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

Strawman

[PyromanFO]

And I think at some point we have to look at the Linux platform and ask: Where is our effort better spent? The answer is not necessarily in making Windows software work on Linux, but rather making Linux a better platform for software development. If there is one thing that Loki's short life bought the Linux world, it was a significant investment in the infrastructure on which future games have been built: SDL, OpenGL, and OpenAL. (For example, I believe that Unreal Tournament 2003 on Linux uses all of these libraries. I'm guessing the same is true of Unreal Tournament 2004, although I haven't asked Ryan or Daniel to be sure.) By comparison, it seems unlikely that all the money and effort expended on WineX will have any benefit except to a handful of users for whom a modest number of Windows-only games work well. Linux, as a platform on which to build software, will become no more attractive from even widespread use of WineX.

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.

Re:Strawman

[Christ-on-a-bike]

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?

That's not the general case. As has already been discussed, someone who just wants to play their already purchased Windows games almost certainly has a Windows install around, letting them do this without hassle. They might perhaps pay up for winex, but if they want to pick and choose their games, they are going to spend quite a lot of time gaming on Windows. (E.g. lots of new games are DirectX 9 - no play on winex for them.)

In the general case, we have quite a few Linux users, some of whom are willing to spread some cash to get games on their Linux machine (I'm one of them). I could either buy winex + some Windows games, or I could buy Linux native ports. Which is better?

I think it's much better to give my money to the people selling Linux native ports:

1. Some of my money may go towards maintaining and popularizing open source/cross platform gaming tools and libraries - in particular, OpenGL.
2. My money 'tells' the developers/publishers that there is demand for games on Linux.
3. The native ports run better and cost less (figuring in the cost of winex). (What I want to see is Doom 3 on Linux playing just as nice as on Windows - not Half Life 2 on Linux through winex, and sucking royally, if it runs at all.)

I don't think the scenario of winex bringing gamers to Linux is very realistic. (I certainly didn't switch over because of games.) In a situation where people are already dumping Windows, what is needed is to spend money on Linux ports and thereby give feedback to developers.

But buying winex + Windows games gives no positive feedback to games developers at all. Therefore, winex doesn't bring developers over to Linux either! As we have seen, TransGaming can't be relied on to push cross platform development strategies, because they make money by implementing DirectX. They want developers to use DirectX!

Numbers are the only thing that matters to publishers when it comes to ports.

Do you think that software houses continually carry out usage studies to figure out whether they should put out Linux ports of their games? That's not how it works. AFAICT, if one of the lead developers has a nice feeling about Linux, then it will get done. Otherwise it won't. If the developers are all in love with DirectX, it definitely won't get done (and neither will a Mac port). The story of Linux gaming is being played out in developers' heads, not in usage statistics.

Re:Strawman

[PyromanFO]

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.

Re:Strawman

[Christ-on-a-bike]

OK, we're on the same page. But you seem to think getting people gaming on Linux (creating the market) is more important, while I think getting the developers on board ('mindshare') is key.

I don't know if anyone knows which part of this process is really more crucial. For one thing, there were certainly Linux ports coming out (like Quake 3) when the market was very small. That kind of thinking by developers has to be encouraged. On the other hand, there are some publishers that are immune to mindshare and might never OK a native Linux port; Vivendi and EA spring to mind.

We need to get the developers to recognise the potential of Linux and move to cross platform tools. winex hurts this mindshare growth because it effectively promotes DirectX! So buying winex is bad.

If I were trying to convince a gamer to use Linux I would sell them on UT2004. I would say, "OK, you can't play Counter-Strike on Linux. But it does run UT2004, and you can bet it'll crash less, look nicer, be more secure, etc." The hardcore gamer (you?) only needs Windows to run their other games and will be prepared to dual-boot (or possibly run winex). The casual gamer (me) might be prepared to just drop CS and live without his Windows titles. To me, winex makes Linux look like a crappy Windows replacement. To grab peoples' attention I think it should be sold as different (as Macs are).

So it comes down to this: is the negative developer mindshare of promoting DirectX worth the potential Linux growth winex gives us by stopping dual-booting?

According to my argument, the answer is 'no', because there aren't very many hardcore gamers who are pissed off about dual-booting and so won't use Linux.

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

my new subscription

[sdibb]

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.

Money

[Matthias Wiesmann]

The switch from porting games to OS X instead of Linux seem obvious to me: there is some chance of making money. While you can discuss the relative market shares of OS X versus Linux until the sun dies out, the two markets are quite different.

• 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.

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