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Loki's Draeker On WineX, Transgaming And More

Posted by Hemos on from the i-just-wanna-play-my-games dept.

pseen wrote to us with a conversation with Scott Draeker (of Loki Games concerning the recent Transgaming and Wine announcements, as well as the Mandrake Linux Gamer announcements.

6 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Re:wineX lib? by garett_spencley · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't think Loki would want to use something like that. Sure it would speed up devel-time but it would still just be a wrapper (a huge ugly wrapper) to native linux libs which would make things slow and ugly.

    Loki's philosophy has been 100% native linux software. They strip out all windows-specific code and replace it with linux-specific code. In the process they also fix and remove bugs in the windows version.

    Actually, there's another reason not to use wrappers. Using wrappers means there will be large blocks of code that the developers will never know anything about. Porting 100% of the code means that the developers understand the code much better which results in more bugs (from the original code that doesn't get thrown out) getting fixed.

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    Garett

  2. The trouble with Transgaming... by aussersterne · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is that it's using Wine. Maybe I'm behind the times or biased, but Wine has been around for a long time now and still can't even be used to run already-installed business applications like MS Word, much less the Word installer, much less still DirectX games, much less even that that installers for DirectX games...

    The one important commercial product released so far using Wine is Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, which was such a dismal failure that many users who paid hundreds in cash for it ended up buying the windows version in addition anyway to run under VMWare or Win4Lin.

    Wine simply has not proven itself a viable project. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not complaining about the Wine developers at all. I'm just wondering whether it's really possible (both legally and technically) to get a working, current implementation of the Windows and DirectX APIs on Linux.

    This question is, of course, in addition to the significant question of performance, not even addressed in this post...

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    STOP . AMERICA . NOW
    1. Re:The trouble with Transgaming... by Ami+Ganguli · · Score: 5, Insightful

      My impression is that Wine has been "almost" ready for ages. The basic structure is there and works, but the MS APIs are so large and innacurately documented that many individual functions don't work or don't work exactly as on Windows. Transgaming claims to have a DirectX implementation.

      The Transgaming approach of selecting specific games and making sure that the API calls they use work properly could actually work. The question is whether or not their business model will generate enough revenue to keep up the development.

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      It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
  3. The traditional Approuch FAILED by HanzoSan · · Score: 3, Insightful



    Loki had their chance.
    They cannot do what needs to be done.
    What we need is games in linux, They dont have to be native games.

    I subcribed to transgaming, We are voting for them to mostly port old games, leaving the newer games to loki

    Loki will still have a job, Loki can port directX 9 based games, while WineX works with all the old games.

    The dicussions from the voting subcribers have said that most of them want old game support more than the new stuff.

    Loki is just being a typical company here, trying to have all the money to themselves.

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    If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
  4. Why should linux have a windows like GUI? by HanzoSan · · Score: 4, Insightful



    Simple, to get windows users to migrate to linux, giving linux more support with hardware such as drivers, and software.

    This is a GOOD thing.

    Windows users want games, they dont care if the games are native or not, they just want to play their OLD games in Linux.

    The new games can be native but the old games are what transgaming should be porting.

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    If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
  5. Re:Here's the thing, though... by Troodon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "If I'm going to play games, I'm not going to run them through an emulator. I keep 3 machines on my desk at work"...

    Thats very nice for you and for those in your situation, an ideal solution. 'Heres the thing, though' Im a student, and while I have enough disposable capital for games and the odd rare hardware upgrade, I certainly couldnt afford OS dedicated machines.

    Now while perhaps on an indvidual basis you are a much more interesting consumer, as a representative of a wider income range cohort, whom do you think might be a more attractive target?

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    troodon.net