Archive:Lord of the Rings Online
Lord of the Rings Online Tutorial
Lord of the Rings Online is a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. Currently in Europe this game has a Free version which allows the users to play a percentage of the contents available, and offers the possibility of using the in-game store to buy contents, though it's completely user choice.
To write this tutorial, I've used the following:
- openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 6 (x86_64);
- Lord of the Rings Online (European Version, using a Free account);
- Wine 1.3.10 (default on openSUSE 11.4);
- PyLotRO (latest version available);
- winetricks (d3dx9);
- ATI FireGL (fglrx) 11.1 on kernel 2.6.37-20-desktop.
The hardware used was pretty much command standard hardware, in this case a simple VAIO Laptop armed with a ATI M92 RV730.
This tutorial is aimed for performance and not for eye-candy. The performance achievement is quite nice, but some graphical options have been disabled as they eventually lead the game to crash or provide substantial performance breaks if enabled.
Setup
As stated before, the system used for testing this game was openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 6, which ships with wine version 1.3.10. At a later stage, I've tested the latest development version packaged by wine veteran Markus Meissner and found actually better results (reduced the number of crashes).
Through this section, I will demonstrate how to prepare your openSUSE 11.4 system to install Lord of the Rings Online.
Install Wine
openSUSE 11.4 'Celadon' comes with wine version 1.3.10, which is very capable of running this game. To install wine on a openSUSE running system, the easiest way is through 'zypper'.
Open your virtual terminal of choice (ex: konsole, gnome-terminal, xterm, rxvt, etc) and type in the following command:
zypper install wine
Zypper will check for the necessary dependencies and will prompt you if you really want to install, to which you might want to say 'Yes'. Voilá, wine is now installed.
WARNING: I've had better results with wine version 1.3.13 from the Emulators:Wine repository. I strongly recommend this version of wine made available by openSUSE contributor and Wine developer, Marcus Meissner.