Messages

1

General / Re: Aquaria Demo - Linux & Wine (good news!)

« on: December 09, 2007, 08:01:30 am »

Ah, sorry Lucif... I tend to assume automatically that all distros can do deb/rpm, if that were the case then any distro with that support could get the releases from the official wine servers.  It's a silly assumption to make really and I look all the more foolish for it, I'll try to stop that.

Anyway, I had suspected as much.  The kind of protection that Aquaria uses sounds like the kind of web-wrapper protection which the Sam & Max games also used, wherein the player has to login to a remote server, a signal is sent back to the wrapper and the game is launched from there.  Wine seems to be incompatible with these wrappers, unfortunately.

To put this in the most blunt of terms, I had to crack the Sam & Max episodes I'd bought.  After that, they ran beautifully.  I can fully understand, of course, why small companies use systems like that to protect their assets, but it usually means that a perfectly functional game becomes inacessible on an unsupported platform.  Again, that's undersandable too, considering that Linux isn't officially supported, but it is always a shame.

If I want my chance to play Aquaria, I might have to wait for a similar scenario to arise here.  I hope Alec & Derek won't think too little of me for that, because I really, really want to play this game, but that might be my only means.

Of course, should I do that, it's probably not best that I report back with my results, as it could be taken the wrong way... but considering that the demo runs beautifully and that the wrapper seems to be the only issue, I can pretty much surmise how that test would go, just so others will know for future reference.  Under those circumstances, Aquaria to be played under Linux would probably be a pretty safe bet and a worthy purchase!

2

General / Re: Aquaria Demo - Linux & Wine (good news!)

« on: December 09, 2007, 06:33:29 am »

Thanks for all the updates, chaps, it really is helpful!

Luciferin, you shouldn't have to actually compile wine as the latest has been available in binary form on their official repos for a little while now.  It should just be a matter of adding their servers to your apt sources, then a standard apt-get install should update it to the latest version.

Fred, I might be wrong but that problem might be fixable by installing the msttcorefonts package?  I think Gnome's default font-pack can't deal with non-standard characters, so that's why having that might help.  Just a thought I figured I'd share, anyway!

As for the wrapper, it sounds promising!  I'll likely buy the game soon enough anyway and test it myself, and if worst comes to worst then I might be able to find some way to get around it, much like I had to with Sam & Max (which worked beautifully except for the wrapper).  It'd probably be easier on everyone if I were to just have a Windows partition, but I have great respect for this beast of burden we know as the machine and I simply cannot curse another with Windows.  It's like painting a happy face and a twirly moustache on a fabrege egg.  I wouldn't hold anyone else to that of course, it's just how I feel about it.

Well, once I'm done completing the demo, I'll very likely buy the game whether there's news here or not, and if there isn't then I'll report back with my findings.

3

General / Aquaria Demo - Linux & Wine (good news!)

« on: December 08, 2007, 07:40:34 am »

I've spent a little while playing Aquaria and I can report that it seems to run well, I'd say a complete sucess!

My first test was with the wine version on the official Ubuntu repositories, which is version 0.9.46.  That didn't go so well at all, so at first I was worried.  I didn't have a mouse cursor in game for one thing, I didn't have the beginner's tips either, and the minimap was a bit glitchy, but everything else (including sound) worked beautifully.  I tinkered with the options for a while but I didn't have much luck, so I decided to try running it with wine version 0.9.50 off the wine repositories.

And what a difference that made!

With 0.9.50, I was able to fully play every facet of Aquaria, at least as far as I could tell.  The mouse cursor, music, tips, minimap, song menu, all other menus, movement, full graphics--pretty much everything I could test, really--all went swimmingly.  I even had further success when tweaking the init.cfg.  I'm running Ubuntu on a laptop (a 7004-series Acer, and Aquaria runs very well on it despite it having humble specs), one with a widescreen, so the resolutions didn't exactly fit for me.  I did find however that the gmae could redaily accept resolutions of 1280x800 and 1440x900 by simply dropping them into the cfg.  I can't help but wonder why they're not in the game's config-app, considering that the game quite happily supports these resolutions without any problems (as far as I could tell).

Basically, I'm convinced enough that Aquaria runs beautifully under wine, so I'm about ready to buy it... but (and some of you lkely knew this was coming) I'm worried about the anti-piracy wrapper that Aquaria's full version might use.  Could I enquire as to which it is so I could do some research as to whether wine is compatible with it or not?  If not, has anyone tried running the full version in wine, and if so, what results did you get?

I'm sorry if this topic has been covered, I did do a search but I didn't come up with anything other than older posts in the supported platforms thread, and a few others even less related, so I decided to post this question myself.  I think that this is a good question to ask as the answer opens the door to members of the Linux userbase (like myself) who'd like to play the game.  As if there aren't any concerns with the question I've raised, just about anyone with a half-decent computer capable of running wine 0.9.50 (with a default loadout, no windows files nessescary) will be able to do so.