Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Very good! The reason many still have Windows on their computer isn't MS Office and friends, but games.
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?
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.
-=-
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
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.