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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?"
It's quite possible, if people don't renew thier subscriptions that the 20,000 may never be reached.
Conversely, someone could say one day "Let's all subscribe for just one month" and code will be released.
(100,000 a month is the goal by the way)
A blog I run for the wealth
First, it's not about bringing Windows gamers to Linux, it's about keeping Linux users in Linux instead of having to reboot to play their games. There's alot to be said for no longer having to dual boot and WineX helps people do that. Mainly I see this with multiplayer games. People have one or possibly two games they play heavily in a given 6-month period. If WineX lets them run both those games and they otherwise want to stay in Linux, they'll become a full time Linux user, more likely to buy games with Linux support. It's not about getting people to convert, it's about allowing people who want to convert the ability to do so.
Second, the developers aren't the only one's who determine what gets ported where. Publishers would start putting pressure on developers if we say even a 10-20% share of the desktop market on Linux. How many Mac games get published? Macs are a smaller share of the desktop than Linux right now.
Third, I agree totally on the buying games with Linux ports instead of emulation. WineX doesn't hurt that at all. Nobody out there is saying "Well, it works with WineX so we won't do a Linux port." Theyre saying "nobody's using Linux on the desktop, why do we care?" Every person we can allow to use Linux full time just adds to the mindshare of Linux on the desktop. Things like Crossover Office, Wine and WineX help that. I know our office at work wouldn't be rolling out Linux on the developers desktops if we couldn't access IE and Outlook. They're not about to change the entire infrastructure but they'll allow us to use it if it doesn't cause them too much trouble. It works the same at home. If people can use their favorite apps in Linux they will be much happier with the switchover. Then they'll gradually move to native Linux applications because they will always work better.
Basically, WineX just allows gaming to get it's foot in the door. The future will most definately be native Linux clients, but until that's a reality we can't just ignore the situation out of principle. WineX allows people to play games under Linux that would never get a Linux port, it eases the pain of switching from Windows and causes them to have to reboot into Windows less. I don't see how that's a bad thing.
As a Linux user who doesn't dual boot, I feel richer than a Windows user because I didn't have to shell out for an operating system. Thus I have more money to spend on games!
OK, that's anecdotal. But so is your insistence that Linux users won't shell out for games. I will and I do.
P.S. Remember also that porting games Windows->Linux x86 is a hell of a lot easier/cheaper than doing it Windows->OS X PPC. Indeed, some developers will already have some kind of Linux x86 toolchain because their dedicated multiplayer servers run on Linux.
Although didn't announce it until recently, VALVe Software's Steam runs better with WineX than it does in windows. The reason for this is simple, in Windows the url loading mechanism works, and there are numerous spots that have adds. With WineX, the URL loader does not work so I can play without annoyances.
Ignoring this, it is possible that Transgaming is the reason there will be no Half-Life2 on Linux. VALVe promised the Linux community a port after they made a Linux version of the dedicated server, but now we learn that H-L 2 will be DirectX 9 only. VALVe may have assumed that linux users could play the game under WineX, and thus it wouldn't be worth it to make a native port. I hope that TransGaming protests by making no effort to support Half-Life2, and urges their subscribers to do likewise.
At least the war on the environment is going well
Before you can expect more developers, *nix needs a direct competitor to ALL of DirectX. Currently there's OpenGL and OpenAL, currently though OGL's a bit out of it (once they finally release 2.0 to the public it'll be back in the game), however DirectX is more then just D3D.
There's DirectMusic, DirectInput, DirectSound, DirectShow AND Direct3D. If someone can make a single unified programing library that can do all those sorts of things for *nix, then I think it'd make the platform ten times more attractive to develop for. The problem right now is really there are only two libraries which pose competition to parts of DirectX, not the whole. If that situation were rectified things would be on a definite path to change I think.
For obvious reasons it will always be better with a port than running games through wineX or similar. The problem with porting is IMHO that it is never planned for when developing games, it may be an item on the "wish list", but is easily dropped when time get sparse.
My suggestion is that the open source community could help developing the Linux (or any other os for that matter) specific parts. Release a precompiled library with the game core, and let the community build a renderer around that!
All it takes is to separate some classes (e.g. textures, vertex buffers, input, sound) and release the header files.