Tanetris
August 29th, 2009, 03:44 AM
My brother wants to play Aion (has it preordered already and everything), and he also wants to make the switch to Linux (which he has recruited me to help him with, as I switched roughly a year ago). As one can imagine, these desires are in conflict.
I understand that Aion is unlikely (understatement) to work in Wine, CrossOver, etc due to Gameguard. I prefer not to take the dual-booting route, as my own experiences with it involved getting more frustrated over having to reboot back and forth, splitting my IM and IRC logs, keeping up two e-mail clients, two sets of bookmarks, etc than at the individual downsides of either OS.
I forget what set me on this track exactly, but at some point in googling around about Gameguard and Wine, some page or other mentioned VirtualBox, a VM program. After getting an XP VM up and running, and a bit of fiddling to get the Direct3D support enabled, I decided to test out Guild Wars as a trial-run, as it was the closest DirectX game I had on hand. Now this computer is not current top-of-the-line, but it's no slouch: Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz and a GeForce 8800GTS, with 1.5GB of RAM devoted to the VM. At minimum graphics settings, I was getting 1 fps in GW. Adding -dx8 and -noshaders command line arguments I managed to get that up to 15 fps, still quite unplayable, and considering the respective sysreqs of GW and Aion, I can't imagine something that runs GW that poorly even attempting to run Aion. My understanding based on reading VirtualBox's forums is that this is because of the way the VM must emulate the video card and can't let things access the actual video card directly for... Reasons I don't understand.
Now, it's entirely possible that Aion will have less of a reduced performance in VM than GW happens to, but I'm not holding my breath on that. So my question to you, my good ubuntuforumers, is are there any other options besides dual-booting? Is there another VM program with better Direct3D support? Is there some workaround for tricking Gameguard into not freaking out over being run in Wine/CrossOver/etc? Is there something else I'm plain not thinking of?
Apologies if this is poorly-placed, but the Gaming & Leisure stickies were pretty emphatic about Windows games questions going here, and this is more about getting Aion to work in whatever way than about VM as a possible solution.
Thanks in advance.
I understand that Aion is unlikely (understatement) to work in Wine, CrossOver, etc due to Gameguard. I prefer not to take the dual-booting route, as my own experiences with it involved getting more frustrated over having to reboot back and forth, splitting my IM and IRC logs, keeping up two e-mail clients, two sets of bookmarks, etc than at the individual downsides of either OS.
I forget what set me on this track exactly, but at some point in googling around about Gameguard and Wine, some page or other mentioned VirtualBox, a VM program. After getting an XP VM up and running, and a bit of fiddling to get the Direct3D support enabled, I decided to test out Guild Wars as a trial-run, as it was the closest DirectX game I had on hand. Now this computer is not current top-of-the-line, but it's no slouch: Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz and a GeForce 8800GTS, with 1.5GB of RAM devoted to the VM. At minimum graphics settings, I was getting 1 fps in GW. Adding -dx8 and -noshaders command line arguments I managed to get that up to 15 fps, still quite unplayable, and considering the respective sysreqs of GW and Aion, I can't imagine something that runs GW that poorly even attempting to run Aion. My understanding based on reading VirtualBox's forums is that this is because of the way the VM must emulate the video card and can't let things access the actual video card directly for... Reasons I don't understand.
Now, it's entirely possible that Aion will have less of a reduced performance in VM than GW happens to, but I'm not holding my breath on that. So my question to you, my good ubuntuforumers, is are there any other options besides dual-booting? Is there another VM program with better Direct3D support? Is there some workaround for tricking Gameguard into not freaking out over being run in Wine/CrossOver/etc? Is there something else I'm plain not thinking of?
Apologies if this is poorly-placed, but the Gaming & Leisure stickies were pretty emphatic about Windows games questions going here, and this is more about getting Aion to work in whatever way than about VM as a possible solution.
Thanks in advance.