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It's no longer a secret that we've been doing work for Wargaming, Inc.,
the makers of the hugely popular World of Tanks, World of Warplanes,
and the forthcoming World of Warships (which is currently in open beta).
We're doing the Mac port of World of Warships,
and we've gotten to the point where it's in good enough shape that it
needs some serious testing. And who better to do some serious testing
than a naval historian who's written a book on the Battle of Midway,
and who is an adjunct lecturer for the U.S. Naval War College, and
given talks at Pearl Harbor, the National WWII Museum, the Nimitz
Museum, and blah blah blah? Yeah, ummm, I guess that'd be me.
Splash screen for World of Warships, running on my Mac. Late-war Nagato-class battleship, so pretty...
So, first things first: from a purely technical standpoint, our Mac port
is going to be great. I've played the game extensively on Windows and
on my Macbook Pro, and there's no perceptible difference in game play.
None. If anything, with my Mac's SSD drive, it plays better on the Mac
than at home on Windows. No graphical glitches, no performance issues,
nothing. It works very, very well. When my ship sinks on my Mac, it
sinks
exactly the way it ought to on Windows: broken, capsizing, and in flames. And that's not just hype.
Me, sinking: broken, capsizing and in flames... but at least I killed the pesky destroyer that killed me...
So is the game fun? Yeah, sadly, it really is. And I say "sadly,"
because, believe me, I need a good game to chew up my time like I need a
hole in the head. (I am, after all, working on my next book.) But
Wargaming has done a really good job injecting a sense of realism while
tempering it with game balance as well. This is, after all, a game, and
it's meant to be fun. Having done play-testing on some "hyper-realistic"
games (including 360 Pacific's horrifically bad Gulf War simulation
"Patriot"), I can tell you that games are supposed to be fun, first and
foremost. "Realism" is nice, but "fun" is nicer. And this is a great mix
of both.
So, for instance, if you're a hardcore Imperial Japanese Navy fan (which
I most certainly am), you'll see a mixture of the perennial favs
(battleship
Fuso, heavy cruiser Mogami, and of course the mighty Yamato) mixed in with a bunch of never-built oddities. And you might be tempted to say, "The cruiser Zao? The carrier Hakuryu?
What the hell were those?!?" Really, what those are, are conveniently
vague placeholders that give Wargaming the wiggle-room it needs to make
sure that things are reasonably well-balanced between tiers of warships.
Come to me, my prey... just a little bit closer...
The equipment, likewise, "feels" realistic, even though it kinda isn't.
So, yeah, if you're playing a battleship, you'll notice that your main
armament has a much flatter trajectory at medium range than, say, a
cruiser's armament (which is fair enough). But then again, if you take a
look at the range of
Yamato's main guns, 26.6km, you'll see that that's about 60% of
their real-life maximum. All the weapon ranges are downscaled in this
way. Likewise, ship speeds (and certainly acceleration) are all scaled
up, so that players feel like they have mobility around the battlefield.
In real life naval gunnery, encounters often felt as if they were
being waged in slow motion, although some of the encounters in places
like the Solomons could be comparatively fast-moving and short range.
However, even a real-life brawl like the First Naval Battle of
Guadalcanal, which was very fast to develop, and about the nearest thing
to a knife-fight we got into in the Solomons, lasted for nearly 45
minutes. World of Warships encounters are all brawls of this
type, but they typically take about 15-20 minutes apiece. That's a nice
chunk of time: long enough to be interesting, but not so long that your
wife will yell at you for being an hour late to dinner.
There's a lot more terrain on World of Warships ocean than there was in
most real-world naval encounters as well. Most of the games I've played
seem to be fought over the remains of some ancient, sunken volcanic
calderas. (I had no idea that that many ancient sunken volcanic calderas
even
existed in the world.) In the game, you routinely use small
islands to shield your maneuvers, or to sneak up on your opponent, or to
get the hell out of the way before that enemy battleship over there
unloads on you. That's "fun," but it ain't very realistic. In fact, no
naval officer in his/her right mind would be willing to drive a ship
into any of these horribly constricted maps festooned with toothy rocks
and volcanic peaks. But then again, such maps are fun as hell, and it's a
hoot to drive your
Kuma-class T4 cruiser through there like a Porsche taking the curves on Hwy 1. What's not to like?
Notice the terrain all around me? Yeah, there's a lot of that.
I also appreciated the fairly realistic tradeoffs being made between the
various nationalities that reflected their "feel." So, you like
torpedoes and speedy warships? Then go with the Japanese all the way,
but don't expect to have super great survivability. You're into gunnery
and protection? U.S. Navy, baby, but you have to get used to the fact
that your plodding
South Carolina is going to take a lot longer to get into the fight than my zippy little Kuma.
This brings up another point: the individual types of ships also feel
and play differently. And this is good, too. So, for instance, with a
battleship, you really have to think ahead to what you're going to be
doing a minute or two from now, because your ship is slow, your turrets
are very slow to train to new bearings, and your reload time is slow as
well. So, you have to look down the road and think to yourself, "Yeah,
he's going to be around there, and I need to be facing this way in order
to unleash a broadside, but, oh, wait, there's going to be that island
in my way, so I'd better adjust my course now." This is why I primarily
play cruisers, not battleships. "Yep, everything's goin'
great... mhmmm... my 6" guns are nibbling that guy to death… oh crap, torpedoes! Turn around NOW and
run like hell!!!"
Anyway, the game is a hoot. I'll be playing more of it, and can't wait
to see it released. If you're a naval history fan, whether you're
running Mac or Linux, I think you'll really enjoy it. And if you see
"JonnyKaigun" out on the servers, you know who he is now...
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The last two and a half weeks of testing were heavily occupied with attention to World of Tanks and World of Warships.
With
World of Tanks we began by triaging a crash that started with the 9.9
update. We fixed the issue quickly and sent a new build to Wargaming. We
followed this with a fix for a severe drop in frame-rates with the 9.9
update. A fix for the frame-rate issue and a mouse offset issue is on
it's way to Wargaming now. We continue work on a rendering issue that
lights up the garage as though it were decorated with blue LED lights on
Intel based systems.
For World of Warships we spent a majority of the time working with the
black screen a user would be met with upon login. The problem is related
to
Wine Bug number 35397.
With more testing and development, we hope to send the fix upstream.
This means we fixed it easily for Wargaming but to ensure we don't break
other applications in Wine, we need to complete the patch by adding
tests and additional cases.
Following that, our normal cycle of testing did not reveal new regressions with the latest version of Wine.
We reproduced a crash reported in our forums with El Capitan and
CrossOver 14.1.4. We confirmed the crash in our development branch and
opened a bug report with Apple regarding the crash. This crash is caused
by an exception in code that only occurs when using El Capitan.
We confirmed that Apple fixed a rendering issue with the release of El Capitan that affects
Banished.
We reviewed
Wine bug number 34041; we confirmed that Skyrim continues to hang on exit both with CrossOver and the latest version of Wine, 1.7.47.
For CrossOver 14, we tested fixes with
Microsoft Office 2010's
behavior on dual screen systems. This includes full-screen
maximize/minimize behavior of primary and secondary screens on Gnome
Classic and Gnome Shell with Metacity and Debian 7. Additional testing
was performed on Debian 8 with dual screen systems. This work will be
included in CrossOver 15 and any future updates of CrossOver 14. We also
retested the behavior of inserting
Word and Excel objects in PowerPoint 2007.
For CrossOver 15
We confirmed a fix for Microsoft Office 2007 & 2010 installs where the contents and control panel would scan forever and never load.
We confirmed a fix for a bad case on bottle renaming where pressing
ESC would rename the bottle in the GUI but not the system. Pressing ESC
now completely cancels the bottle renaming process.
We confirmed a fix for a bad behavior when CrossOver was minimized
to the OSX dock. It now maximizes with a single click, the same behavior
as native applications.
We confirmed a fix where CrossOver could not download specific files
based on a feature in the Mac frameworks via the user agent string.
CrossOver on OSX now uses the same method as Linux for downloads.
We confirmed a fix for PokeXGames where a proper username is now used in the registry setting so the game can rely on it.
Dwrite
has been completely merged into Wine with this update, this means that
more people can now contribute to the work that still needs to be done
for implementation. It also means that we changed how the development of
branch of CrossOver is handled. We now build with dwrite for the first
time in a long time. Unfortunately some titles break with this
configuration, namely Steam.
However, the work to make Steam functional is ongoing and we have
confirmed that if Steam is not functional by the time CrossOver 15 is
released, we can adjust this setting specifically for Steam.
Direct2D implementation was also merged into Wine this week. More people
can now contribute to the work that still needs to be done.
As dwrite and direct2d were submitted to Wine, we performed a series of
tests to ensure that Office 2013 applications remained as functional as
they have been in the past weeks. This means that each application
launches in the very least. In some cases that success is short lived as
the application crashes quickly. Our developers have a sense of humor
with this:
With extreme caution, testing of Office 2013 can now take place with
Wine and with development builds of CrossOver. Many installers do not
yet work, patience.
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