Dark Age of Camelot?

[gylf]

Anyone have any luck with DAoC in Ubuntu?

I've tried the standard and cvs versions of cedega and wine with no real luck. I get very poor framerates, corrupted character select screens, etc. I would consider paying for cedega if it supported the game, but their notes say that in certain situations the only solution is to "log in using another OS". This game is the only thing keeping me duel booting to windows.

Further, if there is a lot of interest out there in a linux client, I might start a petition to try and generate some community support for a native client. Petitions usually have little to no effect, but Mythic has listened to their players in the past and has taken a keener interest lately in using player opinion to organize their priorities. My hats off to them for that.

Anyway, if anyone does play, my character's name is Cupajoe in Midgard on Lamorak. I'm the guildmaster of JT's Legacy, and all are welcome :)

[Snowmayne]

It's funny, but I think DAoC is about the only thing really keeping me from jumping completely in to any type of Linux. Other than that, it seems anything WinXP does, Linux does too. Guess it's time to pester Mythic about making a Linux client. ;)

[gylf]

Thanks for the reply. I actually don't play DAoC anymore; I've switched to Guild Wars, Civilization 4, and I will be on to a new addiction soon, I'm sure ;)

However, I'd still love to see a linux client for DAoC. I'm far less optimistic now than I was a year ago though; EA Games has purchased Mythic, and Mythic is working all-out on a new expansion and their new Warhammer MMO.

Here is what really bothers me though. This is a clip from an article in Gamasutra: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20020213/firor_01.htm

Postmortem: Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot
February 13, 2002

What Went Right
[. . .]
5. The joys of open source software and stability. Long ago, during the development of our early titles, we decided to use Linux wherever possible as our server back-end OS, and we kept to this same practice when creating Dark Age of Camelot. We have extensive Linux experience in-house, and it made sense for us to stay with a platform that we knew could handle the task and also was, well, free.

Because running Camelot would require a considerable amount of data management, we initially planned on using Oracle to store account and character information. However, Oracle's quoted license fee of more than $900,000 quickly removed them from contention. Once we got over our shock and amusement at Oracle's pricing, we turned to a Linux-based freeware solution, MySQL, to manage Camelot's data storage, which so far has worked admirably.

Everyone developing games should at least investigate open source solutions for their servers. It's saved us a pile of money and has been stable and reliable. In fact, prior to Camelot's launch, it was axiomatic that MMORPGs were unstable and prone to crashing during their first month or so. . . With the combination of reliable server code and a stable Internet connection- all running on open source software - Camelot went live on October 9, 2001, with virtually no problems. That first night, the game went down for about an hour and a half due to a database configuration problem, but since then, the game has been remarkably solid and stable. As of this writing, it hasn't been down due to server error for more than a few minutes ever since the first night.



So linux plays a huge role in DAoC's success, yet they refuse to develop a basic client or a even a wine-compatible version of it, which would most likely be used by the very people who wrote and now support their server software. I personally see some hypocracy there.

Not that any other MMO is better, but it irks me nonetheless.