

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...annoy-you.html

Sigged. Just because it made me laugh.

Originally Posted by Replicon

To their credit, they DID beef up security a lot (though it's kind of annoying to use hehe).

that's debatable

I mean,
every vista help thread I've seen advices to switch off the UAC (expressly allow all actions)
Mainly because apps still expect to have write permissions to "program files"

and looking at any Vista tweak'ing howto, and the first thing they do is switch off the UAC and some even advise the activation of the super user account as default

it's not security
it's crass

but anywho....

Agreed. Real security is security that works behind the scenes and doesn't cause further problems. All those pop ups aren't security, they are the illusion of security.

I don't need to know about an intrusion attempt, block it and don't bother me. Microsoft's security system is like when the Big Tobacco gave a million dollars to charity then spent twenty million making sure that people knew it. Oh, it blocked one spyware program then told me about three times, does it want a cookie?

Yeah... vista's security system makes it so anytime someone gets a virus it can be entirely blamed on the user. I mean, if it asks you for EVERYTHING, then it's your fault if you accidently installed a virus... right?

Reconditioned XP yanno using those chop shop programs throw out the garbage saves on space, and processes being run at fresh install And then some improvements made then after.

And of course Linux, totally customizable bag of win right there

Originally Posted by Ynot

that's debatable

I mean,
every vista help thread I've seen advices to switch off the UAC (expressly allow all actions)
Mainly because apps still expect to have write permissions to "program files"

and looking at any Vista tweak'ing howto, and the first thing they do is switch off the UAC and some even advise the activation of the super user account as default

it's not security
it's crass

but anywho....

Re: apps expecting to write to Program Files:

1) that's bad coding practice
2) I thought they fixed that by having it re-route to the correct place to write, and making it seamless to the application (it thinks it's reading/writing inside program files).

I'm not contesting that UAC is annoying, and that I'd turn it off right off the bat.