Cedega and World of Warcraft

When you're me and the spouse expresses interest in no longer dual booting, and instead running World of Warcraft under Cedega since it's supposed to be possible, you end up in one of those "I guess I can take a break from my work and forgo sleep tonight" situations to see if you can get it all set up before said spouse changes his mind. Those who know me know that Cedega and I don't necessarily get along very well--I like the folks at TransGaming just fine but Cedega and I haven't been speaking properly for about a year now--so I was oh so thrilled to give it another try. Usually I'm testing it with older games, so at least I hoped that a newer one would work better.

So far, it is. I upgraded Cedega and Point2Play to the latest versions, and then managed to install WoW in Fedora Core 3 under Cedega. Had to start over once after I discovered that clicking the OK button too early after changing CDs meant that it would never give me another chance! Other than that, the installation went smoothly except for the predicted "error" at the end, which TransGaming's site had already warned me about and assured me wouldn't make a difference.

Once I had the software installed, I knew at least I wouldn't run into what caused me so much trouble in Diablo II--the dang CD copy protection stuff. You don't have to have a CD in the drive to run WoW. So, I quickly discovered that Point2Play wouldn't properly launch the game ... well, not properly is a nice way to put it, I clicked Play and it did nothing. Since you don't have to use Point2Play I launched it from the command line without a problem. After going through the lovely process of creating an account with a screen the game had left me with in a weird resolution where the mouse didn't want to reach all of the form sections, I managed to get to that fun point of any online-capable game where you spend the next few hours of your life downloading the updates. That's fine, except the fact that it reduced my computer to a teeth-grinding crawl. Few have accused me of having the patience of a saint.

At the 50% point the download froze and refused to move on. I quit and started again. The updater was smart enough to return very quickly to 50% and then froze again. My husband ran into the same problem at 4%. Fortunately, you can download the patch manually, and then you can manually install it using Cedega. Having done this, it's time to see how the game actually plays on my machine. Er, no, another client patch, ugh. Gotta love MMORPGs!

Finally, I get in and am able to create a character. Once I get into the game I see that my sad little ATI Radeon can manage to kind of keep up with the opening "movie" as long as it doesn't try to look too far into the distance, which is fine and certainly not Cedega's fault. What I'm pleased with is that the game is pretty playable with my sad little video card. Ironically, I end up having less trouble playing it than the spouse, who has a newer ATI card and is still trying to iron out the kinks (we know, we know, nVidia has always worked better with Linux, I can't remember how we got stuck with all ATIs). Of course, I tried to enter a building and hit an error and now can't log in and play that character anymore, heh heh, but Blizzard is having problems with their game worlds so I'll cut everyone a bit of slack and wait to see if that problem goes away once they get everything fixed.

All in all, this is the most successful Cedega experiment I've done in a long time. I might actually have to get updated hardware!

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit