Making digital videos by means of a Bluescreen effect

As you might know when you take a look at my very first posts to the blog, I have been interested in hacking around with Blizzard’s World of Warcraft game. Back when Blizzhackers was still up and the very first private servers popped up after a game server got hacked and people reverse engineered the server software, projects like WoWmapview (a program which could display ingame terrain) and the WoW Model viewer (a program which displayed models from the game, PC, NPC and monsters alike) popped up, too. The very first version of the WoW Model viewer was done by a smart chinese guy, but he released his sources (which I was the first to report on the Blizzhackers forum) and it seems that others have now taken up the project. Even more interesting: Some people are using this program to create their own videos by means of a Blue-/Greenscreen effect.

Troubleshooting a DRI setup

I can’t stress this enough: If you need to get DRI to work on your system because it suddenly miraculously doesn’t want to work anymore, then your very first step should be to closely follow the DriTroubleshooting page on the DRI Wiki. Check your /var/log/messages and dmesg or Xorg.0.log respectively Xorg.1.log to look for errors and follow that guide. I don’t remember what exactly my problem was anymore, but that guide helped me to get hardware acceleration back for my system!

Dungeon Siege 2 Multiplayer

Somebody requested the new game Dungeon Siege 2, so I delivered. This did have an even shorter life span than Diablo 2: It took about half an hour of playing before I got to the inevitable use of the “Uninstall” button. But in order to get the game working in Multiplayer, we discovered some interesting things.

Dedicated Diablo II battle.net server for Linux

From time to time I tend to have a moment of Fantasy/RPG-Nostalgia – like with Master of Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic, Might & Magic: World of Xeen , Age of Wonders or Spell Force in the past, the first and the last one being the more honorable mentions. Two days ago I started playing Diablo II on a whim – playing it again, as it turns out. Although I still have a good memory of the first game (boy, did I have a whipping bow with chain lighting that cut through the enemy lines like through butter! do I remember the stressful time getting the gear back after being killed in the last level, starting butt naked out in town again!) I didn’t think I played Diablo II before. But I didn’t only look my brother over the shoulder when he was playing it, it seems I have been playing it to the beginning of Act III some years ago. As far as I can remember now I quitted when I was slayed by some Fetish pygmies. Ah well, anyhoo…

Blizzhackers got shut down

It’s kinda late for me to notice this, but the Blizzhackers forums seems to have been taken down by Blizzard. zOMG! It seems they finally share the same fate as the late GotWoW.