Went to install DDO on a new computer today,  started the launcher downloading this morning and checked into it in the evening. 

Launcher bugged out on downloading client_sound.dat all day where it would get the file to 80% or so then restart. 

I got it fixed but fuck me, I wonder how many gigs of data I burned today.

noamineo wrote on Jan 26^th, 2021 at 10:21pm:


I did a fresh install,  I probably should have just copied the bottle but I decided to start from fresh since I'm working on a very unsupported install.  macOS M1.

noamineo wrote on Jan 26^th, 2021 at 10:50pm:

Well it runs,  at about 30fps with dx9 atm.  I should be able to get it to 60fps consistent I think with tweaking,  but either way, not bad considering it's an emulator running wine to play it.

NOTpopejubal wrote on Jan 27^th, 2021 at 12:13am:


Yes it does download files, but if it gets stuck downloading a specific file it does not use data while being stuck.

So the entire game is about 13gb, some of that's compressed but lets ignore that.  Lets say the download gets stuck at 80% as Charon said, about 10.88gb, it then sits there and doesn't use any more data until someone un-derps it.

Flav wrote on Jan 27^th, 2021 at 1:14pm:


Yup. Really wish M$ would do more offline-installers for that sort of thing. Hate having to redownload every friggin time...)

Flav wrote on Jan 27^th, 2021 at 1:14pm:


I'm interested.

So you suspect Turbine/SSG is not compressing the files for download, then de-compressing them after? That would/should have been standard practice in the Asheron's Call days when everyone still had dialup. I remember waaaaay back in the day, practically every file you downloaded(IF you could get a direct DL) came compressed; that's how companies like WinZip made their bank. I never played an MMO in the dialup days but I know patches were tough for that reason. Of course NOT doing that would be perfectly on-brand for SSG...

BTW just did some testing, 

With the lowest end MBA with an M1, 

I'm getting 85fps now with DX11.

I'm highly impressed considering that it's running through an emulator then a version of wine that has to turn 32 bit code to 64 bit and do all the normal wine stuff.

Definitely works well,  obviously a gaming system would be better, but it's just interesting to see what it can do.

Ok so I bought the latest macbook air.  It's Apple's low end laptop.  I bought the model that uses a 7 core gpu instead of 8,  because I bought it mostly as a coding laptop and I didn't want to spend the money.

Those new macbooks don't use an intel chip they use apple's new M1 system on a chip and the cpu is an arm variant.  This is similar to your phone for example.

To run ddo the code has to go through:

Rosetta 2.  This is Apple's amd64 emulator.  It makes it so that 64 bit code that can execute on an intel processor can still run on the new chip.  However, as always emulation involves a slow down.

Crossover 20.  This is a commercial version of wine which allows macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS users to run windows apps on non-windows os's.

However on mac,  crossover's work goes one step farther.  Mac removed the ability of it's computers to execute 32 bit code a couple OS versions ago.  (Which is why SSG only supports a version of the OS that will stop getting support this fall).  This required the crossover team to write not only a change in wine, but a custom compiler so that 32bit windows code would then call 64bit wine libraries that macOS could then execute.

Not to mention dx9 gets changed to opengl and dx11 gets changed to vulkan and then to metal.

All this translation means that the solid but mediocre performance I'm getting impresses the hell out of me.

noamineo wrote on Jan 27^th, 2021 at 3:01pm:

The part that sold me on it is the 16 core NPU on the M1 chip.

So I'm not sure on the increase in power from cm3 to cm4 with the Turing pi's,  but the benefit of the system is limited to server applications that can use the 4 compute modules to offload work,  or other programs that use massively parallel processing. 

Even though I'd get faster results on a modern "real" cpu though I've thought of setting up a chain of raspi zeros on a usb hub to form my own cheap cluster and writing a program to calculate prime numbers on it, just for the educational experience.

noamineo wrote on Jan 27^th, 2021 at 5:28pm:


You can do the offloading thing with any other pc on the network,  the purpose of that hardware is clustering.  For example I have an 2008 Mac Pro with dual Xeons that I offload some tasks to when they'll tie up lots of resources and I don't really care about speed. (It's not fast anymore but it has a lot of cores, drive space, and ram)

The turing pi or any pi cluster has two values,  it can be setup cheaper than most other options, which leads it to be useful in testing cluster software before running it on a real cluster, and education since a pi cluster is affordable as a teaching tool where a real cluster would be cost prohibited.

As far as doing it with zeros, it would simplify any cluster build greatly since you could power and provide a network connection all with the same plug from a good hub.  This means you don't need to build a custom power supply to provide power to multiple pi's and you don't need to incorporate any other networking gear into your build.

noamineo wrote on Jan 27^th, 2021 at 6:14pm:


You boot the pi in gadget mode.

https://gist.github.com/gbaman/50b6cca61dd1c3f88f41

I should note there might be more up to date instructions or better ones out there.  It's been a while since I set one up.

noamineo wrote on Jan 27^th, 2021 at 1:28pm:



My bad the utility was for DirectX ( and apparently it's gone, my link to it gives a 404. )

for the VC you have here : https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/the-latest-supported-visual-c-download
s-2647da03-1eea-4433-9aff-95f26a218cc0


Quote:


You're new here ?

It's in the open ( read : not in a restricted forum ) here in The Vault among other things.

It's also in the open with a tiny usage of googlefu.

Also that 404 just started this morning,  I think Microsoft is either just down or in the progress of moving stuff around possibly.