Transgaming and Transitive E3 Announcement

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Breaking news today on the Transgaming website. Today they announced an alliance with the company Transitive. Here's their headline: 'Los Angeles, Ca. TransGaming Technologies, in partnership with Transitive Technologies, unveil their game-porting technology that can allow Windows-based x86 games to be simultaneously released onto multiple platforms. These include the Sony PlayStation 2, Apple Mac OS, set-top boxes, PDAs and wireless devices.'" There's more info on the Transgaming Site. Since Transgaming has ported The Sims already, it's a lot easier to believe that this isn't just vapor.

Comments

Re:This will not quite work.

[binaryDigit]

Getting a game to run on multiple consoles is a bit more involved then simply switching compilers

I assume that is why they say it goes from two years to two months versus two days. They are acknowledging (though implicitly) that it isn't just a purely simple matter as switching compilers/platforms and recompiling.

Re:Definition of "port"

[Anonymous Coward]

By that definition, they also "ported" Max Payne, Diablo 2, Jedi Knight 2, and Soldier of Fortune 2, as I am told those work reasonably well under WineX too.

However, that definition of port does not match the common usage I've heard in my years as a Unix user. In the common parlance to which I've been exposed, "porting" something from one platform to another results in a native binary (possibly with helper libraries). This is a native emulator, with non-native binaries. Qualifying that as a port means that since the Linux gcc works under the FreeBSD Linux emulation environment, the FreeBSD team "ported" gcc just as much as the gcc developers who made the FreeBSD version of gcc.

I agree that they build some impressive technology improvements (D3D, many DirectX fixes, the SafeDisc fixes) on an existing codebase (wine), enough, even, to warrant a subscription fee and bundling deals.

I disagree that qualifies as "porting" in the practical sense, and it lowers the value of the term and cheapens (nay, insults) the work of those developers who make a natively-optimized binary (such as id, Epic, the sadly defunct Loki, Hyperion, Tribsoft, Sunspire, Illwinter, and others).

Wine and WineX are a valuable migration tool -- but running a Windows binary through an emulation environment is quite a different beast from taking a code base and moving it to a native toolchain.

I do use Wine to play a few older games -- but I'd hardly call that "Oooh, I ported WarCraft 2 because I got it running under Wine". And the Wine team didn't port WarCraft, they created a set of APIs roughly matching the Win32 APIs.

Similarly, the existence of stella is certainly not indicative of the stella team porting the Atari 2600 titles to Linux (I doubt many people would agree that they ported Pitfall, for instance). Nor does epsxe mean the epsxe developers ported Final Fantasy VIII.

(By your logic, running the cygwin version of ls under WineX is as much a port as grabbing ls from GNU's FTP site and building it with the Linux version of gcc.)

I know MandrakeSoft has a vested interest due to the bundling deal, but please try and realize that this is not an indictment of that, your company, your distribution, you, or TransGaming. It is an attempt to correct the mis-apprehension that The Sims was ported to Linux -- just like Quake 3, Tribes 2, etc. The processes were very different, the underlying pieces are very different. The only real similarity lies in the fact that, in the end, the user can play Quake 3, Tribes 2, or The Sims under Linux. (And, according to one TransGaming employee with whom I spoke, the Sims binary that was built was, indeed, built with Windows tools.)

I am aware that timothy did not say "Look, they ported The Sims just like Loki ported Tribes 2", but his phrasing linked it to just such efforts in the past.

Games that have worked for me under WineX 2.x

[kikensei]

Jedi Knight 2, Max Payne, Soldier of Fortune 2 Full Version, Half Life, HL Counter Strike, Sacrifice, Quake 2.

Quake 2 had linux binaries available, but they were intended for a 3dfx chipset. Documentation on getting Q2 to run on OpenGL (Nvidia) hardware is SO hard to come by, that I just said screw it and installed under WineX. Works as well as under windows natively. SoF2 was released YESTERDAY, a cutting edge title that runs under linux thanks to winex (issues to install, see transgaming forum's for details).

I love WineX. I believe the the big money payoff for this announcement is the Mac folks comsumer base. They wait a looong time for a meager trickle of PC games, this could work to making main stream games available to them upon initial release. Linux is not mentioned in the press release, but I'm assuming that by x86 PC, Linux is the main target, as windows needs no help to run native apps. The optimistic result of this (if the tech pans out) is that developer's are so happy to have a multi-platform release that they adopt open design standards (sound and graphics) as opposed to DirectX API, to keep their titles available for all platform's via the WineX environment. That's a step closer to open standard games which require no WineX. As has been posted, there are open standards (SDL, etc) that could be used now to accomplish this, but what we need are baby steps that result in sales $$$ to publisher's as a result of the broad cross platform market.

Don't go down that slippery slope!

[IGnatius T Foobar]

This is a dangerous idea. If what TransGaming achieves is true portability of Windows game source code to Linux and console platforms, and if game developers take to it, it makes Windows the reference platform for game development. Is this where we want to be? Specifically, is this where we want to be in another couple of years when Microsoft suddenly starts adding patented "features" to DirectX that can't be brought into the TransGaming WINE environment?

Write your games using truly open standards like OpenGL, and then port to Windows.