Observations of a Slightly Sane Person

Okay, some back story.
A month or so ago, I felt like total, absolute shit.
So I figured: what the hell, I’m going to be sick for a week or more, I can finally try my hand at installing Linux!
So I got the most popular distro I could think of, Ubuntu 7.10, and ordered a Live CD because the ISO’s weren’t burning properly.
I really, really, REALLY like Ubuntu.
In fact, if I could just get Adobe Flash CS3 Professional, Photoshop CS3 and all my (hentai) games to work on Linux, I’d switch my laptop to Ubuntu too!
But that’s okay, I’ll manage… with Wine!

Wine is supposed to be totally awesome at running Windows games and programs, but so far, it doesn’t really work for me. ;[
Here’s a list of games I’ve tried so far:

Test system:
Wine 0.9.58
Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon
AMD Athlon 1 GHz
512 MB RAM
Aeolus nVidia GeForce FX5200 256 MB

(Yes, it’s crap, shut up, I’m poor. >:()

Tips:
-in Wine options, select the option “Emulate a virtual desktop” which will prevent games from running in fullscreen, fucking your shit, right up.

Diablo II (action RPG)
Wine refused to even run the install.exe.
A nice start indeed.

Halo (FPS)
I looked on the Intertubez and downloaded a dll you needed, but to no avail, you could see the install image, but it crashed. :(

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (Action)
Installer wouldn’t run. :(

Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (Snipey Spyey Action)
Another Ubisoft game, same problems.

Red Alert (Only the best goddamn RTS ever made)
Wouldn’t install. ;_;

Black & White (Cutesy RTS)
Error during installation.

Battlefield 1942
Yes, a game that will install!!!
Except when you come to the second disk, insert it, and it claims it can’t find it because of some drive letter issue. ;_;

Age of Empires Collector’s Edition (AoE, AoE:expansion, AoE II, AoE II:expansion) (RTS)
Holy crap it installed!!!
And it runs too!!!
The fonts are all black which makes it kinda hard to read and the fullscreen mode is fucked up so you still see the two Ubuntu bars, but it’s working!

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Nope, no installation possible.

Microsoft Motocross Madness (Racing)
Another game that installs!
If you have never heard of it, that isn’t exactly a crime, it’s not a really good game.
Just kind of funky that it runs. :O
Bit of lag, but it’s okay. >^_^<
There’s just one problem: no textures are loaded. :\

Neverwinter Nights (Hardkoer RPG)
Nope, error on installation.

Grand Theft Auto 2 (Action game)
Yeaaaaah, it’s installing!
Oh, no, wait, never mind, error at 76%.

WWII Desert Rats (Action)
This game is totally awesome.
It’s so crappy it’s adorable!
It installs just fine, it just won’t run. :(

Aaaaaaand I’ve gone through my collection.

Games that installed:
Age of Empires II
Motocross Madness
Desert Rats

Games that were playable:
Age of Empires II

Kind of a sad score. :\

-knite

Ohi.
Been a while, ain’t it?
Here’s a small and sweet post about Flash.

A global variable is a variable that you can call throughout your program.
For instance, if you are making a game, and you want to add points to the score and display it in the top right of the screen, you would make a global variable varScore and call it twice.

Now, in ActionScript 2.0, this was fairly straightforward:

//define your variable
_global.varScore = 0;
//call your variable (adding 100 points)
_global.varScore += 100;

Now, apparantly, Adobe figured this was too easy or something, and they gave the programmers a big fat middle finger when it came to global variables.
This, apparantly, because if you have a global variable in your code, and you don’t know where each instance is, and you change it somewhere, you might not know its value.
Even though, you could, like, do

trace(_global.varScore); //this will give you its value!!!

So they decided to not have global variables alltogether.
Yes, that’s right.

Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster, there is a way to have global variables in ActionScript 3.0.
-make a new ActionScript file, call it GlobalVars.as
-in this file, write the following:

package
  {
  public class GlobalVars
  {
  //stuff!
  }
  }

-at the stuff, write your global variables like so:

public static varScore:Number = 100;

-to call your variable, first import your ActionScript file, like so:

import GlobalVars;

-and then, finally, you have global variables:

GlobalVars.varScore += 100;

This took me three days and 12 forum posts to figure out.

Fuck you Adobe.

-knite