MMORPGs

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about MMORPGs and how one might be able to create a successful browser-based one that does not depend on Flash. It’s a pretty tricky situation, really. Although you can cleverly use AJAX and CSS to create a party-based, co-operative against computerised enemies that occurs in “real time” that only works well for the battles themselves. We can easily add live chat to the system between guilds, parties, friends and perhaps world channels but that’s also only a part of the multi-player experience. Another key part is being able to navigate the world and come across other players on your way who you can optionally communicate with or assist. So without these visual representations of players moving about you really lose a lot of the multi-player feel that is present in Flash-based and non-browser MMORPGs. Furthermore it’s really quite tough to create strong emotions and feels for different places inside the game without linking the visuals with audio. Facebook’s in-browser chat service does not depend on Flash however they do use it for sound notifications if you have them enabled. This leads me to believe that there’s no viable alternative for audio through browsers’ in built features.

Update: It seems that a lot of this can actually be done using HTML5 and Javascript. Of course none of this will ever work in Internet Explorer but Google is already in the process of providing a solution to this problem. Which means that I would only need to focus on supporting the main browsers: Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari. Unfortunately Safari doesn’t support OGG playback so I would need to use MP3s for it. Or I could just ignore supporting Safari because of its caveats and still have 93% of modern users (people using pre-XP versions of Internet Explorer would be left out) able to play it in their browser of choice.

Posted in General.

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By Jai – 15 April, 2010

Jaunty Woes

As per usual I clean installed the latest version of Ubuntu yesterday and have been using it on my Inspiron 1525. There have been various improvements since Intrepid such as a faster boot time, a new notifications system and a new version of GNOME. There have also been numerous regressions. With each new version of Ubuntu I’ve often hit an odd problem here but nothing of this scale and with the final release in 5 days it appears that Jaunty will ship in a state unsuitable for Ubuntu’s target market.

A good friend of mine leapfrogged one of the Ubuntu releases after sticking with the prior one for an additional six months because it was unusable on his machine yet the later release worked fine. I had never experienced similar problems until now. Allow me to go into a little detail about the problems I’ve encountered.

Major regression in Intel drivers performance

I always read the release candidate technical overview before installing a new version of Ubuntu. Unfortunately complete unusability on Intel graphics cards isn’t mentioned in the known issues. You have to check the bottom of a seperate set of release notes. Given that 22% of GNU/Linux users use Intel graphics along with all of the Ubuntu machines sold by Dell you would think Canonical would think that the regression is a bigger deal.

So I installed an older driver following instructions linked to in the bug listing. Whilst this did originally seem to provide an enhancement graphical performance has since returned to it’s original Jaunty hell. Why would someone decide to include alpha drivers in an Ubuntu release?

Settings in Power Management are ignored.

The Power Management options in Jaunty sure behave weirdly for me. I disabled the display sleeping and dimming when on AC power and set nothing to happen when the laptop lid is closed. However my display still decides to sleep and closing the laptop lid:

Turns the display off on the screen.
Turns the display off on my external monitor.
Turns my two screen setup into a single screen that, when I reopen the lid, is mirrored on both screens.

Needless to say I’ve configured my display settings correctly and I’ve even settled for the external screen being primary when the laptop one should be. So, anyway, I tried changing the battery power options to the same as the AC power ones and then my display stopped sleeping. I’m on AC power so this shouldn’t be resolving it! This still doesn’t resolve the closing laptop lid problem which means watching a movie on my external screen involves me keeping my laptop open (and bright).

Rhythmbox refuses to play WMA files even with w32codecs installed.

Sadly I still have some WMA files from back in the day when I used Windows. I’ve tried countless programs to convert them but nothing has successfully converted them without intermittent audio issues. Thus I’ve kept them in WMA format and, until Jaunty, have been able to play them back in Ubuntu. I hate to say it but it looks like Canonical has taken steps to prevent people from playing back WMA unless they purchase the codecs from their store. My reasoning for this conclusion is that Rhythmbox refuses to play WMA files yet every other gstreamer based application on my system handles them fine. This is especially a shame as the application I’m now using to play music, Songbird, doesn’t like OGG format. As the only OGG format music I have is the Ubuntu podcasts I figured it’s a sacrifice I have to make – I’ll listen to those in a seperate application.

Other Minor Annoyances

indicator-applet – It appears that this is meant to hold all of the programs that should be in the notification area. Firstly this is completely unwanted behaviour – I want easy access to Pidgin and other programs. Secondly, it doesn’t work properly as the only tray program it actually shows is Pidgin and, furthermore, Pidgin is also shown as an additional separate icon.
update-manager – Apparently there’s some people out there… somewhere… that don’t see the update icon in the notification area and use it to update their software. I’ve not met anyone who isn’t aware of it and my grandmother who is in her late sixties is able to use it fine this way. Removing it now means that she won’t ever update her machine, ever. Fortunately it can be re-enabled with a command in the terminal but I worry about people out there that, without this icon, won’t ever update their machine.
VLC media player – Now VLC displays video inside a seperate window to the rest of the program despite whatever settings are used in its preferences.
Poor performance – Jaunty gives me generally poor performance. It lags constantly. I’ve listed this as a minor annoyance as I believe it’s probably caused by the lack of proper support for Intel graphics but it makes the OS pretty difficult to use.
GNOME panel regression – I am no longer able to drag panels around on my desktop. I can change the orientation of each panel but this doesn’t allow me to move them from one monitor to another. This especially poses a problem when the wrong monitor is automagically chosen as primary.

Improvements

Okay. I’ve spent plenty of time listing all the problems that have crept into Jaunty, both minor and major, but now I believe it’s time to list the enhancements that relate to me and how.

Faster boot time – Jaunty boots faster than Intrepid. It also includes a nice, new bootup screen. This is definitely a good thing although I wonder if, really, what people need is the base installation on a SSD for fast bootup (~7 seconds) and then the data stored on a HDD inside the same laptop/desktop for price factor. It’s also a shame that I have to wait for my desktop to load after entering my username and password. On a one person machine like mine it would be much better if it preloaded the desktop and displayed it once I’d logged in.
New notification system – A new notification system is bundled with Jaunty. The new notifications look pretty cool and you can try it out yourself with the following command: notify-send “Hey” “Jai is awesome”
gEdit – A nice new theme is included called Cobalt. The document’s language can easily be changed via the bottom of the text editor although there are a LOT of entries here (perhaps it would be better to let users choose which languages to display as the average user probably only uses a small selection of the ones gEdit supports).
Open Office 3 – It’s definitely a good thing that this is now included with Ubuntu but, of course, I installed it on Intrepid ages ago using a third party repository.
Updated software – Most software has been updated to the latest versions in the repositories