Temetum Lusus

Still working my Ubuntu 9.10 system into shape, and playing games on it to wile away the hours.  I've found some things that work very well, and some disturbing things as well.

The very well.  Again I wanted to see about pushing the video card a little bit.  I wasn't looking to find a FPS game to prove things out, I just wanted to see something that had 3D graphics, and would allow me to interact with the environment.  And, since it was/is a test I don't want to have to pay for it.

A little bit of searching, and I stumbled on Secondlife.  And found, I didn't have to fiddle with a windows installer under Wine.  Not saying anything bad about wine, but if there is a native client for anything, be it game or other app, it should be better than forcing it through a secondary system.  So, install this application is as simple as extracting the tar.bz file and then executing the startup script.

And, everything seemed to work right off.  Except. (there always is an expection)  It was apparently written specifically for RedHat, or at the very least a system that had KDE and not Gnome.  First things first, setup of your account is done through a web page, and not the viewer client.  So that done I start the client script and I see several errors flying by, a little worrisome, but the login is there.  Pressing on, I actually get into the system, and it appears that everything is rendering fine.  Since this is essentially a huge 3D rendered environment made for user interaction and chatting I wasn't really sure what to check out.  So, I went through the supplied tutorials, and found right away that my system would not play in game video's or in game sound.  (heavy sigh)

Referencing their secondlife wiki, and since this client is still beta release, I guess I shouldn't be too upset.  I verified that all the pre-requisite support software was loaded (for example minimum gstreamer 0.10) But in the end I find that there is a simple script setting commented out because it is still unstable.  Basically, review each of the known problems and solutions in the wiki.  For me just "uncomment the 'LL_BAD_ESD' line in the 'secondlife' script" and then going into the environment setup of the client to allow the streaming video and audio to flow through was enough.

The Disturbing.  And now to what I consider a disturbing, and as yet unexplained issue.  In facebook, there are a lot of games.  Most of them flash based, some of them interesting enough to play.   I had been having issues with them for as long as I could remember, and always just chalked it up to poor programming on the game writers part, or incompatibility with the supplied linux flash program.  The crux of this happens in FireFox, while accessing any flash game that opens a sub menu within the game itself.  Be this simple things like the poker games, or the farming games, or any of the various others.   If you go to open this sub menu, you get a cut-off weirdly truncated view with no active boundaries.  They just plain do not work.

I have found, purely by accident, and frustration that if I use the mozilla offshoot "Seamonkey" instead of the Ubuntu approved and supplied "FireFox" I have no issues at all.  And, after verifying support apps, I find that they are both running the same flash version.  I have gone through the typical troubleshooting as outlined on the firefox site, but no plugin or other add on appears to be the culprit.  Simple fact is though, it breaks in FF and it works in Seamonkey.   go figure.