NetStorm: Islands at War

Netstorm is a very, very addicting game in which you battle on floating islands in the skies of nimbus. Your goal is to capture the enemy priest and sacrifice him in order to gain knowledge from the furies. In multiplayer, you keep this knowledge into future games.

The server for this game is currently being run by Netstorm HQ, Activision's servers having shut down years ago. The current version makes use of an auto updater to download the game for those who don't have it as well as to keep it updated and to make sure all of the files are present and undamaged.

While the game itself has always worked under Wine, the launcher has not. Since the game now disables access to the multiplayer server for anybody who hasn't started the game using the launcher, this has proven to be a big problem for linux users.

With some major help from the kind people in #WineHQ, however, I was able to get my launcher working. The following is a step-by-step instruction I made up telling what I had to do.

1. First thing's first. Download the launcher's installer from http://www.netstormhq.com

Run that under wine. Install the launcher to whatever location in wine's c:\ drive you desire. Default is c:\Program Files\NetstormLaunch\

2. [If your /etc/hosts file is configured correctly, you can skip to step 5. If you're unsure, follow these steps.] Open your /etc/hosts file and see what's in it. The first line should be your local IP address (127.0.0.1) with the word localhost next to it. And the second line should be the IP address of your computer with your computer's name next to it. In mine, the second line was was a local IP (127.0.1.1), which prevented the autoupdater from being able to download the game files.

3. Open your terminal. Type ifconfig. A bunch of stuff should come up on your screen. There should be two blocks, at least for me there was. One was under eth0, the other was under lo. lo is local, so you want to pay attention to the stuff on the other one. Particularly inet addr, since that's your actual IP address.

4. Change the IP address for your computer in the hosts file to your actual IP address. Save the change. You may have to change the permissions for the file so you can make the change.

5. Open your ternimal (if you haven't already) and 'cd' to the launcher's directory. (I had to do:
cd ~/.wine/ drive_c
then:
cd "Program Files/ NetstormLaunch"
For some reason, it doesn't seem to like it when I do the entire directory if one of the levels has a space in it, so I did it in two parts.)

6. Run the launcher from wine. (Your working directory must be the launcher's directory.)
wine "c:\Program Files\ NetstormLaunch\ nsLaunchC.exe"

Unfortunately, as far as I know, you have to launch it the same way every time, from the terminal. First, cd to the directory, and then run the launcher under wine.

Application Details:

Version:	10.x
License:
URL:	http://games.activision.com/ga...
Votes:	0
Latest Rating:	Silver
Latest Wine Version Tested:	1.3.19

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