Three Years of TransGaming Discussed

jvm writes "In 2001 TransGaming launched their product WineX with the goal of bringing Windows games to Linux with 100% compatibility and speed by building on the WINE project. In a lengthy, critical post, Curmudgeon Gamer uses those three years of perspective to assess the company, its product, and its role in the Linux gaming world. How is compatibility progressing? What about the source release after 20000 subscribers? And what's up with porting games to MacOS X instead of Linux?"

Comments

SDL was a god-send

[magic]

Thanks to SDL, I was able to port my Windows-only 3D code base to have full support for OS X and Linux in only a few weeks. The result is G3D.

G3D now has professional game developers, researchers, and students at several universities all developing 3D games and demos that run natively on all three platforms. The nice thing is that SDL was easier to use than the native Windows APIs.

For Linux to continue to be viable it needs to have a viable desktop. The desktop needs to have infrastructure that is easier to use than the Windows APIs and platform-independent in order to convince developers it is worth their while. As a developer, I don't want to use even more platform-specific APIs in order to support a (comparative) handful of users. I am willing to learn and use a new API if it makes Windows programming easier and gives me a free port to new platforms.

SDL, SDLmixer, OpenAL, and G3D are great for games. I'd like to see things like wxWindows for GUI development reach the same level of stability and native performance. Right now it is too hard to make a GUI application that runs on 2 or 3 platforms and looks as sharp as a native Windows app on Windows. It needs to be easier to write such a program using a platform independent API than the Win32 API in order to get more "real" programs on Linux.

-m

Re:SDL was a god-send

[Christ-on-a-bike]

I'd like to see things like wxWindows for GUI development

ITYM wxWidgets....

Lack of support

[Via_Patrino]

Linux still lacks support for opengl2, it doesn't have support for functions like, pbuffer as a texture, render to texture and pbuffers mapping on a quad.

And as someone said before, on another article, most of the games supported by winex are opengl, the number of supported directx games is very low. But I won't repeat what he said, read yourself.

And the source is already released, you can get it using winex-cvs, but it's not gpl.

Re:Lack of support

[magic]

Technically, OpenGL 2.0 isn't released yet. The NVIDIA drivers on Linux lag the Windows ones by about 6 months but provide almost the same functionality: pixel shaders, render-to-texture, etc.

-m

Re:Lack of support

[Anonymous Coward]

You are wrong, there is no render to texture on NVIDIA's Linux GLX. WGL, though, has it.

Re:How many subscribers at the moment I wonder?

[GigsVT]

Don't worry, they automatically bill you for renewal whether you want it or not.

I learned that the hard way, but I agree with what they are doing so I let the charge stand.

Re:Strawman

[Kleedrac2]

Hate to intrude on your conversation but as was reported on /. here you can run Steam (Counter Strike 1.6) under linux! And Half-Life (Counter Strike 1.5) runs fine too! :)

Kleedrac