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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?"
When will people quit parading around this tired old strawman? "Why have two GUI Desktops, you could spend all that energy on one desktop? Why have more than one X Server, one is good enough! Why have several sound systems, OSS works just fine!" Repeat after me, competition is good. WineX can't hurt the Linux community, only offer incentive for Windows users. If the only game someone plays is Half-Life and WineX lets them play Half-Life in Linux, that's somebody who now uses a Linux desktop. How does that hurt anybody else? One more Linux desktop means one more number to point to when making news games, begging for a Linux port. Numbers are the only thing that matters to publishers when it comes to ports.
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
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
I just recently bought a subscription to winex, and I must say, while its *nice* to have a Windows installer on Linux to install pretty much anything, and since I've installed only a smidgen of my Windows games on here, the ones I keep coming back to are the native Linux ones. Namely, Neverwinter Nights, my ScummVM games, and Unreal. Even with WineX, the games are noticably kludgy on a fast system, and I'm too stubborn to do a dualboot just to play the three or four games that won't even install under Linux.
While WineX is nice, it just doesn't cut it, and nothing beats a native linux port.
- OS X users are used to pay for software, there is piracy of course, and open-source and free software, but companies, including Microsoft, are making money selling OS X software. Linux software by default is free.
- Most linux users are using a x86 processor, and have thus a machine that can boot Windows. I have seen a lot of people using Linux for desktop use, but most of them have still some version of windows lying around, typically as a dual boot option or for running VM-ware. The only option for Mac users to run windows software is virtual PC and it is not suitable for gaming - not recent games at least.
If you consider this, making games for OS X makes sense, the people are more willing to pay, and you can sell them a more expensive version of the game (By the time a Mac version comes out, the PC version of said game is discounted). This would be a hard sell for Linux people, as most of them have the option of rebooting to play the cheap windows version. So you basically have a low volume version that has to be as cheap as the high volume version. Tough.I know more people who use Linux than OS X (I work in a academic setting), yet I only know one Linux user who bought a Linux game, it was Heroes of Might a Magic by Loki, and he bought it because it was discounted (basically at the time Loki was going out of buisnes). Most OS X users I know have bought a few games.
I think there might also be technical issues (variety of sound system in different Linux distributions) or legal (lawyers of gaming companies being nervous about the GPL), but for me, those are secondary, the core issue is the target market.
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.
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
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.