WineX 3.3 Out - Now Supports Steam

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WineX 3.3 Out - Now Supports Steam

Posted by timothy on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @01:57PM 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."

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I continue to be impressed with OSS! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-17 14:03 · 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.
Support development by 77Punker · 2004-02-17 14:14 · 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 · 2004-02-17 15:20 · 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?
Re:Steam :) by revmoo · 2004-02-17 14:15 · Score: 3, Informative

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

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I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
Depressing, in a way... by Quarters · 2004-02-17 14:22 · 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 · 2004-02-17 14:36 · 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 · 2004-02-17 15:29 · 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 · 2004-02-17 17:59 · 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.
What's the performance like? by skermit · 2004-02-17 14:42 · 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 · 2004-02-17 14:50 · 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.
What about the REAL Wine, people?! by IntergalacticWalrus · 2004-02-17 15:33 · 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 · 2004-02-17 16:05 · 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.
Great. by Night+Goat · 2004-02-17 16:09 · 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.
Re:Silver Dollar City by Deraj+DeZine · 2004-02-17 16:24 · 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)

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True story.
Re:no descent, no tomb-raider, no NFS by Rysc · 2004-02-17 17:44 · Score: 3, Funny

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

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