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Wine Gets Direct3D Support
chromatic writes: "Looks like a company called TransGaming Technologies has been improving DirectX support in Wine. They plan to use a modified Street Performer Protocol to make money, and will eventually relicense their patches under the Wine license. Maybe I'll finally be able to run Thief!" And maybe one day Xbill will run on Windows.
I don't think this would make more gaming companies want to port to Linux. Why? Because they would have to recompile the game with WINE and Linux to get a native binary. Unfortunately, with these 600Meg-1Gig games you see, that would mean adding another CD (or two) to the box, which would cost money, as well as add weight for shipping costs. Why not just go ahead and create a Linux version seperately, if it's going to cost so much more?
The other option would be to compile a Windows only version, test it using WINE on Linux, and if it works, ship it with that version of WINE on the CD. Unfortunately, using WINE as an emulator will see significant loses in speed and framerate (or at least in my experience).
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The World is Yours.
The Transgaming DirectX path is distributed as a diff to Wine 20001222. The WINE site seems extremely poorly designed, with a series of sites [oddly labelled `mirrors' despite the fact none of them contaisn the same software]. I'm still hunting down the list for packages, or even source tarballs, but they're damned difficult to find and most of the sites mentioned are a little stale.
Sould someone please post a link to Wine 20001222? RPMs and DEBs would be great, but source will do.
2.1 was the release of OS/2 that had the most chance of making it in the consumer market. It was stable, allowed you to preemptively multitask Windows programs, and you could do things Windows users could only dream of, like format a disk and do anything else at the same time. And we had users -- the highest estimate I heard was that OS/2 had 10 million users at the height of its popularity. Many of those were home users who were curious and wanted to try it out, ham or BBS operators who wanted real Multitasking, and programmers like me who wanted an OS where you could crash the DOS shell and not have to reboot.
Of course I probably don't know my OS/2 history either. After all, I started working IBM's OS/2 support line around the time that 2.1 was introduced and left around the time they announced that the Boca Raton plant was going to be closed.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Wine doesn't let you run xbill in Windows. It lets you run WinLinus in X.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Perhaps one that had a game with good gameplay but not so flashy graphics who wanted to sell to as wide a market as possible? Many people believe that this thing that you also wrote:
Is so wrong that it's not even funny. Game programming is about producing an enjoyable game, not about throwing megapixels on the screen. The whole "pushing the hardware to the very limit" BS is a fairly recent phenomenon, and may be the reason that PC games (not just the Linux ones as reported on /., but PC games in general) typically are money-losers.
In fact, I believe that the emphasis on programming is misplaced because a game's design is far more important than how pretty the graphics are, and the game's graphics depend more on the work of visual artists than on some coder who's always trying to bum a few cycles. To be sure, the best programmers can combine with the best game designers and aound and visual artists to produce a game that is enjoyable to play and visually stunning as well as a programmatic masterpiece, but simply being a programmatic masterpiece is not sufficient.
The point is that different developers are trying to accomplish different things. Not every developer will share your vision of the way things ought to be. Those that can produce a commercially viable product will get to do it again.
Not true. Microsoft needs third-party developers. That means they're symbiotes, not parasites.
Microsoft considered having Windows test for the presence of MS-DOS, because Windows 3.1 had only been tested with MS-DOS. The notion was that Microsoft could warn consumers that they were using an untested configuration and that Microsoft could not guarantee the proper functioning of their machine. To preserve the option of including such a message in the final product, Microsoft included in the third beta release of Windows 3.1 certain code that looked for MS-DOS. If MS-DOS was not found, that code displayed a benign message asking beta users to call Microsoft support personnel. The goal of the message to beta testers was to determine whether the code that tested for the presence of MS-DOS was working properly. Importantly, Caldera fails to mention that the message to beta testers did not mention DR DOS or DRI by name or suggest that the reason why the message was being displayed had anything to do with the beta tester's operating system. In fact, the message provided beta testers with no indication of what was causing the message to appear. Caldera also fails to mention that no such message was ever displayed in any commercial release of Windows.
Very good! The reason many still have Windows on their computer isn't MS Office and friends, but games.
Naw, Counter-strike doesn't run on a Playstation. That's why mine has been sitting in my stereo cabinet unused now for the last year and a half. Playstations can't hold a candle to a computer with a decent graphics card and the cool FPS games out there. If you want to play basketball or football games then a console would be fine.
LOOK! There allready is xbill for windows:
http://www.azzit.de/xbill/
"Mommy, mommy! The garbage man is here!" "Well, tell him we don't want any!" -- Groucho Marx
1) Is it true that the WINE project could one day run Windows programs faster than Windows does itself? I would have thought that with the open nature of the program code, it would just get faster and faster until it outstrips Windows itself. If this is true, then it would be great for playing games on ;)
2) Is it likely that Microsoft will deliberately try to scupper the WINE project by introducing new API's that are top secret but required to make MS programs work? Or perhaps try their hand legally? But then, I'd have thought that the WINE project benifits Microsoft in a perverse way, by giving them another market to sell to.
Brrrr. I just can't get over how cold NE America is. I can't get used to it at all! :o)
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
WINE is certainly a nice thing to have. However, I'm wondering whether it really is doing more good than harm, as there is a theory that one of the factors which led to the demise of OS/2 was precisely its ability to run Windows (3.1) applications.
Of course, everybody agrees that IBM's attitude did not help, to say the least. But the lack of native OS/2 applications can also be explained by the fact that software developers could target the DOS and Win16 platforms, and also have some OS/2 market share...
Now, OS/2 did not have a strong open-source movement behind it. Nevertheless, couldn't a good WINE make Win32 the de facto standard platform for PC software, and eventually make the OS's it runs on targets for the Microsoft change-the-API tactic, as they did with Windows3.1, 3.11, win32s1.1, 1.25 and 1.30?
A portable engine can be just as fast as a non-portable one. Its called Quake III. Game engines don't use the OS. They call some initialization routines, and then use whatever APIs are available to shove the OS out of the way. The only thing they interface with is OpenGL, the filesystem APIs, and the networking APIs. In the core code, it doesn't interface with anything except custom game code, and maybe OpenGL. Games like Unreal even do their own memory management.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
What's the point if you can remote control Halflife 10 on a windows computer with soap if all the grafics appear on the server?
signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
if they are totally dependent on MS to survive, then they are a parasite
Maybe a better term would be "symbiote"? Symbiosis indicates that two organisms (or whatever) are dependent on each other. The software companies need MS (well, they rely on MS's popularity to provide a large user base for thier product), and the proliferation of software for MS systems helps to make MS Windows, etc., a more popular platform. MS would not disappear if third party developers stopped doing software for it, but it would probably hurt MS. Similarly :) the 3rd party developers could migrate to different platforms when they start getting more of a market share than Windows currently enjoys.
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DirectX 8.0 is completely compatible with versions going back to 3.0 They did not break anything! They added new interfaces, sure, but everything else is still there and even better performing!
I doubt Wine will ever hurt Linux:
Monkey sense
You have selective memory. Some games have always pushed the hardware to its limits, but the reason that PC's had "turbo" buttons for years was because most games, and turbo buttons were all about games, did not push the hardware and you had to slow a faster than standard computer down for them to be even near playable. Most console games even then didn't come anywhere near taxing the hardware they ran on. Some (and here I'm thinking things like Atari chess) did, but it was less about graphical displays than it was about limitations of RAM and ROM. The graphics were intended to be competitive with the often specially-designed arcade equipment and, for the most part, achieved that easily by including similar hardware.
Carrion also wrote:
And how many other game programmers, all of whom are writing games that require substantial upgrades to the typical Windows computer just to run, are driving Ferraris? Damn few. Isn't it just possible that, given the success that some people have while writing games that push the hardware when others fail utterly, even though they push the hardware every bit as hard, that the success doesn't really have that much to do with how extreme their performance is?
For what it's worth, I think Id's commercial success has more to do with having a coherent and enjoyable vision and wise business practices than it does with advancing the state of the art in graphical displays. The pushing of the hardware to new performance levels was a side-effect required because the older techniques weren't able to support the vision. But the vision came first.
There is no doubt in my mind that Id's vision is always going to take the hardware to its limits, but that's the sort of games they design. Other designs are not nearly so hardware intensive. (How many megapixels/sec do you need to do a "Tetris", anyway? I would expect that more people play "Tetris" and "Mahjongg" daily than have ever played "Doom", "Quake", or even "Wolfenstein 3-d".) The fact that other sorts of games can be every bit as enjoyable to play and not tax the hardware proves my point.
Carrion also wrote:
Not necessarily, but making a game that uses hardware "to the max" does not necessarily make a game that is a money-maker. It's the emphasis on technically duplicating "Quake" without really understanding what makes "Quake" playable that makes for money-losers. Your counterexamples don't disprove my opinion because they are so rare.
Carrion also wrote:
How do you know? Are you a game artist? I am willing to stipulate that that is what the visual artist might want, but what does the game designer want? I'm not talking about some crap derivative game designer who is trying to duplicate "Quake" or "Half-Life" or "Diablo" because he thinks, as you apparently do, that simply duplicating someone else's success will get you a Ferrari, too. No, I'm talking about someone who has a different idea of what people will play.
You can't tell me, because you can't imagine such a person.
Maybe it's not the hit game of the year, but it is cool -- Codeweaver's WINE runs Stardock's Entrepreneur practically PERFECTLY. I'm happy about that, since I bought the combo OS/2 & Win CD and have been wanting to play it ever since I dumped OS/2 for an all Linux system.
ONLY problems -- when you install, you have to install the demo from the CD first. If you run the install program and install the game, it will say it succeeded but the files don't seem to be actually copied. After the demo is installed you can run it again and it installs fine.
It crashed ONCE. Once in several (probably 10+) hours of gameplay. Not too bad I'd say, since you can save often.
A couple of times, the keyboard quit working in that session. I could still control it w/the mouse, but that's not good enough. In one case, it started working again, and in the other, I killed it and restarted. I think it happened when I switched between various windows and a terminal window overlapped with the Entrepreneur window.
But game play is flawless -- scrolling and sound are fine.
They have to develop for the Mac because they need Apple around as evidence that they're not a monopoly on the desktop. Without the anti-trust trial, Office for the Mac would never have existed. Office for Linux doesn't exist because Linux would almost immediately eat WindowsNT/2000 for breakfast, whereas the Mac is no threat in that department. There's a reason why Compaq, Sun, IBM, Dell, Intel and Oracle have investments in Linux, they can see it's potential to remove the closed monopolistic Windows and replace it with an open OS. I'm always surprised to see people defend a single closed unreliable product, when the PC they use would not exist had the standards not been freely available (thanks to the IBM anti-trust trial folks). Look at how powerful PCs are now, and yet the shipped home OS has barely changed since Windows 95. Look how long it took Microsoft to produce a reliable OS in Windows 2000 and it still crashes occasionally for no obvious reason. Microsoft are a blot on a thriving market and the sooner they are cut down to size the better.
I don't know a whole lot about how Wine will be pulling off DirectX support, but I'm making the assumption that it's doing so by reporting some form of generic hardware to DirectX, which when querried claims to support the features that DirectX requests.
This is all find and dandy, but I think everybody is missing the point of DirectX, which is to allow game developers to make feature-calls from hardware without having to actually access the hardware it's self.
In Wine, DirectX support or not, games written for DirectX will simply have one more layer of software to trudge through.
I'm skeptical that performance will be acceptable in any game with anything more than very modest hardware requirements.
I'm aware this isn't emulation, but an API running in an application hosted on an OS might as well be emulation.
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"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
This begs the question from me - why reinvent the wheel?
Couldn't resources be better spent optimizing or developing any number of open graphics standards instead of pumping dev time into a relatively closed standard such as DirectX?
IMO, the advances made with DirectX compatibility via WINE will be redundant by the time they are finished. Graphics technologies move at insanely fast rate (I had read moores law CUBED somewhere) and by the time that yesteday's great DirectX functions are working great in WINE, we will already be two generations ahead.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but DirectX is primarily used by games. I've never seen a killer office app that depends heavily on complex graphic functions via DirectX. Most applications dont need insane graphics acceleration. This move seems to be targeted towards making three-year old games run well in WINE. Why devote such resources to something in which very few people will actually have any benefit from?
Oh and by the way: Can you imagine running 3DMark2000 benchmark on an ultra 10 with a 3D-creator card... :)
Yup, and I shudder at the thought... Sun's 3D hardware isn't exactly impressive, IMO.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Hmm... no. I was referring to individual companies that base their entire product line around a single product (MS-Windows). If that product was withdrawn, then all of their software would cease to function immediately. If an individual company withdrew a product that ran on Windows, then Windows would still survive. If a software apps company used a cross-platform library, or had other products that ran on different platforms, then the company would not be (as) reliant on MS, and would not be a parasite.
However, if you are speaking in more general terms, then yes, software apps companies and OS companies form a symbiotic relationship, as do software and hardware companies.
It still is Windows, just emulated.
Yes, but with more games available to play under Linux, more people will be using Linux to play games. With a significant percentage (e.g. 15%) of people playing under an alternative platform, there will be an incentive to improve the quality of a game under that platform (i.e. make it portable, and provide a native version).
This moves Linux closer to that 15% (or whatever magic number is needed).
The reality has nothing to do with Corel, the great bandwagon jumper. Why are IBM investing a billion dollars in a 'non-viable' platform? Why are all the other industry heavyweights getting into Linux if there's nothing there. Microsoft will never build Office for Linux while their business depends on their OS monopoly.
I think you're the one out of touch with reality. You really think that Microsoft would have bailed out Apple without the anti-trust trial. Apple were in serious shit before Microsoft came along, so don't try and pretend that MacOS, no matter how good it is, would have been any less a fringe OS than Linux had Microsoft Legal not needed someone to point to and say 'see - we're not a monopoly'. Linux is already the number 2 choice on Intel servers, and it's not far behind MacOS on the desktop.
See, I haven't contributed anything to the Linux community at all
If you feel guilty, you could
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It would be nice if the game developers would actually use a cross-platform engine to begin with,
I've had good luck with Allegro 3.9.33. It's a cross-platform 2D gaming library; there's an add-on package to make it interface with Mesa3d or OpenGL. You wouldn't believe how easily it is to recompile a Linux Allegro game for Windows or DOS.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I should have said Office for Mac would not still exist had it not been for the anti-trust trial. Microsoft face little OS competition at the moment, despite the explosion of Linux interest, because it's hard to compete against an entrenched monopoly. I still don't see how Linux is an unviable platform as you say when most of the industry big-hitters are getting behind it. There must be something there for IBM to throw a billion dollars at.
The bizarre belief that the Microsoft investment was irrelevant and it was the genius of Steve Jobs that turned Apple around shows how truly out of touch you are.
SuSE, the only profitable Linux vendor, is very focused on the desktop. RedHat may be the major vendor in the US, but I live in Europe, where SuSE is the major vendor.
Your banging on about Corel failing, when Corel have tried to latch on to every new fad going (remember WordPerfect Office for Java) fails to demonstrate that Linux is failing any more than Microsoft's recent profit warning indicates that Windows is dying.
An investment did help save Apply [sic]. Jobs has done a wonderful job revitalising it, but it still would be in trouble without the financial and applications support of Microsoft.
Microchannel is a specious argument, that was years ago when IBM were still trying to cling to their monopoly.
You still haven't answered the question of why the major PC manufacturers offer an 'unviable' OS preinstalled on their desktop PCs, or why so many other major vendors have invested so much time and money helping out the OSS community if it is unviable.
I don't 'demand' that Microsoft do anything. My argument is against you dismissing Linux as an unviable OS, despite the fact that most of the industry considers it to be important enough to invest in. WordPerfect Office has failed, not because there is no market for it, but because it is no better than StarOffice which is free.
As for Quake 3, you're selectively quoting what the sales director said. You failed to mention that shops weren't stocking it because it wasn't the Windows version (a problem that Mac software also encounters). That isn't a fault of Linux, as much as a fault of the salespeople not convincing the shops and the shops being overly conservative.
Linux is no more an 'unviable' platform than the Mac, it has it's strengths and weaknesses, but don't try to pretend that Microsoft has continued Mac Office for any other real reason than as evidence in the anti-trust trial. If Apple had gone bust, that would be all the more Windows Office customers available.
It would be nice if the game developers would actually use a cross-platform engine to begin with, but I guess we can't have everything. Actually, this could help Linux become more mainstream. If the game companies see that Windows isn't the only OS out there being used to play games with, perhaps they will think more about not being an MS parasite (not a flame, if they are totally dependent on MS to survive, then they are a parasite).
I hope they can make the Street Performer variant work well - it seems to me that people are putting a gigantic amount of effort into an ultimately doomed attempt at copy-control, and not enough into actually figuring out what to do for money when copyright has completely broken down.
Also, you seem to forget that big corporations LOVE IBM. Here at work we have an IBM mainframe with the accompanying DASDs, gateways and tape backups. That plus IBM printers, and quite a few AIX boxes. So your assertion that people stay away from IBM hardware is patently false. Hmmm... I was working in IT (at a Mac shop) and I read quite a lot of computer magazines. Contrary to what you think, I was fully aware of what was going on at IBM re: OS/2. As someone who saw the Stac Electronics debacle and actually experienced firsthand the bogus error message when I ran Windows 3.1 on DR-DOS 5 & 6, I was fully aware of what MicroShaft was capable of, and I knowingly CHOSE to support FREEDOM OF CHOICE, which is why I bought OS/2 then and use Linux today. IBM did not screw me, Bill Gates did. If he had licensed Win32 to IBM I would be running Win32 apps on OS/2 version 5 or 6 right now. I happily got by with OS/2 and Win 3.1 until it got to the point where most of the Windows apps were 32 bit, so I eventually had to shell out another $100 to Bill G. for Win 98 (had I not skipped Win 95 I would have had to pay him TWICE for the privilege of running Win32 apps).
How could you say that I got screwed by IBM if my $90 US got me the best OS and GUI I have ever used bar none? 32-bit multitasking OS/2 was technically head and shoulders above Windows (a 16-bit GUI on top of 8-bit singletasking DOS) that was being sold by Microsoft at that time.
When I got the red spine OS/2 it came with a TCP/IP stack and internet tools. That was when you had to pay someone for an aftermarket TCP/IP stack (remember Chameleon?) just to get Winblows connected to the net, something that OS/2 did out of the box! Unlike Windows, OS/2 gave me my money's worth...
P.S Have you ever heard of civil conversation? I guess not with your charges of "crack smoker" and "clueless". Maybe if you pull those Petrophile pulchella Conesticks out of your ass you will stop acting like an dickhead!!!
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You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
...by Windows coders. Libraries like SDL and Crystal Space provide quality cross-platform solutions, but the folks who learned from "Learn Game Programming in 21 Days with DirectX 7" or somesuch don't know or care. Thus, WINE's support for DirectX is important -- while not diminishing the importance of the cross-platform libraries Done Right.
And btw, WINE's DirectX support already works great with most older games -- it's the newer ones these folks are working on. It sounds like they'll be doing a great job; in any event, don't underestimate the importance of games. Believe it or not, there's a very large number of folks out there who spend more time in them than actual office apps.