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

What's the performance like?

[skermit]

I never decided to "switch" because of two things. I don't have as good of a *nix background as I would like, and it seems pretty daunting to run my own box. The second is that I'm an avid gamer. I probably use my computer for no less than 30% gaming, 30% internet, 20% watching tv-shows/movies, and 20% doing actual work (heh!).

Such turnkey installations are available, and I guess I can take the plunge with Knoppix boot tests, but with WineX, everything's looking a bit more lucrative.

My only reservation is performance. If WineX is an emulator of sorts, what's the performance hit that's associated with newer games such as Warcraft 3 vs. the older engine'ed games like Half-life (CS, DoD, etc.). Anybody wanna help convert me?

Great.

[Night Goat]

I can now run Steam in Linux. Too bad I can't run Half-Life in Steam because some dick used a keygen and my legit key came up, and now I can't register my key. This is the exact reason why key verification via server hurts customers far more than it does software pirates. Fuck you Valve, you had better fix this before Half-Life 2 comes out. I'm not buying if Steam is the only way to play.

Re:Depressing, in a way...

[Quarters]

Actually, I have been paying attention. I know that the Q1/Q2 engine games have been somewhat supported (Working Rating 4 for all HL based games) for a while now. But, even by Transgaming's admission on their website, you're better off playing them in OpenGL mode than the D3D mode.

WineX 3.3 can't even fully support the version of Direct3D (I'm guessing DirectX 3) used in games released circa 1998. That doesn't bode well for them supporting any game released now.

A quick search of the Supported Games List over at Transgaming shows that there are only seven (7!) titles that get a Working Rating of 5. Only two of those titles are 3D games and both of those have OpenGL renderers. There are no Direct3D only games that WineX 3.3 supports 100%. The newest game of the seven is Warcraft III, which is fast approaching two years old. The other five games are Direct 2D based and average in age from 3-4 years old.

Extrapolating out that means that I could reasonably expect to play a game released in 2004 sometime in 2007 if I'm going to use WineX. That's being lenient and assuming they will somehow leapfrog DirectX versions 4-8 and get to D3D 9 sometime soon. If I were to start paying my $5.00/month subscription now I will have paid $185.00 (5 * 37) by the time I can play a game made in 2004. I don't even have a guarantee that there will be another WineX release between now and then to hold me over.

I can buy an XBox or a PS2 now for $180.00 (or a Gamecube for $100) and know with 100% certainty that it will play any modern game released for it. High polygon counts, pixel and vertex shaders, high resolutions, large textures, etc... It's all there and I can play those games now. Currently on WineX I can enjoy, with 100% compatibility, five 2D sprite based games, a three year old third person shooter (Max Payne), or Warcraft III.

Check out this paragraph I took from the Business Plan page at Transgaming.com:
"TransGaming is working with among the largest game developers globally to bring the most popular and the highest demand gaming titles to new platforms. Our core technology has demonstrated that it is the only technology of its kind and allows us to accomplish within a couple of months what would take most other companies as long as two years to achieve. TransGaming's technology is taking the video games industry to new levels and is changing the rules in how multi-platform games are deployed."
(emphasis mine)

The newest game they support fully is almost two years old, yet they claim to have technology that allows the translation of games to Linux in just a matter of months.

At best you can say they've taken two years to get Warcraft III working. By their own admission their library of 100% fully supported games could've been made to run under Linux in half the time if they'd ported them directly instead of working on WineX.

It's just not that impressive.