- Joined
- Dec 19, 2021
- Messages
- 1,203
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Hello all,
After 23 years of playing Diablo II, and 13 years since I originally started Bliss Version Switcher on Windows, we are finally now on Linux! This is a big day. We are free from corporate spying, forced updates, forced telemetry, forced AI down your throat, forced having to "sign in to a Microsoft Account" to even use your own computer in the first place. No more. We can now continue to enjoy our favorite game, Diablo II, completely on Linux. Cactus 5.0.0 is a fundamental re-imagining on top of the idea that I've been working on for all of these years. It is too much to write here but I would recommend to completely re-read the main Cactus page again since I wrote it again from scratch. In there it will explain all of the features, improvements, etc. The first thing I'll say is that Cactus is now officially rebranded as follows:
A Modern Diablo II Worldstone Manager (Original, Not Resurrected)
In addition, what we use to call "Platforms" are now "Worldstones". One thing I did recently was to implement and include the MPQ Fix directly into 13 versions of the game that were affected by the modern Blizzard installer. This includes all versions between 1.08 - 1.13d (including 1.10b (Beta 1), 1.10s (Beta 2), and 1.13a (Beta). Nobody in the world will ever again have to worry about fixing their MPQs. It will just work on both Linux and Windows.
When you create a new "Cactus Entry", what you are now creating is a "Shard". A shard is derived from a Worldstone, but it is a specific isolated manifestation of the universe into the physical world. As you normally would expect of such manifestations, you can run multiple shards in parallel. Not just "Multiple Instances" for a Shard, but you can run multiple different Shards at the same time. This means you can run every single version of the game, 1.00 - 1.13d, and even Shards that are based on Mods, all at exactly the same time! The only limitation is your hardware resources. We have also dropped 1.14 completely. 1.14d is patch identical to 1.13d and all they did was merge all of the DLLs into a single Game.exe, and removed DirectDraw support. The DirectDraw support is a big deal for me since it means we can't easily use cnc-ddraw with it. The cnc-ddraw project has had proxy dlls that they distribute for it, which works on Windows, but it doesn't work on Linux. Additionally, since 1.00 - 1.13d have the same file architecture, I decided I wanted to have a more strict file validation process during the automatic shard creation step to increase the chance of success for the user. This benefit outweights having 1.14 - just be cause. Do to these reasons, the 1.14 worldstones are no longer part of Cactus.
Finally, Succulent is now officially part of the Cactus Repository! It will be located alongside Singling in the "Optionals" folder.
The old Windows version is no longer supported. However, I've uploaded it to the Resource Manager and you can find just the Cactus files themselves here.
This is a new beginning for all of us, I already have a few bugs I will fix most likely tomorrow, and I will continue to improve and refine Cactus over time. There's a lot of polishing I want to do internally since I love programming in Zig, and Cactus is the perfect project to continue playing with the language in. I also have a few feature I want to implement, some of them that existed in Cactus before, and some new ones that nobody has seen yet.
Stay safe in Sanctuary folks.
Jonathan
After 23 years of playing Diablo II, and 13 years since I originally started Bliss Version Switcher on Windows, we are finally now on Linux! This is a big day. We are free from corporate spying, forced updates, forced telemetry, forced AI down your throat, forced having to "sign in to a Microsoft Account" to even use your own computer in the first place. No more. We can now continue to enjoy our favorite game, Diablo II, completely on Linux. Cactus 5.0.0 is a fundamental re-imagining on top of the idea that I've been working on for all of these years. It is too much to write here but I would recommend to completely re-read the main Cactus page again since I wrote it again from scratch. In there it will explain all of the features, improvements, etc. The first thing I'll say is that Cactus is now officially rebranded as follows:
A Modern Diablo II Worldstone Manager (Original, Not Resurrected)
In addition, what we use to call "Platforms" are now "Worldstones". One thing I did recently was to implement and include the MPQ Fix directly into 13 versions of the game that were affected by the modern Blizzard installer. This includes all versions between 1.08 - 1.13d (including 1.10b (Beta 1), 1.10s (Beta 2), and 1.13a (Beta). Nobody in the world will ever again have to worry about fixing their MPQs. It will just work on both Linux and Windows.
When you create a new "Cactus Entry", what you are now creating is a "Shard". A shard is derived from a Worldstone, but it is a specific isolated manifestation of the universe into the physical world. As you normally would expect of such manifestations, you can run multiple shards in parallel. Not just "Multiple Instances" for a Shard, but you can run multiple different Shards at the same time. This means you can run every single version of the game, 1.00 - 1.13d, and even Shards that are based on Mods, all at exactly the same time! The only limitation is your hardware resources. We have also dropped 1.14 completely. 1.14d is patch identical to 1.13d and all they did was merge all of the DLLs into a single Game.exe, and removed DirectDraw support. The DirectDraw support is a big deal for me since it means we can't easily use cnc-ddraw with it. The cnc-ddraw project has had proxy dlls that they distribute for it, which works on Windows, but it doesn't work on Linux. Additionally, since 1.00 - 1.13d have the same file architecture, I decided I wanted to have a more strict file validation process during the automatic shard creation step to increase the chance of success for the user. This benefit outweights having 1.14 - just be cause. Do to these reasons, the 1.14 worldstones are no longer part of Cactus.
Finally, Succulent is now officially part of the Cactus Repository! It will be located alongside Singling in the "Optionals" folder.
The old Windows version is no longer supported. However, I've uploaded it to the Resource Manager and you can find just the Cactus files themselves here.
This is a new beginning for all of us, I already have a few bugs I will fix most likely tomorrow, and I will continue to improve and refine Cactus over time. There's a lot of polishing I want to do internally since I love programming in Zig, and Cactus is the perfect project to continue playing with the language in. I also have a few feature I want to implement, some of them that existed in Cactus before, and some new ones that nobody has seen yet.
Stay safe in Sanctuary folks.
Jonathan
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