How to use OpenOffice.org 3 Calc solver in Eternal Lands

The upcoming OpenOffice.org 3 features a new solver in the OpenOffice Calc module. The solver is built on the lp_solve engine, a mixed integer linear programming.

Now how to make use of this in Eternal Lands.
Say you need 103608 points to reach the next Alchemy Level. You decide to make steel bars. These require that you also make fire essences. Both fire essences and steel bars give alchemy points. Now you need to make just enough fire essences and use them all to make just enough steel bars to reach your next level.
OpenOffice.org 3 helps you make that combination.
First install and open a OpenOffice.org 3 beta build. The create a table that resembles the table below. Click on it to see it in bigger detail.

Follow the following procedure:

1. Set cell D4 to 0.
2. Set cell D3 to 3*D4 because you need 3 fire essenses for each steel bar.
3. In cell C5, insert the points you need to reach your next alchemy level.
4. In cell E3 and E4, insert the points you get per fire essence and steel bar made respectively.
5. Set cell C3 to D3*E3 and C4 to D4*E4.
6. Now set C7 to C3+C4.
7. Next open Tools > solver and copy the data from the screenshot. Basically, you set target cell C7 to a value of C5 by changing cells D4. Your only condition is to set C3 to > 0.
8. Then click solve.

The solver will fill out cells D3 and D4 by the approximate minimum number of fire essenses and steel bars you need to reach the next alchemy level. This is done with the condition that we are using all the fire essenses we just made to make just enough steel bars to reach the next alchemy level.

Happy playing Eternal Lands.

New Mystical Warriors Web Site

I started working today with DHT on the new MWAR website. It uses drupal. The website is pretty new but it should serve for now. With time, new features will be added. This is thanks to the fact that drupal is very rich and extensible. Still, I’m open to suggestions as how to improve the website including content or maybe even a better theme (maybe something RPG related).

Seeing the red dargon on peace day

Today was peace day in Eternal lands. Peace day is always a good time to go see extremely dangerous monsters that would normally kill you. On peace day, creatures cannot attack each other. Therefore, I went to the cave where the dragon was on Irilion, otherwise knows as continent two. I’m not sure whether some players placed them there or not, but there were a lot of mines around. The dragon started to lose health when it stepped on them. I managed to take the following few screenshots before my connection to the game started to lag too much and I had to log off. The screenshots are high quality png images and are around 1.4MB each.

Games on Linux

Since I switched to Linux a few years ago, I haven’t played many games except for planetpenguin racer, supertux, supertuxkart and gnome games. Even back when I used windows, the only games I used to play were some racing games including my all time favorite game Monaco GrandPrix Racing Simulation 2 by UbiSoft which is undoubtedly the best car racing game ever. UbiSoft used to be great back then. Just over a week  ago, I tried Eternal Lands using the ArchLinux aur package. It was pretty fun since I’ve never played a mmorpg game before. The graphics were fast and the game was a bit addicting and easy to play. But the fun ended fast since they released a new version and wouldn’t let anyone using the old client log in to the game. I downloaded the updated client. But it wouldn’t run on my computer (a AMD sempron 2300+ with 1GB ram and a nvidia 7300 gt card). The game would immediately crash once I launch it. I downloaded the client source from cvs and compiled it because I assumed this would solve the problem but I got the same crash. I don’t really care much about games so this didn’t annoy me but if anyone has a solution, I would surely be interested in knowing it