Codemonkeyx

Yeah, I was Codemonkeyx back on EA Live... at least until I got myself and a bunch of other people from the guild banned! 😅

Hey alys, is that the name you used on Live? I see you were also a RIPer from Pegasus! Seems like we're thinking about the same thing... I'm interested what your play style is that makes a pure tank desirable? I was kinda thinking that I would be doing most of my damage with missiles kiting from range, then the JE/JD/PP would just be for cleanup of anything that was low/got close + utility. I could see a completely different strategy where one goes all up-close and personal and runs more J*/P*, but then I have doubts about whether I would want as many Terrans. How does the PW fit in for you? I was mostly debating between PP/PS, but now wondering if I should give PW a harder look as well. The PP/PS utility is just hard to pass up.

I'm leaning toward TE, TT, TS, JE, JD, and PP. Overall missles + JE/JD utility + PP shield regen seems like the best set of buffs... hull damage control (PW) and warp recovery time (JS) in particular don't seem to add a lot, and neither of those combos seem to have gotta have utility. The PS weapon efficiency would be nice, but I can't think of any of the others I would want to give up for it.

Hey all you multiboxing lovers of 6-packs, in your opinion, what are the 6 best race/class combos for a highlander (there can only be one [of each race/class combo]) 6-pack, and why? I'm guessing JE and TT are obvious includes for utility. Personally I will definitely have a TE as well as that's my bag. But I'm less sure on the other 3. Thoughts? Opinions? Unpopular opinions? Another way of stating the question, which are the worst 3 race/class combos in a group that you would exclude? 😁

Errors go to stderr, not basic output from programs. If that were true it would certainly make my life a lot easier! Seriously though, it's from the perspective of the program or function... POSIX says only: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/stderr.html which obviously comes ultimately from C. So stderr is somewhat poorly named as diagnostic messages are not all errors. This stack overflow poster summarized it well: https://stackoverflow.com/a/74896844 So from the perspective of installing the Earth & Beyond Emulator all of this extra output is logging/diagnostics. I didn't spend a whole lot of time ensuring all the superfluous output goes to stderr, but many of the large wine/winetricks actions for example are wrapped in blocks like this: output=$(... 2>&1) || { rc="${?}"; err "rc: ${rc}, output: ${output}"; exit "${rc}" } which will not be printed at all unless there is an error because wine is incredibly spammy and there is little to nothing of value in there if you aren't a wine or winetricks dev, which, tbf, I did feel like at times during the development of this, heh. I think it would be completely defensible to do the same thing to these installs, but I decided to at least leave the output on stderr since they're somewhat "unexpected" or abnormal, or at least represent a larger change to the system beyond just the expected items going into `~/.wine-enb`. Anyway, thanks again for all the feedback and your concern, I do appreciate it, and you definitely helped make this script much better. Hopefully it will work more seamlessly for people on yet other distros.

Don't do that. Fix the script instead. I'm not sure I understand; that did fix the script. The output will still show up on the console, it just won't go into the WINE_EXEC variable. What are you concerned about? $ echo $(echo stdout; echo stderr 1>&2) stderr stdout

Alright, I spent a ton of time digging into this and trying some different things out, but ultimately I think it's because the config app checks the resolution against something and if it decides it's invalid / not-supported it reverts back to defaults. On my system 1312x984 was working, but obviously it doesn't on yours. If I set it to 1x1 I see the same behavior you're describing where it goes back to 640x480 fullscreen... so I changed the default again to 1280x960 windowed which should at least be visible for anyone and they can adjust from there. It turns out winetricks has a built-in mechanism for handling this, I just had to set WINE when I call it. This is a winetricks dependency that is usually installed along with the winetricks package, so yeah, I had to add an explicit check to install it separately. I sent all the installer output to stderr. added Amazing how difficult Ubuntu is making everything... seems like everything we try and do to solve one problem just causes two more. Thanks again for all the testing. Hopefully we're getting close to the center of this onion 😅

Ah, the joys of cross-platform shell scripting. doh, I remember seeing that too but when I got around to making that replacement I did it by " wine " 🤦‍♂️ fixed 🤦‍♂️ I went ahead and implemented your suggestion set is POSIX, as is trap; there should not be anything bash specific about that function... indeed, the goofiness of it is specifically to make it POSIX-compliant, doing this in pure bash is much easier because you can just use an array, e.g. https://www.shellcheck.net/wiki/SC2124 from `man set`: from `man trap`: I'm just using it to easily modify the EXIT trap without having to deal with a nightmare of unquoting and re-quoting. This is a pretty standard way of doing this in bourne shell to make it cross-platform. trap by itself just lists the traps that have been set, so I'm grepping for the EXIT trap, then saving it into the positional args with set, it just sets $1, $2, $3, etc. but since trap begins each line with `trap -- ` I shift twice to get rid of those, so the whole thing looks like this: $ bash $ trap 'rm -f /tmp/some_file' EXIT $ trap 'some other trap' INT $ trap trap -- 'rm -f /tmp/some_file' EXIT trap -- 'some other trap' SIGINT $ trap | grep -E 'EXIT$' | sed 's/ EXIT$//' trap -- 'rm -f /tmp/some_file' $ set -- $(trap | grep -E 'EXIT$' | sed 's/ EXIT$//') $ echo $1 trap $ echo $2 -- $ echo $3 'rm $ echo $4 -f $ echo $5 /tmp/some_file' $ shift $ shift $ echo $1 'rm $ echo $2 -f $ echo $3 /tmp/some_file' then I add the new exit command and append the original commands back on. The problem seems to be that dash has some very weird behavior with both pipes and command substitutions which do not follow the POSIX spec imho: $ dash $ trap 'rm -f /tmp/some_file' EXIT $ trap 'some other trap' INT $ trap trap -- 'rm -f /tmp/some_file' EXIT trap -- 'some other trap' INT $ trap | grep . $ echo $(trap) $ trap > /tmp/saved_traps $ cat /tmp/saved_traps trap -- 'rm -f /tmp/some_file' EXIT trap -- 'some other trap' INT so I should be able to fix this by redirecting to a temporary file instead (oh the irony). I think you might be confusing the config with the Character & Starship Creator? e&b/net7 config are just basic windows applications with a single panel. Or perhaps you mean the resolution that they default the game to? I do have a change in the script where I'm trying to default it to windowed @1312x984 by changing the registry, e.g. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Westwood Studios\Earth and Beyond\Render] "RenderDeviceWidth"=dword:00000520 "RenderDeviceHeight"=dword:000003D8 "RenderDeviceWindowed"=dword:00000001 But the Character & Starship Creator is fixed at 640x480 which is damn annoying; I tried to get around that by creating a wine virtual desktop with `explorer /desktop=...,800x600` which seems to work for me... but before I added that I was having the same problem you describe when launching the CSC. The only other thing I can think of is if this new default resolution is causing you an issue (1312x984) if the old one worked (1400x1050), but that would be dependent on you switching it from windowed to fullscreen since it should be defaulting to windowed. If you can provide more details on this it would be helpful. I've seen that happen intermittently as well but I've had no luck tracking down what's happening; it seems like the autohotkey script is getting stuck somehow. I tried one thing out which may fix it if it somehow skipped over my loop break condition.

@karu I put in some fixes for everything above except for the `add_exit_cmd` issue as I don't have anything to go on there and it seems to be working exactly as expected for me. I'll need more info to understand what's going on there. Thanks again for giving this a try!

Thanks for testing it out, can you provide all the output of the failures you ran into and I can try to get that stuff fixed? Alright, I found a way to handle this if there is no wine-gecko package using the msi installer as you suggested. Ah, I see the problem: https://github.com/wine-staging/wine-staging > On most distributions the wine-staging package is installed to /opt/wine-staging, such that multiple Wine versions can be installed in parallel. If this is the case for your distribution, you will have to type /opt/wine-staging/bin/wine instead of just wine. I'll add a check to try and find both (starting with `/opt/wine-staging/bin/wine`) and use whichever I find first. I'm definitely curious about the exact error you got here; all this is trying to do is cleanup some temporary files at the end. This is the one thing I'm not sure how to handle so if you could provide the log for this it would be a big help. Hmm, I do have a check in there for that which should have skipped that section if gsettings doesn't exist; though perhaps it exists for you even though you don't have gnome, e.g. you either had gnome in the past, or your distro includes that and doesn't remove it even when you switch to another WM. I will investigate a more foolproof check for gnome there.

https://www.frankklepacki.com/ost/vg/earthandbeyond https://archive.org/details/earth-and-beyond-soundtrack

First of all, a huge thanks to @Nimsy for her excellent detailed install guide without which this script would not be possible. I banged my head against the wall for quite awhile before finding her guide buried on page 7 of the existing thread. Once the GMs have a chance to review this and some people have been able to give it a try I would like for this post to replace the venerable "Linux(maybe mac?)/Wine install guide." as I spent a ridiculous (seriously, if my wife hears Megan's voice in the installer one more time she will divorce me) amount of time trying to incorporate everything I could find in that thread into one cohesive fully-automated script. I looked briefly into supporting MacOS (Darwin) but it doesn't seem possible, especially on recent MacOS versions; Apple is working hard to kill off OpenGL and replace it with Metal and the WINE builds I could find have no 32-bit support which is a requirement. I would also like to see the FAQ updated, specifically the "Game play and issues" section, to bifurcate the "How do I get in the game !!" topic into Windows and Linux versions where the latter is just a disclaimer about Linux not being officially supported and a link to this post. This would make it much easier for my future Linux brethren to find this and hopefully spend a lot less time installing the game and a lot more time playing it! For updates, issues, and PRs: https://github.com/ciphersimian/enb-linux-installer To install (I strongly encourage you to review the script first, you should never run a script directly from the internet like this without reviewing it first!): sh <(curl --fail --silent --show-error --location https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ciphersimian/enb-linux-installer/master/install-enb-linux.sh) -or- sh <(wget --no-verbose --output-document=- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ciphersimian/enb-linux-installer/master/install-enb-linux.sh) Long Live Tux! 🐧

Thanks for the response, oakman/FlyingFireTruck. The e&bconfig.exe loads just fine, but what I expected was to be able to change the value of EnBConfigPath in the user.config and make it point to another location, namely the net7config.exe tool which is a bit nicer. The bigger issue was the CharCreatorPath setting because on Linux (for me) launching that from LaunchNet7.exe never works because the "Character and Starship Creator.exe" is hard-coded to 800x600 and tries to set some video mode that my monitor doesn't support. It attempts to go "full screen 800x600" and just blacks out my screen and the monitor ultimately turns off because it doesn't support the mode. I can work around this by launching it separately from wine and setting /desktop=CSC,800x600 which forces it into a window and everything works fine. So for example if I could customize CharCreatorPath and that worked I could redirect it to a script which does the above.

I'm trying to modify my `user.config` so that the Tools menu items of LauncherNet7.exe work, and point to the versions I want them to. Is there any documentation for the `user.config`? Are these absolute or relative paths? Are they paths + filenames or just paths? <setting name="EnBConfigPath" serializeAs="String"> <value>C:\EnB\EBCONFIG\net7config.exe</value> </setting> <setting name="CharCreatorPath" serializeAs="String"> <value>C:\EnB\CnSC\CnSC.exe</value> </setting> Are these configuration values implemented and do they work?

I wasn't sure if this was the right forum for this, or if I should open a bug report (not a bug, yet!) or what, but hopefully one of you devs sees this. If you wouldn't mind tossing an ack in here just to let me know you're on it so I don't need to figure out how to escalate it further I would appreciate it, thanks! I've been working on trying to get the client running in my environment and noticed that the cert expiration is imminent (NotAfter 9/11/23). It's a little odd that the cert is only valid for 3 months... it seems like an application like this could just make it never expire and re-issue a cert only if you have a security incident requiring you to do so? For people in a position where they have to trust this cert explicitly for one reason or another having to do so every 3 months is a little cumbersome (as is updating it for you I'm sure!). Just my $0.02! $ openssl s_client -showcerts -connect sunrise.net-7.org:443 ... Certificate chain 0 s:CN = net-7.org i:C = US, O = Let's Encrypt, CN = R3 a:PKEY: rsaEncryption, 2048 (bit); sigalg: RSA-SHA256 v:NotBefore: Jun 13 18:57:16 2023 GMT; NotAfter: Sep 11 18:57:15 2023 GMT

This is wild. I haven't thought about this game in nearly two decades and I never knew this emulator existed before today. Somewhat disappointed about Starfield, I got to thinking about all the good space games I've played over the years. I was part of the notorious Rest In Peace guild on Pegasus during EA Live. I've seen a ton of familiar names on here already. Probably my biggest claim to infamy was getting a whole lot of people (including myself) who were fully geared out from all the raids at the time an uh, let's call it early sunset for macroing on EA Live. Oh to be young and stupid again. I guess I was macroing before it was cool, as I've seen a whole lot of controversy about it in posts on here already, but it seems attended macroing is actually allowed?! For anyone that remembers (who am I kidding, the polls clearly show that pretty much ALL of you remember) Exploration XP was awful to get on EA Live. Turns out they had a bug in a repeatable exploration mission at the time that you could just click through all the dialog in a particular order right there at the terminal to complete the mission without going anywhere. As someone who had maxed out pretty much everything but Exploration in an obscene number of hours of completely legitimate game play, I viewed this both as clever use of game mechanics and something they owed me for Exploration being broken. I told a bunch of my friends and guild mates about it too. As a budding computer science student at the time, I then got the bright idea to automate the process. I distributed a binary to a whole lot of people that clicked through the whole sequence automatically, and did it very quickly. Needless to say, the number of people that ended up piling around that terminal grew and grew and the secret was clearly out of the bag. Not long after, there was a ban wave of the most egregious offenders. I took to the forums to try and appeal on behalf of all the people who I'd unintentionally helped to get banned by distributing that tool. Not only was that ineffective, but the community manager actually called me out specifically and posted the details showing the extent to which I had exploited the bug for everyone to see. I don't actually remember the numbers anymore, but it was fairly obscene, and turned even the somewhat sympathetic firmly against us. Definitely a humiliating learning experience (and a humbling one at that) for a much younger me. I don't remember much of what happened after that (I didn't try to come back to the game), but if you were one of the people that got banned for that using my tool, I'm so sorry! I read that (among other things) the emu has made some balancing changes to Exploration XP... I feel somewhat vindicated by that, hah. Anyway, this has been a blast from the past. As a way of paying reparations for my past sins committed against the EnB community and to thank all these devs for their hard work of bringing this thing back to life I decided to make some donations to get you guys the rest of the way to the new server hardware migration & software upgrades goal, it's the least I can do.