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WineX 3.3 Out - Now Supports Steam

Posted by timothy on from the making-things-work-together dept.

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."

30 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. I continue to be impressed with OSS! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Flamebait

    This is just the stuff to get my friends to switch over to Linux. They can't be stuffed to move from Windows, because currently it supports all their games, comes free with their machines, and is user-friendly and familiar.

    Way to knock off another barrier, Transgaming.

    1. Re:I continue to be impressed with OSS! by FoolishBose · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Windows doesn't actually come 'free' with the machine. The cost is passed on the manufacturer who include it somehow into the general price of the computer. Now an open-source OS on the other hand, may truly be a 'free' piece of software for the consumer.

  2. Steam :) by captainclever · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Anyone know of a good howto or guide to getting Steam working in wine?

    Surely i cant just copy the install over and run the exe.. or can i?

    --
    Last.fm - join the social music revolution
    1. Re:Steam :) by revmoo · · Score: 3, Informative

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

      --
      I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
    2. Re:Steam :) by va3atc · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      --
      Candle burns its brightest in the dark
  3. Support development by 77Punker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think it's a better idea not to buy WineX and support native ports by buying native Linux games instead. Supporting WineX just lets them talk about their "compatibility technology"(or whatever they call it now) more and more, while developers use that as an excuse to make Windows only games.

    1. Re:Support development by 00420 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I understand your concern, but I look at it this way. WineX may be the final thing that convinces some Windows users to switch to Linux, which is what Linux needs right now.

      Once Linux has a large userbase companies will want to make Linux ports of their software.

      Of course, this isn't to say that one shouldn't still support any company that is already making Linux games.

      --
      Have you tried Linux yet?
    2. Re:Support development by Per+Wigren · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "WineX may be the final thing that convinces some Windows users to switch to Linux, which is what Linux needs right now."

      No, what we need is more programmers, more contributing powerusers, more people willing to understand the importance of the Free Software model. We need quality, not quantity. Quanitity is just a bonus.

      We welcome the normal users but saying that we need them is going too far...

      Besides, anything keeping the XYZ23B3D.RAR, XYZ23B3D.R00, XYZ23B3D.R01, XYZ23B3D.R02-kiddies away from Linux is a good thing.

      --
      My other account has a 3-digit UID.
    3. Re:Support development by Seahawk · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Games on computers is a niche market allready. I would think that most games coming on the PC platform will HAVE to be Linux/Windows compatible to have any chance of earning money in 5 years.

      Hint: Console game revenue is MUCH larger than PC game revenue allready.

  4. Silver Dollar City by NanoGator · · Score: 2, Funny

    "WineX 3.3 Out - Now Supports Steam"

    Whoah, my great grandfather would rejoice!

    --
    "Derp de derp."
    1. Re:Silver Dollar City by Deraj+DeZine · · Score: 5, Funny

      Judging by how much noise some of my friends' computers make, it would appear that they have already taken advantage of this new-found steam powered computing technology.

      Time to replace that old "turbo" button with a "turbine" button.

      (when you're tired, every joke is funny)

      --
      True story.
  5. Depressing, in a way... by Quarters · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Supporting Steam is ok, but that's really just a Windows app, regular Wine could probably support it.

    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.

    The mean time between WineX releases is slowing and the gap between the stuff they can support and the stuff being done on current and modern games is always widening. The utopian dream of being able to install any Windows based game you buy off the shelf at BestBuy on your Linux box and run it seamlessly won't, imho, ever become reality.

    1. Re:Depressing, in a way... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      again, whats wrong with supporting quality and quality with a fanbase instead of a fragmented society of new games? i'd write support in my product so that i can help out 50% of my users instead of writing alot more to support 20 new games for 20% of the users.

    2. Re:Depressing, in a way... by PyromanFO · · Score: 4, Informative
      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.
    3. Re:Depressing, in a way... by Quarters · · Score: 4, Interesting
      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.

    4. Re:Depressing, in a way... by one4nine4two · · Score: 2, Informative

      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

  6. What's the performance like? by skermit · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    --
    -Christopher Wu
    http://www.christopherwu.net/
    1. Re:What's the performance like? by MBCook · · Score: 5, Informative
      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).

      --
      Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
    2. Re:What's the performance like? by irc.goatse.cx+troll · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Performance is a funny issue.. Back in the 1.5 days, CounterStrike ran MUCH better in wine than in windows XP. I'm talking atleast 20fps difference, easily more.

      I've yet to try the new winex/steam as I play counter-strike in leauges and really don't want a VAC bug to ban me for 5 years, both for having to explain 'no I was not cheating' and because I'd have to ditch my 0:1:2496 steamid.

      I'd honestly not want to rely on winex now that Valve is pushing an update once a week over steam, the chances of it breaking are just not something I wan't to think about.

      --
      Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
    3. Re:What's the performance like? by AstroDrabb · · Score: 2, Informative
      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.

      --
      If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
      it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
  7. What about the REAL Wine, people?! by IntergalacticWalrus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:What about the REAL Wine, people?! by linux_warp · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:What about the REAL Wine, people?! by slux · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Much of the support for games regular wine enjoys has been contributed by "those monkeys at Transgaming".

      The copy protection is the part Transgaming cannot release, but other than that they do give back to the community. After WINE changed to the LGPL, they're doing it thru ReWind but I'm sure the changes finally trickle back to the main wine tree if they're any good.

      TransGaming is not such a bad company. I don't agree with what they're doing, I feel it may eventually or has already hurt GNU/Linux as a gaming platform. Still, it's nice to have games such as Warcraft 3 or Half-Life which enjoy a large following and would probably never be ported supported. It helps when someone considering switching just has to have that one game.

    3. Re:What about the REAL Wine, people?! by Penguin2212 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Also, according to the Wine website...

      TransGaming has done extensive work to get copy protection working. They've added support for popular formats such as SecuRom and SafeDisc. In the case of the latter they've licensed SafeDisc LT from Macrovision and incorporated the necessary changes into the core parts of their Wine tree.

      Currently in the LGPL Wine tree you can find support for SafeDisc 1 with SafeDisc 2 on the way. The caveat being that Wine must run in NT mode (configure winver "nt40" in the wine config file).

      D3D/OGL support isn't the only thing keeping games from running in Linux. DRM software is what's causing more problems for gamers using Wine. Wine includes many game-specific hacks for things that the regular CVS wine doesn't support. Presently, I have both installed and use both of them for various things.

      And, just FYI, Gentoo still has a CVS ebuild for wine. Have a look-see for yourself:

      root@athlonxp patrick # emerge -pv wine

      These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

      Calculating dependencies ...done!
      [ebuild U ] app-emulation/wine-20040121 [20031212] -alsa +arts +cups -debug -nas -nptl +opengl +tcltk 9,639 kB

      Total size of downloads: 9,639 kB

      root@athlonxp patrick #

      --

      --
      Adobe's anti-counterfeiting softw
  8. Re:Yes, But... by Medieval_Gnome · · Score: 2, Informative

    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)

    --

    :wq

  9. Ultimate Wine cvs automation script by dan_bethe · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Check out this script for automated management of the cvs source of all Wine versions and branches, including WineX. I'm just trying it out now for the first time.

    I do feel somewhat bad replying to a commercial announcement, with a freeloader announcement ;-> But there are a lot of unemployed hackers out there, and a lot of people who'd test it out and give WineX a louder voice. Do support free, commercial software if you have the means.

  10. Great. by Night+Goat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  11. Re:no descent, no tomb-raider, no NFS by Rysc · · Score: 3, Funny

    No NFS? What are you smoking? Linux has had NFS for years.

    --
    I want my Cowboyneal
  12. Re:no descent, no tomb-raider, no NFS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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

  13. Don't forget to support your friend Icculus.. by msimm · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Winex is neet and all and I'll give them credit for not adding game support for games that are actively being ported to Linux. But if your trying to decide between a couple of games try to get the one that has a Linux port before chosing one with emulation (ok, wine is not emulation..ygmp).

    Between inhouse porting and Icculus a lot of the major releases are coming out with native Linux ports. The developers are doing their part to support a Linux market that we've been clamoring about it for ages, so...buy something from ID Software or try out Savage, Neverwinter Nights, MOHAA or Unreal Tournament. Or save a little money and try America's Army. I'm playing a hell of a lot of Postal 2 STP and its *addictive as hell* and I haven't even touched Tribes 2 in months. Supporting WineX is just begging to go back to playing Tetris clones and Solitare natively under Linux. ;-)

    --
    Quack, quack.