WineX 3.3 Out - Now Supports Steam

AstroDrabb writes "WineX 3.3 has been released, with more impressive support for your favorite Windows games from within Linux. According to the Release Notes, Valve's Steam content delivery system, including the latest versions of Half-Life, CounterStrike, Day of Defeat and other mods, is now supported. The list of games supported by WineX is getting pretty impressive. So head over to Transgaming and sign up for a subscription to help further development."

Comments

Re:Steam :)

[revmoo]

Well, you'd need to run the command "winex steam.exe" or whatever, but yes, pretty much.

Re:What's the performance like?

[MBCook]

WineX is based on Wine, which is actually an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator". It's not a full emulator (like running a gameboy emulator would be), it simply intercepts system calls and translates them into the Linux equivelents, the actuall program code doesn't need to be translated. So programs that make very few syscalls (things like, just to take the far end Super Pi, which simply calculates Pi to various accuracies) would run almost identically. On the other hand a program that uses tons of Windows calls (like something that uses Direct3D) would be very slow. Games that don't make tons of those kind of calls (like simple card games, 2D games, etc) should run fine (close to "Windows" speed) as should OpenGL programs (because OpenGL can be passed to the OpenGL subsystem and doesn't need to be translated into OpenGL (or something else) like must happen with D3D).

So it really depends on the program. I assume you could find out for a specific game by searching google or the WineX forums or support pages (they have pages that list supported games and their status, right? Been a while since I've been to their site).

Re:Depressing, in a way...

[PyromanFO]

Announcing that WineX 3.3 has support for Valve games that were written on the Quake 2 engine back when the 3DFX Voodoo2 was new and nVidia was pushing their soon to be released TNT2 cards really isn't that amazing to me. In fact, it kind of underwhelms me.

Then you really haven't been paying attention. Half-Life has been supported for a very long time. Steam, you know, the part that wasn't based on Quake 2 and didn't come out with the Voodoo2 was king, that is now supported.

I'm just disappointed these improvements didn't add PunkBuster support, since I've stopped caring about Half-Life anyway.

What about the REAL Wine, people?!

[IntergalacticWalrus]

I find it pretty sad that almost everybody thinks that only WineX can run games. Reality check: Wine does have a DirectX emulation layer too! Including Direct3D to OpenGL translation! In fact, the few times I tried running a Windows game under Linux, I had better luck with Wine than WineX (CVS build, from back when Gentoo had an ebuild for it).

So, please, don't support those monkeys at Transgaming and use the one, true Wine instead.

Re:What about the REAL Wine, people?!

[linux_warp]

Just FYI: I tried the december wine snapshot, and it would not run STEAM. It had a few fatal errors. So winex supporting steam is a big breakthough.

Re:Yes, But...

[Medieval_Gnome]

You do know that there will (afaik) be a native port of UT2004, just like there was of UT2003 (it was on cd3, for what it's worth)

Re:Steam :)

[va3atc]

Actually if WineX is anything like Wine there is a nifty winefile program that comes with Wine that acts like a file manager.

So if you drop to the terminal prompt and just type winefile, and you can now openly browse all configured volumes including your CDROM.

Re:no descent, no tomb-raider, no NFS

[Anonymous Coward]

means I'm not buying it. I don't play that many games, but I'm dedicated to the ones I do play.

Descent 1
Descent 2
Descent 3

As for NFS the previous poster Rysc says Linux has had NFS for years.

Now Tomb Raider I don't think there is much demand for, its not even listed in the Wine Application Database

Re:Depressing, in a way...

[one4nine4two]

i don't know how the game's os environment is relevant to its physics/rendering/etc. engine(s), does that make a difference?

in any case, half-life is based off the q1 engine with some major enhancements from valve, and some features from the q2 engine, so arguably you could say it's based off both engines

Re:What's the performance like?

[AstroDrabb]

Huh? Who would mod this up informative? Come on people do a little reading

Wine consists of a program loader, which loads and executes a Windows binary, and a set of libraries that implements Windows API calls using their UNIX or X11 equivalents. There is no "translation" and no "emulation". A win32 binary should run as fast if not faster as under MS Windows on the same hardware. Some programs I have run under Wine do seem faster and others seem slower. What could cause that? It is the Wine source code itself. Wine has 1,000's of win32 function to write and convert to a Linux world. Some of those function are not complete yet, some have not been tuned yet, etc. It is a huge job and takes time.

There is no translation as if one massive wine function grabs all the Win32 calls and goes through a massive switch statement and "translates" it to some Linux function. Say a Win32 application calls CreateWindowEx, under Wine that application does the same thing. Wine has a function named CreateWindowEx that has the same parameters as the Win32 version. The application doesn't know and doesn't care.