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.

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.