Three Wise Men

Recent Indie Humble Bundle provided us with Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds: Survivor two excellent third person action shooter games from Frozenbyte. There is a small problem if you are running Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal (this probably applies to Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat). There are no sounds in the game.

The problem lies in the libasound which is bundled with the game. The solution is pretty much trivial, just get rid of those libraries. If you installed the game as root for all users then do this for Shadowgrounds:

# cd /usr/local/games/shadowgrounds/lib32/
# rm libasound*

And this for Shadowgrounds: Survivor:

# cd /usr/local/games/survivor/lib32/
# rm libasound*

Or if you are afraid that you’ll break something, move libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so and libasound.so.2 out of the lib32 directory.

Run the game, enjoy the sound. :)

It was a thing of a moment. We decided to try some live streaming of Monkey Island 2, special edition. After realizing that Xfire fails miserably with streaming games that are not listed as supported we went looking for another solution.

Livestream’s Procaster was the first thing we tried and while we had some trouble at first it picked up rather nicely and the overall quality was decent enough.

Procaster supports streaming of any Direct3D game together with sound and in the free version you can mix output of your web camera and your screencast. We also had some trouble with the sound being recorded from the camera and we needed few minutes to figure out how to turn off the extra sound input. Here is some room for improvement, an audio mixer that can be controlled while streaming.

All in all, the broadcasting was an interesting experience and we are likely to do some more screencasts in the future. We were pleasantly surprised with the recording of our video. If you missed it and you are not bored with pirate oriented adventure games you can watch our screencast below.

During press conference Sony confirmed that PlayStation 3 prices will drop. $299 for 80 GB version, $399 for 160GB version and PlayStation 3 Slim with 120 GB hard drive will hit the shelves in September for $299.

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Fingers are still crossed for 2009 release of Starcraft 2, but now with a bitter aftertaste. It appears that Starcraft 2 will lack support for multi-player games over LAN network. Multi-player will be supported only over internet via Battle.Net service. Everyone was aksing why on earth they did that?

“We don’t currently plan to support LAN play with StarCraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with StarCraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games. While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy.”

Said Bob Colayco from Blizzard.