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Winex 3.0 Released
syntaxman writes "You'll find the information thread here, or see the release notes. The pre-packaged files (rpms,debs,tarballs) are available only for subscribers."
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The day when it doesn't matter what kind of application you run under linux, all win32/directx apps are supported - is the day this will really take off. While I'm sure alot of these games will work under linux, the day when you can just install and play is when it'll make it to the big time.
30% Why would I want to run windows anyway ?
20% Its dreadful they limit it to subscribers for the RPMs
20% This great news, it means I can run X, Y but not Z
10% It sucks because Z doesn't work
10% If you want to run Windows you should install windows.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
people into retro gaming, or required to use other old software. I'm so glad we are slowly approaching this point. UT2K3 has Linux support out of the box. The demise of Loki is something that I initially thought was going to set back the Linux gaming community for years, but then I've seen games like UT2K3, Castle Wolfenstein, and if you want to count their late to the punch arrival Never Winter Nights come out native. If we could only get Blizzard on the bandwagon, and Maxis more firmly seated the other developers would have little choice but to jump onboard. gatesh8r is right. If Wine gets to good to fast not only will it slow some developers to adopt Linux natively, it may loose a couple that we already have. I'm counting Apple as our new Ace in the Hole. The Mac actually has the attention of the developers, and porting from BSD to Linux should be much easier than porting from Windows to Linux. Of course if everyone adopts and improves on SDL and OpenGL they will have little to worry about when porting anyways. Especially if OpenGL2 ever makes it way to daylight with all the Active X type replacements it's supposed to have available.
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All I can say is that Transgaming sucks. Why do I say that? Well, I subscribed to Transgaming for a year and **my** experience was that:
*Their development cycle is slow.
*I couldn't any games out of the box.
*I couldn't find any tried and true instructions to get a game running under linux in their forums ( or anywhere else on their web site, for that matter..
*Their forums are very disorganized, trying to search them is a lesson in futility. And when you do find some information, it's always a hodgepodge
of 'Joe User tried this' and Jane User tried that' , nothing like 'If you are running Mandrake Linux with WineX ver. X.X., then do this to get the game to work...'
My whole experience with Transgaming is...rip-off.
I can't afford a sig!
with any distro using glibc-3.2.2 (which is just about any new distro release). If you are using older distros, you may be happy and fine with it but if you use RH 9.0 or Mandrake 9.1 (or any other 3.2.2-based distro) you will not be pleased.
This isn't a winex problem, but a problem that affects ALL wine variants whether from WineHQ, Codeweavers, or Transgaming. The glibc developers have happily gone off and broken software everyone uses (again) for no real good reason. I imagine they change things here and there just so they have something to do or simply to try something to see how it works. LEAVE IT THE FUCK ALONE! IF IT AIN'T BROKE DON'T FRICKIN' TOUCH IT!
Sheesh.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Anti-Wine claim #1:
If a company can use WineX for their game, they won't bother making a true native port.
Here's the deal: If a company cares about it's audience, and a significant number of it's audience are running Linux, they are not going to want to use WineX. Why? Performance. Higher hardware requirements on games means you lessen your audience, so it's in a game developer's best interest to make the game as fast as possible, which means NOT using WineX. In addition to a game developer having to make their game run efficiently to reach more players, they have even more incentive to have their game run well due to competetion. If company X and company Y both have a FPS Doom 3 clone, and company X created a native binary while company Y did not, whose game will Linux gamers choose (assuming the games have comparable gameplay/fun factor)?
What if a company doesn't care about their Linux audience and decides to use WineX? Well, we lose nothing. If they don't care about their Linux audience (because it's much smaller than it's Windows audience or whatever) then chances are they weren't going to do a native port anyway. For example, it's obvious that Blizzard has no intention of porting to Linux in the near future. If they decided to create a Linux 'port' of World of Warcraft using WineX because it was extremely cheap, it doesn't mean that WineX prevented a native port. We lost nothing, but gain a title which is likely to attract many more Linux gamers, which will increase monetary incentive for companies to port their games to Linux. An example of a company that could have used WineX to port their game, but didn't, would be Bioware. They obviously care about their Linux audience (late port issues aside.)
To sum this point up, while WineX could cost us a native port or two, it will increase the Linux gamer audience to the point that it is significant, which is usually what is required for companies to even consider a native port of their game. And companies that do choose WineX during the Linux gaming movement's infancy due to monetary reasons will be reconsidering, because the savings from using WineX will be overshadowed by the return from reaching more gamers, and outselling a competetor whose game is less efficient because it uses WineX.
I'll be buying Neverwinter Nights from Tuxgames.com when it's stable under Linux, I'll be buying Doom 3 from Tuxgames, when it's released, and I'll be buying any other native Linux ports that I can get my hands on. I will also continue to be a Transgaming subscriber so I can play Battlefield 1942, the current game of the year (although, since BF1942 didn't run before, I had to dual-boot, which means I am registering my hits to websites as a Windows user. Is surfing under Linux important? Web hosts know the percentage of Windows users to Linux users.)
Why do I keep typing pythong?