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WineX and the Future of Linux Gaming

Posted by Cliff on from the linux-native-games dept.

SQLz asks: "I'm a Linux user and an avid gamer but unfortunately for me, I have a very limited selection of games to play without having to reboot into my 'Xbox partition' (a Win2k partition with only games). To supplement my aging collection of Loki titles, as well as UT2003 and a few Q3A mods, I use WineX to play titles like Battlefield 1942, SimCity 4, and Homeworld Cataclysm. Apparently this is bad, as many people in the community feel that Transgaming's WineX is discouraging developers from creating native Linux ports. Does anyone have any real proof of this happening? Do developers really point out WineX as a alternative to doing a native Linux port?"

3 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Don't think so by jazir1979 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If MS Word worked really well under wine, would that stop people from wanting a native Linux word processor?

    WineX is great, but nothing beats a native game, and developers using WineX as an excuse to be windows-only are just lazy.

    Okay perhaps you are right - laziness is very common after all ;)

    --
    What's your GCNSEQNO?
    1. Re:Don't think so by gregh76 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Lazy? How can you make such a stupid comment?

      Did you ever stop to think that it's ultimately not up to the developers? The game companies are, first and foremost, businesses. Considering what happened to Loki, porting mainstream games to Linux is not profitable (yet, anyway). Too bad, too. I bought Loki's ports of SOF and Q3A and thoroughly enjoyed playing them.

      Where I work (not the gaming industry), developers' ideas are constantly getting shot down due to lack of money. And it often doesn't matter how good the idea is or whether it will make things "better" or not.

  2. Re:Well... by Jay+Cornwall · · Score: 5, Insightful
    To be fair, CVS was never designed for the kind of mass distribution that many WineX users expect from it. A lot of people seem to checkout the source, build it, and delete the old source - if they fancy a new version, they just reget the entire source tree from the CVS server. It's put the Sourceforge CVS server under a lot of strain (or at least contributed heavily to it), which has made it almost unusable at times for other projects, where users genuinely need CVS checkouts to build and update from.

    I think Transgaming took the right step in discouraging automated checkouts, but I still think they should consider releasing nightly tarball snapshots of CVS for users to download. Sourceforge has a lot of bandwidth available for file distribution, and the majority of users wouldn't care whether their WineX came from the CVS server or from a tar.bz2.

    (If you'd like to see evidence of this, wander in to #winex on irc.freenode.net - note the number of completely clueless people who ask for help with CVS throughout the day. They're just looking for free WineX, they're not interested in testing/development at all)