WineX 3.0 Examined

GonzoJohn writes "When I first subscribed to Transgaming's WineX 2.1 product last year, I was pleasantly surprised that nearly half of the games I had were supported to a degree. The games that did run ran pretty flawlessly. The games that didn't work had varying degrees of success, all just short of actually being able to play the game (the installers seemed to work). With the release of WineX 3.0 from Transgaming on April 17th this year, it looked like it was time to revisit the wonderful world of Wine. This time around, Transgaming WineX 3.0 has some new tools as well as improvements in the number of games supported and gaming speeds. In this article, we're going to take a look at the new features of WineX 3.0, with a focus on their new GUI installer called Point2Play."

Comments

WineX 95?

[Surak]

Oh no...I can see it now...the next version will be called 3.1, then 3.11 and finally WineX 95! It's happening again! Argh!

Re:WineX 95?

[Surak]

Ermmm..minor point: Wine Is NOT an Emulator. :)

Installers???

[tmark]

The games that didn't work had varying degrees of success, all just short of actually being able to play the game

Only a die-hard WineX advocate would count ONLY getting installer to run as some degree of success. Everyone else would count such cases as complete failures - one notch above utter and complete failures (when the installer won't run). Actually, if the game itself won't run I'd probably rather have the installer fail.

Re:Installers???

[Angry White Guy]

Sounds like the Iraqi Information Minister, doesn't it. We are Succesful! We have managed to get Halo installed on Linux! X-boxen are commiting suicide, hanging from our Kernel hooks!

Re:Installers???

[aoteoroa]

Sentance 1:The games that did run ran pretty flawlessly.
Sentance 2:The games that didn't work had varying degrees of success all just short of actually being able to play the game

Umm. The way I read that is that some games worked. Those were a success. Others looked like they installed but didn't work and were considered failures.

Incidentally this has been my experience installing games on Windows (not just on Wine). Many games are picky about which version of Direct X you have installed. I used to have multiple versions of Windows installed just to play my games. Some only worked in Win 98, others only worked in Win2000, and I had one that would only work in win95. It was really annoying and put me off gaming.

Re:Installers???

[Jedi Alec]

Which is why they put the compatibility thing in XP. Except for some really lousy games that actually check for Windows and DirectX versions, I can still play just about anything using XP and the DirectX that comes with it. So far the same applies for all the games I've tried under Longhorn...

Re:Installers???

[Breakfast Pants]

online play. there are only a very small number of ps2 games that play online. there is a large number of games for windows that have online play. there is a reason where you said you couldn't find one. try and dispute it.

Re:Installers???

[Nick_dm]

Really I don't know why people say they keep a Windows machine around "for games" Possibly because there are some genres which play pretty badly (or at least significantly diferently) on consoles? I need a PC (or mac) for the games I play; quake3, unreal tournament 2003, warcraft3 and such. I'm pretty picky about being able to customise things and atm there aren't even decent options for using mice on consoles so I can't see myself jumping ship any time soon.
I have a PSone my brother has a gamecube and I play on other consoles with friends, but they aren't an replacement for a pc yet, only an alternative.

Doesn't Inspire a Lot of Confidence

[goldspider]

"...I was pleasantly surprised that nearly half of the games I had were supported to a degree. The games that did run ran pretty flawlessly. The games that didn't work had varying degrees of success, all just short of actually being able to play the game..."

I don't know about anyone else, but that wording didn't inspire a whole lot of confidence in the 'success' of this project.

Re:Doesn't Inspire a Lot of Confidence

[indros]

I would appear to me that line was in reference to WineX 2.1, from a year ago, not the current release, which is really the focus of this article.

Re:Doesn't Inspire a Lot of Confidence

[pdbogen]

I don't know about you, but I think getting one game to work that was writting for another operating system without any sort of recompiling or hacking the actual binary, and without having to have anything from the intended platform, seems like quite a feat to me.

Ok, WineX Lovers

[jvmatthe]

Please answer me this one question:
Suppose WineX becomes perfect. Suppose Linux gamers by thousands load up their games and enjoy the latest Windows games. Suppose as a result Windows game developers see incrementally better sales (less than 5%, probably closer to 1-2%). Now, why in the world would they suddenly throw away all the code, tools, and experience they have on their current platform to grab some tiny extra percentage by learning, developing for, and testing on a new platform?

After all they can happily tell those Linux people "You're unsupported. But try WineX!" When it fails, they simply say "You're unsupported!" They already have your money, after all, and it's your own fault for trying it on an unsupported platform.

Let's be honest: Isn't WineX just a bandage for all those Linux users (former Windows users) that can't give up Windows games? It isn't bloody likely to convince anyone to leave Windows, the platform for which those games were made in the first place.

Look at Bleemcast (PSX emulator for Sega Dreamcast). It emulated the original games on a different platform, even with graphical enhancements, but it didn't convince anyone who already had a PSX to jump on the Dreamcast...it just made already-committed Dreamcast owners happier.

Re:Ok, WineX Lovers

[TClevenger]

On the other hand, if WineX is rather successful, the game manufacturers, who wouldn't dare throw away all their existing codebase to develop for Linux, might provide a bit of tweaking to get the game to run under WineX, since such code probably wouldn't hurt the game under the Windows platform. If enough people are using WineX, and can say so to those game manufacturers, they might just start making WineX one of the environments they test under, just to ship those few extra units.

Re:Ok, WineX Lovers

[Devil's Avocado]

"""
Look at Bleemcast (PSX emulator for Sega Dreamcast). It emulated the original games on a different platform, even with graphical enhancements, but it didn't convince anyone who already had a PSX to jump on the Dreamcast...it just made already-committed Dreamcast owners happier.
"""

I don't think WineX is intended to convince windows users to convert to Linux. It's intended to make already-committed Linux users happier, making a little money for its authors in the process.

Re:Ok, WineX Lovers

[IamTheRealMike]

Suppose WineX becomes perfect

It never will, because there will always be a lag between new APIs being introduced and Wine implementing them. But OK. Let's suppose the impossible happens.

Now, why in the world would they suddenly throw away all the code, tools, and experience they have on their current platform to grab some tiny extra percentage by learning, developing for, and testing on a new platform?

Good question. A few possible answers:

• They want better integration. There are limits to how well Wine can integrate with Linux. It does a hell of a lot better than, well, any other emulation I've seen, but it's constricted by the limits of the Win32 API. For instance, we can do integration with the window managers kill facility, which pops up an "this app has frozen" message like on Windows, but we can't do startup notification. There's no way to extract that info from Win32 apps.

• Better reliability. Win32 is huge, complex and mostly the product of too much acid usage. The number of things that can go wrong is large, the native APIs are normally easier to work with, and more complete.

• No dependancy on Wine. For many people, that's good enough.

After all they can happily tell those Linux people "You're unsupported. But try WineX!" When it fails, they simply say "You're unsupported!" They already have your money, after all, and it's your own fault for trying it on an unsupported platform.

If you're unsupported, you're unsupported and you presumably know that when you buy the game. It has nothing to do with the jump table offsets or data structures in use. Smart companies will cater to their customers even when they're using emulation, stupid companies will make up excuses to get out of their obligations.

et's be honest: Isn't WineX just a bandage for all those Linux users (former Windows users) that can't give up Windows games?

What has the fact that they are Windows games got anything to do with it? If Linux users want to play games, let them. Far more important to code in general is how free it is, rather than what APIs it uses. Look at Bleemcast (PSX emulator for Sega Dreamcast). It emulated the original games on a different platform, even with graphical enhancements, but it didn't convince anyone who already had a PSX to jump on the Dreamcast...it just made already-committed Dreamcast owners happier

This is the same old OS/2 argument. The dreamcast died for LOTS of reasons, having emulation wasn't the major factor, if it was a factor at all.

Re:Ok, WineX Lovers

[DonkeyJimmy]

Let's be honest: Isn't WineX just a bandage for all those Linux users (former Windows users) that can't give up Windows games? It isn't bloody likely to convince anyone to leave Windows, the platform for which those games were made in the first place.

Of course it will! The only reason I (and many like me) hang around on Windows is because we want to run things-- and the main thing that isn't replicated just fine (or 10 times better) in some open source format on Linux is games. When WinX becomes reliable at running most popular games, I will make the switch over and never look back. I already have a Linux box, but it's for coding/serving, Windows is for using things (it has to be the better machine because games require the good hardware).

Just because you don't respect Windows, doesn't mean that all the high budget (and is most cases, best) games aren't made for it and only it. And those of us who do play games need a system that can run them. I hate x-box, but when Perfect Dark Zero comes out for it, I will buy it. You need the medium to use the app.

Re:Ok, WineX Lovers

[4of12]

might provide a bit of tweaking to get the game to run under WineX

With only about 5% of the market, (Apple, anyone?), the developers will devote about that much concern to whether their games will run under WineX.

But if WineX comptability is even on the radar, that's a good thing.

And if some company in Taiwan releases a very inexpensive PC-like box for gaming via WineX, a box that sells millions of units, then the future of WineX compatibility is assured.

It's a long way off, but a great milepost metric for real success of WineX would be if game developers started to badger both MS and WineX developers to get together to advance the APIs; maybe even MS would lower itself to devoting manpower working on the WineX codebase. Not that I expect all that anytime soon....

Re:Ok, WineX Lovers

[JWhitlock]

Yes, a perfect WineX will not convince developers to start developing for Linux. But, it if is cheaply or freely availible, they may be convinced to load up a workstation with WineX, and make sure Linux+WineX can run the game through development. Game developers are programmers, and programmers in general like the free software movement - if you can ensure your program runs on Linux with little effort on your part, why not?

So, WineX might become the standard for cross-platfrom gaming. Not that developers will make games specifically for WineX, but they may adopt the rule of thumb: if WineX supports it, then it's a good feature, and if WineX doesn't support it, then maybe there's something wrong with it. Since WineX should be able to support any well-documented feature of the Windows or DirectX API, WineX might be a good standard to determine if a feature is well-documented and straight-forward - if it isn't, there may be some hidden features that Microsoft isn't talking about, which may go away with future versions.

Here's an example - there are some games that I have that play decently under Windows 95, but appear broken under Windows XP. Others work as well under XP as they do under 95. My guess is that the "broken" games used some advanced feature that Microsoft abandoned with later versions of Windows/DirectX. A emulation suite like WineX may have indicated that these features weren't fully fleshed out, and steered the programmers away from them.

So, if a subset of the API becomes "easy" to simulate, programmers may be encouraged to only use that subset. Hell, they may even get addicted to the WineX environment, which may give them some debugging capabilities they didn't already have. When Microsoft offers new features, programmers may refuse to use them until they've passed the WineX test - they are well-documented and stable enough to be reliably emulated.

Would they ever make the leap to native Linux games? Probably not. But by restricting themselves to a subset of the API that is easy to emulate, the WineX API becomes a de facto cross-platform standard. Eventually, it may be possible to optimize away many of the inefficencies of an emulator, and the Win-native games may run just as fast on Linux.

This little scenario may be nice, but it's not realistic. The best we can hope for is getting 90% there, and hoping the industry meets us halfway. My best computer runs Windows, because I need the horsepower for games. Until I can play those games on Linux, I'm booting XP on the main box and Linux on the older boxen. A perfect WineX may allow users like me to finally see what Linux can do with modern hardware.

Re:Ok, WineX Lovers

[batkiwi]

The facts in your bleemcast argument isn't correct in any way, form, or manner.

-Bleemcast in it's original form (emulate all/100/50 psx games) NEVER CAME OUT
-a total of 3 bleemcasts came out, each doing A SINGLE GAME. That means to play the game, you had to pay 15$ for the bleemcast, plus 25-50$ for the game (depending on which one)
-EVERY bleemcast disc that was released sold out almost instantly. They couldn't keep them in the stores!
-By the time bleemcast came out, PS2 was already out. PSX people had already bought a PS2, and possibly skipped the dreamcast altogether. The GT2 bleemcast was out only a month before GT3 for the PS2!!!!
-bleemcast died due to sony's lawsuits in the end

Re:Ok, WineX Lovers

[GlassHeart]

With only about 5% of the market, (Apple, anyone?), the developers will devote about that much concern to whether their games will run under WineX.

It's not the percentage size of the market that matters. Adobe and Microsoft both sell flagship products on MacOS, for example.

The equation will have to do with how many units you expect to sell and how much it will cost to port (tangible costs like developer time, as well as intangible ones like introducing potential bugs into the source due to the port). If it's really cheap to port to WineX, they'll probably do it, even if they don't sell all that many units.

Also, note that the Linux/WineX game market is a very different one than the Windows market, precisely because many games don't work on WineX. Less competition can mean that your game gets a bigger share of the 5% than in the 95%.

Re:Ok, WineX Lovers

[TClevenger]

Precisely. Apples are a completely different animal, whereas WineX compatibility is just a matter of identifying a problem in either the library WineX provides, or the "nonstandard" way the game chooses to use that library. Chances are if the problem is due to the way the game handles a library that otherwise meets published specs, maybe a tweak in the way that game accesses that library will make it _more_ stable under genuine Windows environments as well.

So find a game manufacturer that has a Linux "insider" in the coding team, ask him to devote a little bit of time to stabilizing the code under WineX, then GO BUY THE GAME when it comes out and let your insider know. He then has some numbers that he can bring to the bosses. "I spend this many minutes working out some bugs running under WineX, and as a result this many Linux users bought our game that otherwise wouldn't have. Oh, and chances are the time spent also made it stable under some non-standard Windows configurations."

Question

[AnimeFreak]

Even though the licence that Bochs uses and the licence that Wine uses are different, why can't the Wine developers write a portion that allows usage of x86 emulation enabling the usage of Windows programmes under different processor architecures?

Re:Question

[Mitchell Mebane]

They are working on it, the project is called Qemu, but it seems the site is down right now.

Re:Question

[AlgUSF]

Because

Wine
Is
Not (an)
Emulator

Re:Question

[AnimeFreak]

I never stated Wine is an emulator. However, you could add x86 emulation into Wine to allow usage of Win32 applications on platforms other than IA-32.

Re:Question

[BlueGecko]

Just the overhead from swapping the endianess must be impressive

Actually, the engineers at IBM were a genious when it comes to handling endian issues on the PowerPC. Although the PPC by default is big-endian, the PowerPC 603 and later added the ability to natively work either way. That's a large part of the reason why Virtual PC can operate as fast as it does, and similarly, might make this Bochs-WINE hybrid feasible for non-CPU-intensive apps like Office, etc.

Nice but still useless

[Alcoyotl]

Playing a game should not require the user to spend time installing and configuring it, and pull his hair whenever the game or computer crash.
This is why game consoles should remain the only serious way to play.
Ok people, we all have great PCs with lots of computing and video power, and we know how to use them, but really, the focus should be on average users, guys who want to play right now, children.
While this is a step in the right direction, Linux is nowhere near being the platform of choice for gamers and will remain the realm of computer savvy users for a pretty long time. Anyone saying otherwise should try to emulate the ease of use of your average playstation.

Does WineX let you enable sound enhancements?

[antdude]

I am unable to read the link to see if the sound support was improved.

I tried v2.0 and wasn't impressed. I tried to enable EAX and 3D Sound in Diablo 2 and other games. The audio sounded plain and boring in my favorite games. I was forced to go back to Windows to enjoy my audio with my old Sound Blaster Live! card. Does v3.x let you do this now?

WineX 3.0 Release notes

[diatonic]

You can read them here.

The review appears to be slashdotted.

.:diatonic:.

Gaming

[rf0]

Under Windows

Insert CD
Autoruns
Type in ID number
Wait..
Click Icon
play Game

Under Linux

Insert CD
Start Wine
Load Binary
Crashes
Load Again
Goes a bit further
Move you mouse X11 Locks up
Download lastest CVS version
Rebuild
Try Again
Crashes
Give up and do something else

Now I really like Linux. Honestly I do, but this is one of those times Windows just wins

Rus

Re:Gaming

[Lumpy]

Funny, i recently bought UT2003 from Toys-r-us and on my linux box typed setup.run and it installed just fine..

in fact I'm playing faster than the copy I have on the Windows 2K box that is indentical in every way (well except the W2K box has hardware raid0 on it so it SHOULD be faster with those 2 drives)

Linux gaming is really easy, and only a silly fool that doesnt know anything about linux gaming would say otherwise...

now trying to get a windows game to run in a non-emulator like wine? that is for the person that want's to have that pain... otherwise buy the linux native games and be content that you have more games available than the Mac people.

Re:WineX segfaults

[Frohboy]

Some of the NVidia drivers seem to run into problems in conjunction with WineX and some version of glibc. When I switched to Gentoo, using the 4191 NVidia drivers, with glibc 2.3.1 (not positive of that, though), WineX would segfault on me something awful, whenever it would try to enable the DirectX. Running installers worked fine, but games would just crash. Reading the support pages, I read the suggestion to roll back to the 3123 NVidia drivers. Worked like a charm.

Of course, nowadays, I seem to be able to run WineX 3.0, with the same version of glibc, and the 4363 drivers. So, I imagine someone somewhere has worked out a bug or two.

Why not in games.slashdot.org?

[kirkb]

Since this article is games-oriented, why isn't it in the new, garish-colored games.slashdot.org?

"+5 Funny?"

[Overly Critical Guy]

You're right. Version number jokes never get old. They are repeated and repeated, year after year, but they are still just as clever and inventive as they were five years ago.

Let's make another 3.11 joke, shall we? The trigger-happy crackheads will be falling over themselves trying to mod it up fast enough.

Re:"+5 Funny?"

[sharkey]

Let's make another 3.11 joke, shall we?

All joking aside, I just can't wait to get the "Leaves" background in WineX 3.11 for Winegroups.

WineX3 has been good to me

[Gyorg_Lavode]

I subscribe and wineX3 has been supprisingly good. It's running the games I am really interested in. I'm back to playing Everquest (maybe not a good thing), Warcraft3, Jedi Knight 2, and Baulder's Gate 2. I'm also using EQIM with it. All of these work basically transparently. There's of course the overhead and minor things, (names over character heads are not very legible in everquest though I hear cvs fixes this), but really it doesn't bother me one bit and I don't have to boot out to windows to play these games.

Point2Play basically acts kind of like a registry for windows games. Not exactly what it does but a reasonable analogy. I wish you could add directories/executables directly to it rather than having to do an install, but other than that it's working well as a launch point for my windows games.

Over all I am pleased with wineX3. I thought the wineX3 preview was lacking but this version seams acceptable.

Re:WineX3 has been good to me

[Papineau]

You can manually add games to Point2Play. Read the Release notes, where they say how to convert an existing WineX installation to P2P. Of course, if you only copy it from a Windows installation, the registry entries might not be setup correctly and the game might be upset, the same way that copying it from a Windows box to another (without installing on the second one) would make it upset. Not much you can do about that part...

Re:RedHat 9

[IamTheRealMike]

Last thing I heard the NPTL support code wasn't yet in CVS, you have to buy it from them. It will get there eventually, but it's tied up with their copy protection proprietary stuff.

Re:Substitute for Codeweavers???

[Guspaz]

WineX is only designed for gaming, not running business applications, browser plugins, etc.

Re:Buzz off

[phoebusQ]

Hey, maybe you should do a little INVESTIGATION before you start posting:) WineX IS free. The source is free for download. If you want precompiled binaries and official support, that is what you pay for (and boy, is it CHEAP). Please don't tell me you can't handle ./configure; make && make install. It's also a hell of a lot cheaper than buying a copy of windows to play. If I had the money, I might not complain so rudely, but come on people! Yeah, c'mon people! Why would you think that releasing your source is enough? Shouldn't you freely support and hand-hold every shlub that uses your product? Just download the source and compile, and sate yourself with a little hard-earned fun, instead of complaining about nonexistant problems.

Re:RedHat 9

[Squarewav]

well to get wine to work with redhat 9 i have to

export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5

strangly enough this will also couse realplayer 8 to work properly under redhat9 , i just addded it to my .bashrc file. If anyone knows what bad side efects this will couse let me know

Re:Buzz off

[BryanForbes]

Let's see... last time I checked, you can download the source for free. The membership is 5 bucks a month ($60 a year) for a pre-packaged wine (rpm, deb, and tgz) with all the correct dll's in the right place AND a voice in what area WineX will be developed in next, plus support. Now they have an installer available (and IIRC, it's source is freely available) that is prepackaged for members. They keep adding benefits to WineX membership, but the price stays the same. Sorry, but that seems pretty reasonable to me.

Yo, here's the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Here we go, love mike the karma whore :p WineX 3.0 with Point2Play Review: No More Wine From the Command Line?

Published by LinuxOrbit.com April 28, 2003
by John Gowin, Linux Orbit Editor-in-chief

It seems just like yesterday I was cleaning up my office and realized I had a bunch of games I could no longer play because of my complete Linux conversion. Although I don't buy a lot of games, the ones I had represented a decent cash investment, and I didn't want them to completely go to waste. This led me to Transgaming's WineX. When I first subscribed to Transgaming's WineX 2.1 product last year, I was pleasantly surprised that nearly half of the games I had were supported to a degree. The games that did run ran pretty flawlessly. The games that didn't work had varying degrees of success, all just short of actually being able to play the game (the installers seemed to work). All of this we detailed in our review of WineX 2.1 last August.

With the release of WineX 3.0 from Transgaming on April 17th this year, it looked like it was time to revisit the wonderful world of Wine. This time around, Transgaming WineX 3.0 has some new tools as well as improvements in the number of games supported and gaming speeds. In this article, we're going to take a look at the new features of WineX 3.0, with a focus on their new GUI installer called Point2Play.

The software

If you're not familiar with the Transgaming WineX sales model, you have 3 choices. You can subscribe for $5 US per month, with a three month minimum subscription. You can also choose a longer subscription term, such as one year for $50 US (essentially 2 months for free). Transgaming also gives access to the CVS releases of WineX to subscribers and non-subscribers, but the copyright protection code needed to run most games is missing. They also offer no support to those who build WineX from source. Once you've subscribed, you'll find pre-built packages available for download in RPM, DEB and TGZ formats. If you're familiar with your Linux distribution, installing the package for your system should be a breeze. This time around, you'll need to install 2 packages however, one for WineX and one for the new GUI tool Point2Play. The instructions for installing both are on the downloads page at the Transgaming website (once you've created an account and logged in).

The hardware

Here is a quick overview of the hardware which we used to test WineX 3.0:

• 
  
• Generic 1.33 GHz AMD Athlon T-bird
• 512 MB RAM
• GeForce 2 MX graphics card with 32 MB RAM
• XFree86 4.2
• Latest NVidia driver

In our tests, we ran WineX 3.0 under Red Hat Linux 7.3, but according to the Transgaming web site, the latest Linux distributions should be fine, provided they support the following:

• 
  
• Linux Kernel 2.4 or higher. Stock Kernels recommended over RedHat 7.x/8.x kernels.
• XFree86 4.0 or higher (4.1 and above recommended)
• glibc 2.2 or higher
• Working hardware accelerated OpenGL video card

(In our previous review, we also tested WineX on a Gateway PII 400 with a Riva 128 video card. That system is currently occupied with a Debian dist-upgrade to Sid over a dialup line, but that is a different article altogether.)

Once we installed the necessary RPMS for Winex and Point2Play:

Point2Play-1.0-0.i386.rpm
winex3-3.0-1.i386.rpm

we were ready to start testing.

Editors Note: In our previous review of Transgaming's WineX, we covered a few technical notes for configuring XFree86 on your GNU/Linux system. I

I LOVE WineX

[James Littiebrant]

There are alot of posts trashing WineX because it supports only about half of all games, this is just as good if not better than Win2K or WinXP because it supports almost all of my favorite DOS games and alot of the recient games for the windows platform. WineX was made to remove the uneasyness of going to the Linux platform by allowing newcomers to have all of their games on Linux, it also allows people who only single boot with Linux to be happier with their Linux machine.

WineX on OSX?

[WatertonMan]

Big question, how hard would it be to recompile WineX for OSX? Yes I know you'd have to combine it with Bosche or more preferrably a JIT x86 -> PPC compiler. I'm just curious if WineX itself is written in C or if there is x86 assembly in there. Are there "big endian" issues?

Re:Umm yeah...

[IamTheRealMike]

I think perhaps you don't understand. Wine doesn't need Windows. You can buy 3 good, modern games for the price of Windows alone.

Game company support?

[sinequonon]

Has there been any interest in having the gaming companies support Wine during their test cycle, as well as printing Wine requirements on their shipped game packages? I'd be more tempted to purchase a game for use on Linux if I knew it was supported on Wine by the vendor. Having the information printed in the requirements box could be a big help in selling Linux as a gaming environment. Thanks.

Re:Requirements - Bloat?

[Mr.Phil]

winex converts DirectX to opengl on the fly to do that at any reasonable speed you need a fast cpu, in reality 500 MHz isn't fast enough to run most modern games under winex

A 500Mhz processor is fast enough to run most modern games under WINDOWS either.

Re:winex makes me angry

[praedor]

"Once all the game developers have already stopped porting to linux they wont come back"? WHAT game developers are porting games to linux? C'mon! Virtually none. Id software produces linux binaries of all their games as a matter of tradition. Perhaps one or two other vendors may consider porting, but usually they are coaxed into allowing someone else to port.

Wine isn't hurting anything because there is nothing to hurt. All you need is for linux on the desktop to become more widespread and you will see linux ports from the actual game source rather than a bunch of hackers doing a port a year or two after the game has been out and played already by the rest of the world. In any case, it isn't as if game developers/companies are building FOR wine - most game do NOT work on winex or winehq or codeweaver's wine. It is practically an accident when a game does work. Thus, if companies were actually building for wine rather than for windoze proper (or linux), then you MIGHT have an argument, but even then it would be pretty weak. Why NOT build for a standard (wine) library so that you know your one game will run on windoze and linux out of the box? You don't HAVE to work to produce multiple versions unless you are also writing for Macs, then it would be two versions instead of 3 (best case): Mac, Windoze, and linux.

WineX CVS source

[m4g02]

You are wrong, some of their code is copyright so (as you could read in their site like everyone else) when you download WineX from the CVS portions of the code are missing and bad patched, from my experience sound wont work at all with CVS sources.

From Transgaming site:
Pre-built packages of WineX contain components licensed from third parties, and may not be redistributed in whole for any reason.

But is not like im bitching about it, Im a TransGaming suscriber, is not expensive and at least i know im helping to keep the project running, i mean, i play Counter Strike without any problem, worth the $5 per month.

- - - - - - - - - -
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...

What happens when

[HanzoSan]

Linux users eventually begin to match or even outnumber windows users worldwide?

China, India, Africa. They can make games too.

Re:Boycott WineX

[Fizzol]

If by "interesting" you mean filled with untruths, innaccuracies and distortions used as justification for a boycott, then yes it's interesting.

"* TransGaming writes incredibly enthusiastic pieces of propaganda which are mostly discussing software they did not write. The LGPL wine (the original codebase) has been developed for 9+ years, but TransGaming forked their version very recently, and does not contribute code back."

Not true

"# TransGaming has consistently claimed that their approach is superior to native porting in every manner."

I've *never* seen that claim made.

"# TransGaming once promised to give back code to what was Wine,"

TG has given code back.

"# TransGaming encourages the misconception that their product is not an emulator, despite the fact that the founder of the Wine project refers to it as such. In order to replace the term "emulation", they refer to WineX as a "portability technology", stretching definitions of both "portability" and "technology". If TransGaming really wishes to avoid the term "emulation", they should replace it with a phrase that actually reflects what WineX does, such as "compatibility layer".

WINE is not an emulator, and besides that, how is what term TG uses to describe WineX a reason for boycotting?!

"# TransGaming has willingly stripped out all methods of debugging the Wine source base in their packaged releases, greatly slowing down the process of fixing bugs."

Not true.

"# Support for games varies wildly between releases, and even their vaunted "DirectX 8.0 support" is already one rev behind and about to be a second rev behind. It still doesn't provide access to all the nice features that the cards, DirectX, and the games support."

Of course it varies between release, mostly better. And again how is this any reason for a boycott?

"# TransGaming promises much, yet delivers little.. . Still, there are many problems with the Half-Life emulation. The most notable of these problems is that the menus do not work, causing a significant drop in user-friendliness."

TG mostly delivers exactly what they promise. The menus in Half-Life don't render exactly correctly but they work just fine.

"# These same Counter-Strike players couldn't play online for some time. Valve had implemented new anti-cheating software which detected Wine users as cheaters."

And TG quickly worked with Valve to have WineX gamers recognized as legitimate clients. Problem solved and bravo for TG, how is this an arguement for a boycott?

Re:Windows Gaming Under Linux At Half The Speed??

[niko9]

woops, heres the link.

Re:Very displeased with WineX 3.0.

[Fizzol]

You can keep both version on your system if you like. Installing Winex3 doesn't overwrite Winex 2.2.1.

talk about contradicting yourself...

[grimani]

"those that worked, worked perfectly"
"those that didn't work, worked to varying degrees"

uhh...okay.

keep working on your literary skills. you know what they say - practice makes perfect, to varying degrees.

Don't support Transgaming!

[korny69]

Support people who are writing natively supported (ports) of the games. Buying a subscription to Transgaming will get you the game you currently are wanting to play, yes, but later when another game comes out, you will probably not be so lucky. OTC, I have had very little problems with my non-supported Loki produced games.

The only way to further alternative platform gaming (including MAC and *NIX) is to support the native code writers (icculus.org), the shops that sell the alternative OS games (tuxgames.com), and especially the companies that port (or pay to port) the games (Epic, Bioware, IDSoftware, etc).

Transgaming is wash! They "support" many games, but that support is strickly community-based and it may be a while before you get an answer. Their so-called "support" includes telling the customer they will need to use a CD-CRACK to get some games working (probably a really bad idea). And, not to mention, you pay for a service for a game that you already "own". Example: I pay $50 for a game I want to play and then I pay $15 (minimal subscription fee for Transgmaing) just to get it running (maybe?!) in Linux. I would much rather pay $50 (one time and maybe more $) for a game that is ported and I know that 75% of time it is going to run out of the box.

The new GUI, Point2Play is a good example. It looks as though they planned, developed, and released this thing in a matter of days. Geez, I understand they want to make money, but I think there may be better ways to do it.

Re:I can't see why portable code is so fscking har

[Joe Tie.]

I mean, how hard is it to use portable libraries and code from the beginning?

Seriously. It never ceases to amaze me when I see programs meant from the beginning to run on multiple platforms, yet written in DirectX. Neverwinter Nights being the prime example of this. It just seems like a bad decision to maintain two separate codebases like this. I only muck around writing 2D, and fairly simple 3D, but I consider it not compiling on any supported platform, with no changes needed, to be an error which should be fixed immediately. It took me a little time to get WxWindows down, but I've saved that many times over in not having to do what amounts to writing two programs to do the same function.

Re:Umm yeah...

[NanoGator]

"We may save some fuss, but we are also telling game developers that we don't want native ports, which is not true."

No you're not. They have 0 clue that you didn't buy a game because you don't use Windows.

Nobody's going to make gamnes for Linux until the market is big enough to be successful. There is no Linux game market, that's why you're getting a trickle of cheap-to-produce ports.

If you want to send them the message you want Linux ports, using WineX is doing absolutely nothing to help you. It gives them an excuse to say "We don't need to do a Linux port then." If you really really want them to make games for Linux, then don't buy the Windows games period. If you feel that's unreasonable, then you're going to have to play by their rules.

I'm in the same boat. I want GTA Vice City. It's only on PS2 right now. I will not buy a PS2. I'm personally boycotting Sony because I was a salesman for their PSOnes when they originally came out. 1 in 4 of those things were defective and Sony absolutely refused to treat their customers (mostly kids) with respect over it. It's a long story, the important part is that I'm boycotting them for reasons similar to why a lot of people here won't buy MS software.

I could probably pick up a used PS2 for a reasonable price. Since it's used, Sony wouldn't see a dime of that. Cool, eh? No. I want Rockstar to prioritize PC development. I'm sending them the message that they have to develop for PC or they won't get money from me. (Essentially what I'm advising to you.)

The bad news is that I don't get to play Vice City, but the good news is that Rockstar's gone ahead and ported it to PC. I'll have it in my hot little hands in 2 weeks. It's been a loooong week. Sadly, there are other games on PS2 I'd like to play that I never will because I just cannot support Sony.

So I hope my point sort of makes sense. If you're really devoted to avoiding MS so you can get games made for Linux, then turning around and playing the games anyway isn't helping. If I had given in and bought the used PS2, I'd be sending the message "its okay to only support PS2, I'll bend over backwards to follow you."

Only use it as a stop gap...

[StarTux]

I use Linux because of its advantages in speed, stability and configurability by the end user. I use Winex as a stop gap so I can play EverQuest with my wife. One of many things I have noticed with Winex is its resource hogging and lack of real stability, even between versions.

Ever notice that between versions some games that worked now no longer do so?

Finally, when Transgaming first started they stated that they would not compete with native ports, well that turned out to be a lie.

Winex is a strange beast, on one hand I see its value, on the other I can see its potential at destroying good solid ports. And native ports run faster, with a lot more stability than winex enabled games; finally, they help improve and mature other tools like OpenGL and things like SDL rather than just directx. Oh and before people say 90% of the desktops are Windows, well sales fell around 3% last year with regards to PC Games, I saw two whole isles at Fry's be given over to Country music. So in essence, if you make games for Mac and Linux you would have gained back those lost Windows sales and a little more and you would have entered a new market, rather than been where everyone else has been.

StarTux

Re:Umm yeah...

[NanoGator]

"This is an opinion, and I disagree with it."

I appreciate that, but I disagree with you as well, please read on.

" WineX helps create this market, because it allows people to stay and game under Linux when they otherwise wouldn't be able to."

I just don't see this happening. What I do see happening is the game company in question digging their heels into Windows. "Well, if I make this for Windows, it'll probably run on WineX. Cool. If I make it for Linux, there is no LineX for Windows to play the game. I lose a huge chunk of my market. Hmm. No Linux port here."

Sorry. It just won't work. The best chance that Linux has at creating a game market is to create a game distro. That's right, create a distro that is not only conducive to gaming, but it also comes with a bunch of free games. Give it away at places like EB, or get a deal to have magazines to insert the CD into their next publication. Then, a good gaming SDK needs to be made that works with both Windows and Linux. It needs to be like DirectX, but platform independent. It needs to cover 2D, 3D, Audio, and input such as Joysticks. It needs to be royalty free so that a game company can just use it without having to worry about signing anything. Heck, if the community is willing to really work on it, make it so that it's easy to travel across processors as well. Make it a recompile to have it work on PS2.

Anyway, that's a bit of a tangent. I don't think there's a lot you can do there, unless you can program in the Linux environment. My point stands. WineX makes it easier to play games on Linux, but it also solidifies the choice to develop games for Windows.

Microsoft and DirectX

[Latent Heat]

Microsoft, bless their black little hearts, made a concerted effort to woo game developers away from DOS-mode and on to Windows by adding all kinds of features, and even then as you point out, it took Microsoft several iterations to get right.

Re:I can't see why portable code is so fscking har

[Dr. Sp0ng]

I mean, how hard is it to use portable libraries and code from the beginning?

It's not hard, obviously. But just as 90% of people are morons, 90% of game developers are morons.

Why do companies choose to use DirectX instead of OpenGL?

Because it's better. DirectX 9 is simply a better graphics API than OpenGL at this point, which is just an unfortunate fact of life. If you're developing for Windows, using DirectX will get cut down your workload tremendously, simply because so much more is already done for you.

Even if you use DirectX, how hard is it to make that choice irrelevant to the rest of the implementation, and the switch to OpenGL transparent?

That's the correct solution, and it's what I do (I am a game developer). It does take some real thinking to come up with a good abstraction which will take advantage of the power of each API while dealing with its limitations as well, but it's not impossible.

It must be possible for eevry company to build portable games and engines when they build them from scratch, shouldn't it?

Most companies are just trying to get the damn game finished and shipped.