Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 19:59 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica) by nix
Parent article: Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Not that that helps. Install everything, and it dumps core with no stack trace (why bother shipping debugging info with a not-yet-fully-working program? That would never be useful!)

I'm sick of this. What a waste of money.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 20:04 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (10 responses)

This may not be Machinarium's fault. Gtk and Pango are... not very biarch-friendly: they read text files in /etc with an arch-independent name to determine the location of various arch-dependent plugins, and then coredump if these plugings are not found. So you can't install 32- and 64-bit versions of Gtk or Pango at the same time without patching around this (perhaps by introducing an arch-dependent filename), and my distro didn't. Sigh.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 21:13 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (9 responses)

That didn't help, but an strace reveals that Machinarium dlopen()s a 32-bit libcurl.so.4 and coredumps if it's not found. Installing that lets the game start... but the first thing it does is kick up Flash Player 10, which is not PulseAudio-ready, so blocks solid at once. Killing everything else accessing the sound card 'fixes' that, but still all I get is a black screen.

I've done enough wrestling with insurmountable closed-source obstacles for tonight. I just wanted to waste a few hours playing some silly game, not waste a few hours cursing software :(

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 21:44 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (2 responses)

> I've done enough wrestling with insurmountable closed-source obstacles for tonight. I just wanted to waste a few hours playing some silly game, not waste a few hours cursing software :(

<Troll>Guess you should've just run the game under windows then</Troll> :)

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 16, 2010 14:55 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Say what you like, on Windows the infrastructure for installing inscrutable binary lumps is more robust (mostly because there's a monoculture so everyone can be depended upon to have a limited number of things and they *all* must be shipped everything else).

That's not the reason

Posted Dec 17, 2010 10:30 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The real reason it works on Windows so well and on Linux so bad is for simple fact that Linux developers are hostile to binary-only releases.

The surprising exceptions are GNU-related projects (GLibC, GTK), but even they are not perfect. Most other projects fell the answer "just recompile with latest headers" is acceptable. It may be acceptable for FOSS (even even there it's painful), but it's totally unacceptable for proprietary software like games.

Backward-compatibility is awful on Linux. The fact that it took literally years to provide decent support for OSS after ALSA introduction speak volumes. In Windows world it's just unthinkable to drop support for old API without providing some kind of emulation!

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 21:51 UTC (Wed) by svena (guest, #20177) [Link] (5 responses)

It's working fine here, with Flash and PA.

But if you're on 64-bit, I guess you're SOL. The game is basically shipped as a stand-alone (32-bit of course) Flash players.

Supposedly you can play the full game using the .swf from the games website (or extract the swf from the binary) which might mean it could someday work with 64-bit Flash from Adobe, or maybe Gnash, whichever comes first.

(Why otherwise sane game developers would willingly chain themselves to Adobe I don't understand...)

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 23:25 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

Oh, gods, is it just a giant Flash-based game? A 300Mb+ Flash game?

I guess we are out of luck hoping for it to work on 64-bit then. But, equally, I guess speed and 3D support is hardly of the essence for it either, so it'll probably run under virtualization. I'll try that. (What a kludge!)

64bit flash is tolerable-to-decent now

Posted Dec 16, 2010 2:32 UTC (Thu) by jthill (subscriber, #56558) [Link] (1 responses)

Preview 3 of square, native 64bit, works real nice, fullscreen HD (except under compiz), the kid's games, the works. Booting into XP for comparison you can tell it's still slower but it's getting subtle.

64bit flash is tolerable-to-decent now

Posted Dec 16, 2010 9:28 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Interesting! Still non-free so rather icky, but we couldn't expect miracles. I'll try it out (though again I don't see how it could get Machinarium working, as that appears to contain its own nonfunctional Flash player).

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 17, 2010 15:59 UTC (Fri) by stevem (subscriber, #1512) [Link]

Works just fine for me...

...in a 32-bit chroot on my Debian system.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 23:29 UTC (Wed) by remur_030 (guest, #70979) [Link]

I got it running on openSUSE 11.3 and 64bit system, though some strace was needed to find out which 32-bit libraries are required and I don't use pulse audio.

I don't really know if I want to blame the developers here, they are obviously more into the art of designing a game then writing a solid portable application so they fell for adobe flash =/ Still a great game in the spirit of old times adventures and beautiful paintings!