10 Points About Transgaming's Cedega/WineX

jvm writes "Attempting to raise the level of the discussion, Dan 'theoddone33' Olson has put together a list of ten critical observations that every potential Linux gamer should consider before buying Transgaming's WINE-based product Cedega (formerly WineX). Dan invites credible rebuttals to the points he's raised. The debate over the value of Cedega/WINE as a solution for the nascent Linux gaming community continues..."

Comments

Slashdotted, but I bought it last month, so...

[26199]

Have to say I was impressed... I can now play Counterstrike without rebooting, which is very nice. Doom 3 works too. It's cheap, it works, haven't seen any reason to complain.

It actually makes me think of Linux as a viable platform for games... not a viable platform in five years' time, but a viable platform now.

Re:Slashdotted, but I bought it last month, so...

[Plac3bo]

I run normal CS via Steam w/o any serious problems. There is still too much lag to be as competitive as I once was on Windoze, but, when I need my CS fix, it gets the job done ;)

What the hell is /. doing posting this tripe?

[marcushnk]

I'm sick of these halfwitts sledging a real contributer to the gaming industry in Linux.
These guys have a good history, yeah its not squeeky clean but so bloody what?!?
They contributed to Loki's technology, Gavriel is on good Terms with Ryan (Icculus) and there are many other linux NATIVE technologies that owe their success in part to direct help from Transgaming.

FFS, if you don't like them then DON'T BLOODY use their product, stop stabbing the poor bastards in the back. /rant over
*mutter grumble* *kicks cat*

Re:What the hell is /. doing posting this tripe?

[rpdillon]

The real problem is that half the people say:

"Yeah, everything runs great! WTG Trangaming!! Best $15 I ever spent!"

and the other half say:

"What a piece of shit! Nothing runs, and I tried 37 games! Screw Transgaming, I want my money back!"

And that was my finding...that some people get it to work, and other simply cannot (often, but not always, how much time you want to put into trying to work out all the idiosyncracies).

But that is enough of a problem: if I *pay* for a commercial product, I shouldn't have to pay and THEN find out if some games I want work for me...performance should be consistent. Further, it IS commercial; if I made you pay for software, you'd expect it to work...not that you'd have to spend 6 or 7 hours every so often to get your money out of it.

Don't get confused: we are used to Linux and other free software (as in beer) that we don't have to pay for, but have to spent hours configuring, learning and tweaking to get it to work sometimes. And its worth it, because we learn, and we get free software, and maybe can give something back to the community.

But with Transgaming, its NOT free software, and I shouldn't have to spend hours at a time trying to get acceptable performance out of games I *already* paid for once. Now I have to pay twice, AND spend a lot of time screwing around with esoteric settings, and in the end, it may or may not work, and I don't know if it will EVER work.

Name one other commerical program that charges you monthly (to the tune of $60 a year), simply to use their software which may or may not work as advertised, whose performance varies so wildly that you simply cannot predict whether it will work for you or not until you pay up. I'd say it takes a full work week of my spare time/year to try to set up games I want to play and find out if they will even run - often without success.

Man, I just convinced myself to go cancel my subscription.

Windows games = Windows community

[Trurl's Machine]

The debate over the value of Cedega/WINE as a solution for the nascent Linux gaming community continues..."

I think this debate is pointless. If you purchase a Windows game, you are a member of the Windows gaming community, period. It doesn't matter if you play it on native Wintel platform or on Macintosh emulating x86/Windows via Virtual PC - or Linux emulating Windows APIs. The next logical step is to quit all your Linux activity and reboot your computer to MS Windows, the same game will run even better then. The *only* way to build Linux gaming community is via native Linux ports, just as the relatively small Macintosh gaming community does. Mac users got used to waiting months or years for native ports to be released. They don't complain paying premium prices for games whose Windows ports are already in bargain bins. There will be no "Linux gaming community", not until Linux gamers accept similar solution.

Re:Windows games = Windows community

[spuzzzzzzz]

Mac users got used to waiting months or years for native ports to be released. They don't complain paying premium prices for games whose Windows ports are already in bargain bins.

Fortunately, id software has a better solution. By releasing Linux binaries of their engines on the web, linux gamers can just buy the windows games and copy tha data files over from the CD. This makes much more sense than releasing a different boxed game for every port and it is probably easier on the developers too.

Re:Windows games = Windows community

[ClassicG]

The question is not if the Linux version boosts the sales of the game - it's if it boosts the sales of the game -enough- to make up for the man-hours spent making the native Linux version. The sad fact is that the answer to this is quite possibly 'no', and that even if it sometimes might pay off, most game companies don't want to take the risk. Considering the current market, most game companies can't -afford- to take that risk - making a game in the first place is risky enough without the extra development and support costs of a Linux port.

Re:Windows games = Windows community

[Anonymous Coward]

You are aware that your whining is what most of us are sick of, aren't you? Most of us linux users don't want to install an OS that has built-in spyware. We don't want an OS that will just suck down all the viruses and extra spyware on the internet that happen to be passing by. I'm happy not being a spam zombie, or part of the massive DDoS network that is the Windows portion of the internet.

Go back to your games. We have some serious computing to get on with.

No problems here with the games I play

[ScottGant]

Actually, I agree with you.

I spent my 15 bucks...15 measly bucks...and installed it. It works great for me on the games I play with it...the same ones that I used to play when I had XP a year ago. Everquest runs faster for me than it did on XP...Warcraft 3 runs great, Steam/Half-Life/Counterstrike runs great also...there are some bumps with Steam as it updates itself...but they fix them.

I have no complaints with my whopping 15 bucks I spent on this. If I didn't like them, or they were not doing what I wanted it to do, then I wouldn't buy it anymore. Plain and simple.

And besides, most of the other games I play have a native Linux client on them anyway.

Re:Slashdotted already?

[JohnFluxx]

Hmm, is this the best top 10 they can do?

I see nothing particulary evil or bad of transgaming. Seems like a small company struggling to get along. They provide a service, and some people pay for it. $5 a month is next to nothing.

Re:Slashdotted already?

[ScottGant]

# Performance
The games I play actually run faster on my system than they do on my wife's XP system. I guess I'm doing something wrong.

# Pricing
15 bucks...wow...that's like...3/4 of a $20...

# Progress
In the 3 months I've "subscribed" to it they've had 2 major releases.

# Potential
True, they play catch up with MS...but what else can they do, they have to see where MS is going so they know how to emulate the calls MS is calling for etc etc. They can't just make the shit up and hope MS follows THEM? Right?

# Priorities
Oh, so a company can't have two areas where they're branching off? Apple released the iPod, did everyone start screaming saying they were going to abandon the Mac or now their interests lay elsewhere? Come on.

# Promises
Sounds like a wash here. No opinion either way. They do release back to the community though, but perhaps not enough it seems.

# Packaging
Agreed here. They should let the distos have it as a package at least. The development package.

# Propaganda
Sounds like this point is propaganda itself. Notice that he offers no proof that they "fail to hold up under scrutiny". Ok, how so? Honestly, I'd like to know...break it down for me because frankly I'm too lazy. But then again, I don't belive 90% of the claims of any product...even the ones I like. lol (i'm joking people...don't get your panties in a bunch).

# Prevention
He states: There is speculation that Cedega... Ok...SPECULATION? So, how is this a bad mark on their part? I could speculate also doesn't make it true. And as we can see, companies are still making ports for Linux. But he did pull it together at the end.

I don't know...he makes some points to make one think...and they would be worth thinking if it weren't for the fact that Cedega cost me all of $15 bucks and it works great with the games I throw at it.

And that's kind of a hard thing to complain about...if it works, it works. And for me it works. Doesn't work for you, not much I can do about it. I can't rally around something that works for me and doesn't work for others. I mean, how can I do that? I would just be repeating what others are saying and not going from personal experience: "Boo...down with Transgaming! BOOO...Yes, it works for me on the games I play...but I've heard that others have problems with it...so BOOO!"

I'd sound like and idiot! Ok...perhaps I already do.

Would a better idea be...

[blahplusplus]

... to develop a "wrapper" (forgive my bad terminology if its wrong, I couldn't think of the name!) so that you could run two OS's at the same time and task switch between them like you do with windows programs?

I never got the whole "linux bit" windows is Mass market, linux will never be MASS MARKET! I'm sorry it just wont at least not for a long time. It may become mass market in emerging markets and developing countries but Consoles come first, then windows, then if you're lucky linux gets the scraps. Why anyone would want to run games on - non-native systems does not make very much sense to me, can't you just dual boot?? Is it really that difficult to wait reboot, and wait ~20-40 seconds for XP to load and run the game? If this is your leisure time you waste all of maybe 2 minutes, 1 going into windows, 1 rebooting and going back into linux.

Doom 3 but no QuickBooks?

[copponex]

This is sad... people can play Doom 3 on their linux partition, but they can't run QuickBooks?! It makes me wonder of the linux community *really* wants the desktop business market.

I have my boss and all employees on Firefox/Thunderbird. I've removed the little E icon but pinned it to the start menu for dumb sites like Ingram Micro and - unbelievably - slashdot. If there were a bit of software similar to a multi-user GnuCash that could import quickbooks files, I cannot tell you how many businesses I could have switched by the Q4.

We have a small window of time before MS breaks all the wine/crossover compatibility with Longhorn. Don't miss it.

Re:Doom 3 but no QuickBooks?

[IamTheRealMike]

Disclaimer: I work for CodeWeavers.

I agree wholeheartedly. I'm doing my best to support Codeweavers, but it's hard sometimes. I get especially frustrated when I see them concentrating an entire release on making iTunes work instead of something like Quickbooks.

Actually, we are almost always working on multiple things at once. Often quite a few of us are working on bugfixes for large, corporate proprietary apps - this is mostly separate to our CrossOver work where we focus on the home/enthusiast Linux users market. The contract work we do for such programs isn't public but the patches go back to WineHQ immediately just the same as work for CrossOver does.

Often these bugfixes are the sort of thing which affect many GUI desktop apps, including things like QuickBooks. So you could say we are working on it in an indirect way.

But I know, I know, you want us to work on QuickBooks specifically, so it runs in CrossOver. Believe me, we'd love to do that too - the only Windows machine in our office is used by the secretary (or as we call her, our Chief Non Geek). She's said she'd be happy to run Linux. So why doesn't she? Right, you guessed it - we use QuickBooks ourselves.

Unfortunately, being a (small) company that isn't exactly rolling in money, we have to focus entirely on what our customers are most willing to pay for. As you can see from our top voted apps list iTunes comes first by a long way with 118 votes, and QuickBooks Pro comes in at number 22 with 16 votes. We can't magically divine what CrossOver users are willing to pay for, so we have to go via these sorts of lists.

I hope that explains our slightly odd focus. Unfortunately Linux on the corporate desktop hasn't taken off yet: given the huge resources Red Hat and Novell are marshalling behind it I'm hoping it has to happen soon, but currently, it hasn't. That means Wine development is driven mostly by personal users.

I noticed in their bug list the other day somebody asked them to support UPS Worldship, which is a *simple* app that would be perfect for running on Linux. Their response was "no" without even considering it

Our bugzilla isn't public so I guess you are talking about the C4 site I linked to above. Our experience shows that there is no such thing as a "simple" app when it comes to Wine - even very straightforward and apparently simple programs can make use of obscure functionality or hit edge-case bugs in Wine that mean they don't work right. By definition if somebody asked us to support it, it doesn't work correctly. We can either choose to spend the time tracking and fixing those bugs, or the bugs that affect high profile, popular apps.

Fortunately we're supported by (and in turn support) the Wine community. We resync with WineHQ regularly (every few weeks usually) so it's definitely possible that a fix for UPS Worldship will make it in from there, or we'll fix it in the course of making other apps work. We term this "collatoral damage", somewhat flippantly - basically it means that as we work on improvements for one program, all the others start working better as well. For example, Office now runs about 50% faster (according to officebench) in the upcoming CrossOver 3.1 relative to 3.0 due entirely to optimizations developed whilst working on iTunes.

OK, I hope I explained how we set our priorities well enough. Thanks for supporting us and the Wine project!

Re: neverwinter nights

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I own 4 copies of NWN + all exps, all of which are played on Linux machines. But the only way I knew to do this was to buy the Windows boxed versions, and copy the data over per instructions on the bioware site. So I suspect all my purchases were recorded as windows purchases.

Now, it also sounds like NWN2 is not going to be ported to Linux :-(

Yet another reason not to use WineX

[Eric Damron]

I have subscribed to WineX for a couple of years now. I just have five bucks a month charged to my credit card via Pay Pal.

For some time now I have been considering dropping my support of this product for some of the reasons listed in the article. Another reason is the way in which WineX or Cedega is distributed. You download their Point2Play program and then from that program you install Cedega. Although Cedega is offered as a separate download I have never been able to successfully install Cedega/WineX unless I use the Point2Play program to get the copy off of their website. What this means is if I ever drop my subscription I won't be able to reinstall the software. Probably the whole point in making it that way.

I have recently upgraded my PC to a 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4 and am testing out Suse. I installed Point2Play and Cedega. I wanted to see if the extra computing power would make gaming through WineX more bearable but I can't seem to get it to work with Suse. It simply won't install anything anymore. Yet another reason to drop this product.

As Linux works its way into the mainstream desktop market, we'll see more and more games being written for Linux. I always considered Wine/WineX just a temporary bandaid to help Windows users make the transition.

Re:Transgaming doesn't deserve support.

[SQLz]

They're hindering progress by running a separate branch and charging for it when they could be working with the wine developers in creating a FREE solid application that would otherwise make people seriously think about switching to Linux.

Hello captain misinformed. Have you checked out thier CVS server? Its all there except for the copy protection code and other proprietary code they licensed. Check it out, ./configure; make; make install.

Not to mention, many of the biggest Linux software companies around have seperate commerical branches based off an open source codebase ot procuct....duel licensing. The same as Transgaming. The copyright holder can license under the GPL/LGPL/BSD/QT/etc then turn around and license the exact same work under a difference license to someone. Do you think money magically appears in their bank accounts?

You can't be serious...

[some_random_person]

I'm not sure if you're being genuine or not, so I'll take the time to reply.

Virtual machines are typically required to run multiple operating systems at the same time, unless you have multiple systems on which you can run your operating systems and then just switch between the two with a kvm switch. The problem with virtual machines is that they need a place to run, which means they still need a host operating sytem. The ones I've seen that either use Linux or Windows just don't implement the child operating system fast enough for it to be viable with newer games.

Why not dual boot? I don't own a copy of windows. I'm not going to pay ~$200 for a copy of XP Pro (and I'm not going to break the law and pirate a copy.) Why? Because I don't want to have to take the extra time to secure the system, keep it up to date with patches that introduce more problems than they solve, and then still have random problems due to either my own lack of understanding of the internals of the OS or the inability of the OS to just do what I need it to.

Now that all those typical religious reasons out of the way, I never use my system *just* to play a game. I'm always doing other things at the same time. Even with fullscreen games I still run a messenger in the background, have a browser open for e-mail and a few forums, and some xterms where I'm idly modifying code or making notes as ideas occur to me. Not to mention downloads that might be running. I play more games, more often, when I'm waiting for something to download. Rebooting means I have to close everything I'm doing to restart. And it sure as hell doesn't take as few as 20-40 seconds to boot XP. If I wanted to download something reliably in windows I have to install cygwin (for wget) or use some third party app, otherwise when my downloads randomly die (as they often did when I was still using windows) I'd have to start all over again.

And what do you mean Linux will never be mass market? It already is. Just not as much in the end-user space. More game companies are slowly starting to produce Linux version of their applications and it's only a matter of time before the rest of the industry follows suit. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass to maintain multiple versions of software, but it's typically easier to develop under Linux (wider availability of tools, better tech/forum support). Wouldn't it be funny if industries started dropping support for windows and windows games due to the hassles of maintenance?

On second thought, mod the parent down. His/her post is no more insightful or interesting than my own reiteration of reasons that others have also used in the past.