I started the game almost blind. I basically went to the allods website, downloaded the game, installed it and started playing. Compared to other MMO’s I’ve played, there is more of a sense of urgency immediately. I won’t spoil it by going into detail, but expect the cast to look to you for salvation. Pay attention and read all of the text during the crisis. It’s pretty enlightening and provides a lot of info on the history of Allods.

Mechanically, Allods is a leveling game. There is a progressive talent “tree”. As you level, you pick talents, though the only prerequisite to later talents is that you have some number of talent points. This isn’t a real tree. The mechanism that looks more like a tree is the talent grid. You buy “rubies” as you level up to fill out the grid. Take a look at a talent calculator to see what I mean. Each character has a pile of stats like strength, intelligence, faith, etc. The general consensus now is that one should keep fairly balanced stats. I suspect that is because the game is young enough that no one has done the math on stats to see which is better.

Itemization is pretty interesting. Quest rewards don’t seem to be limited to one class. Each reward will have stats for several completely different class. It is rare to find an item which is completely useless. Maybe that changes later in the game. I guess this would cause more people to roll on any particular gear, but then there is more gear which is available to roll on and less gear will be completely useless to any particular party. Stats seem to be immensely important. Small changes to stats seem to have a huge impact on everything you do, so be sure to keep your gear up to date. If you don’t, leveling becomes difficult.

Since I like to heal, I’ve become keenly aware of an interesting mechanic in the game called “wound complexity”. You not only have straight hit point damage, you also have a variable wound complexity scale which is measured in percent. The higher the wound complexity, the more chance that your heal spell will heal less then the optimal amount. The stat faith effects how much wound complexity you can ignore when you cast a heal spell. this means you can’t just stack intelligence to get better healing. It looks like many game mechanics have similar tradeoffs which promote a more balanced stats list.

As far as leveling goes, it’s pretty slow going although not boring. Currently, the group quests at the lower levels are pretty easy to knock off. There are always people waiting around to do them. Just give a shout in zone chat and start inviting people. Higher level players seem to help noobs a lot too. Apparently, around level 23 or so, you are required to do some questing in a PVP area called “The Holy Lands”. There is no way around this as far as I know. The end game seems to be a mix of raids and PVP in “Astral Ships”.

The auction house is easy to use, but the economy is not well developed. Prices vary wildly, so it’s hard for me to price my items at this point. Since bag and bank space is limited, I feel obligated to sell stuff on AH. I’ll probably end up using the mailbox as extra temporary bag space assuming the game will let me.

Give Allods Online a go if you’re looking for a change from WoW. It’s free aside from your time, and it’s different enough to be refreshing.

• They seem to be more epic. You are usually the focus of the whole world. It’s hard to do that effectively in an MMO I think.
• I can save and stop at almost any time without losing any time.
• No scheduling conflicts for raids or fleet actions.
• No asshats.

MMO’s are fun too. If I want to casually socialize with people, or if I want to complete some epic task with other people, there really isn’t a way to do that in a single player game. MMO’s are a great place to virtually people-watch without anyone knowing who you are.

Back to dragon age now. As I said, it’s a fun game. I’m currently working on my last treaty in the deep roads. I’ve made some mistakes along the way. Here are some tips based on those mistakes:

• Do *everything* you need to in lothering before you move on. Lothering becomes unavailable soon after you leave.
• Work on approval of your most common companions early. They get buffs which are useful in combat if their approval is high.
• If you have any DLC’s, do them early. The loot can really help out in your travels. If you have all three DLC’s (soldier’s peak, stone prisoner, and return to Ostagar), you can gain several levels too.
• If you want to be the highest level possible, explore everywhere and kill everything which is killable.
• Money is hard to come by early on. Loot all containers. There seem to be no consequences to looting. If you’re so inclined, steal from everyone.
• It almost feels like cheating, but you can also get herbalism to its highest level and make potent lyrium potions for profit.
• If there is an enemy magic user (or several) kill it first. I haven’t found a case where I wouldn’t do this. Player and enemy mages are powerful.
• Area effect spells seem to be situational. I probably should have waited on getting these until late in the game.
• Go for the eyes!

The good news is that there is a solution that seems to work. I tested this with a custom compiled wine-1.1.35 and it worked fine. Find the detailed instructions here. If you prefer Ubuntu compatible packages, follow the instructions here. My audio in wine works ok now. It may be a long time before the pulseaudio driver for wine is integrated into the official wine as there is talk of rewriting the sound system in wine, so the developers don’t want to add more devices.

• Wifi
• Suspend to memory
• Proprietary drivers for the Nvidia video card
• The media panel
• The nice volume control
• The CDRom/DVD. I assume the blueray portion doesn’t work.
• The USB, VGA, and HDMI ports.

Here are the problem areas that I’ve run into. I haven’t had time to sort them out. When I address the issues, I’ll probably write a new post.

• Sound works, but only from two of the five speakers.
• If you place two fingers on the track pad, the pointer flakes out.
• The wifi button is too close to the ctl key. I need to find a way to disable it.

There is plenty I haven’t tested too. Here are the unknown components:

• Finger print scanner. I’ve read that this won’t work with linux.
• Webcam. This is supposed to work fine.
• Firewire, eSATA, and “Display” ports. I’ve read that these work fine.
• SD card/Memory Stick slot.
• ExpressCard slot.

Overall, I am very pleased with this laptop. My wife did a great job picking it out and getting it for a good price (thank you honey). Since this was a fresh install, I decided to go for a new install of wine for all of those games that I like. Here is what I got running and what was required to get it running.

Wine 1.1.35 itself wouldn’t compile initially. This seems to be a known bug when compiling on 64 bit platforms. One solution is to remove the libmpg123 package. I preferred to keep the package, so I edited the file dlls/winemp3.acm/mpegl3.c. I changed line 642 from:

mpg123_feedseek(aad->mh, 0, SEEK_SET, NULL);

to:

mpg123_feedseek_64(aad->mh, 0, SEEK_SET, NULL);

Wine compiled fine after that.

Civilization required the installation of winetricks and the packages: msxml3 and d3dx9.

EVE just required adding allfonts with winetricks.

Runes of Magic runs without a hitch. Perfect World runs without a problem. Fallout 3 won’t even install. I will post when I figure out the problem there. I haven’t installed Oblivion, but I don’t expect any problems there.

Once I got SpiderMonkey running, I plopped the js shell binary and the libjs.so library where the OS can reach them and started looking for a mod_js. I didn’t hold out much hope of finding one since I’ve looked for this in the past. Lo and behold though, someone had done some work in this area. It looks like active work stopped in mid 2007. There is a checkin which changed the license to a dual GPL/Apache license. I checked out the source and got it running after several more hours of work. I produced a patch to keep it from crashing on my Ubuntu system.

I ended up with a minimal mod_js which can handle files. I have a lot of work to make it really useful. Short term goals include setting up some system where tags set off the JavaScript from the content. PHP uses <? and ?> to delimit code. I’ll probably do something similar. There are the beginnings of SQLLite support in the mod_js code. I have no idea how complete the support is, but I’d like to get that running. I’d also like to add bindings for MySQL and PostgreSQL. If possible, I’ll try to build a set of modules which attach to the SpiderMonkey engine instead of attaching to mod_js. That way, the extended SpiderMonkey can be used for other projects easily.

As I move forward, I’d like to offer thanks to the folks at Mozilla for writting a nice C based JavaScript engine. I’d like to also thank the folks at modjs.org for writting something which functions and looks easy to extend. If either of the authors listed are around and happen to read this, I’d be happy to pass along any patches. If I don’t hear from them, I’ll build a repository and make it accessible. The folks at FreeSWITCH seem to have well written docs on the File object. I’ll probably look at their rendition of the SpiderMonkey engine and see if I can avoid some work.

In a future article, I’ll try to write up some docs for building SpiderMonkey and mod_js from a Ubuntu user’s perspective.

The next few articles will describe my adventures in trying to get a mod_perl like (though less ambitious) set of bindings for JavaScript. I’ll also be working on some missing bits of javascript functionality which will make it more useful on the server-side. I’m not the best programmer in the world, so I’ll use ugly hacks, borrowed code (attributed to its authors of course), and prayer to get it all working. I’ll be happy for any help coding or testing since I’m lazy.