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Transgaming to Support Half Life 2 Under Linux
rpdillon writes "According to Half-Life Fallout, Transgaming Technologies has announced that they will be releasing version 4.2 of Cedega, their Wine based software allowing some DirectX games to be played under Linux. The new version will be released Dec 7th with official support included for Valve Software's Half-Life 2 and Steam, Valve's online software store and distribution system, and a required component of Half-Life 2."
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Halflife refers to the amount of time it takes for a radioactive substance to decay to 1/2 of its mass.
What is the relation to the game, exactly ?
How do they intend to get Steam to work? If Windows users are catching hell when they try and "validate" their copies, I can't imagine what *NIX users will go through.
Unreal Tournament 2003 ...
Unreal Tournament 2004
Quake 3
Doom 3
Postal 2
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
more here...
Half Life 2?
Go on Valve!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'd buy it!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
WINE = Wine Is Not an Emulator
You're right, it IS oart of the acronym
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
Is this a troll, or are you stupid? Please advise, I'm not sure how to reply to this comment.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Steamed pengiun for dinner!
Eeeeexcellent! All the more reason you should move to Linux.
IT'S MORE LIKE AN API WRAPPPER THAN EMULATION. KTHX
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or will it run on my DX2s and P75s?
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Wine stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator". It doesn't emulate the graphics, it maps the syscalls from DirectX into opengl for graphics (This is my understanding of it, IANAWD (WineX Dev))
If steam is ported to linux, perhaps more vendors will consider making cross platform games. Of course there is the whole market share thing, but its sure a step in the right direction.
I think I should send a link to this article to my linux friends who are playing hl2.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
If they intended to do that, they would have built their graphics engine on OpenGL, not DirectX. So, in short: Not Gonna Happen.
IANAWH (Wine Hacker), but AFAIK, Wine just translates the DirectX calls into OpenGL, and does the same with all the other APIs.
And yes, emulator is in the name. Specifically:
Wine is NOT an emulator
OH OH OH!! RATHER THAN READING ABOUT WINE, I'LL JUST POST ON SLASHDOT AND ASK EVERYONE!?!?! RTFM YOU TWIT.. LMAO
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Transgendered to Support Half Life
Nobody?
Linux users join the masses of gamers who are collectively WINEing about activation delays.
Because it's a sure way to lose money? Half Life 2 is a DirectX game (argue this decision if you want). It would take a great deal of work to convert it to OpenGL so it can work natively in Linux. It's not worth the development effort.
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Because Linux users comprise less than 2% of the overall desktop market. Don't get religious about it; it's simply the fact that most of the time, it's not financially worth the development effort to port a game, especially a DirectX-based game, over to Linux.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
Wine is not an emulator, but a reimplementation of the Win32 API. The various system calls that are made available to Windows programs are reinterpreted by the Wine libraries, so as to perform similar functionality, sometimes by making system calls to Linux. In the case of DirectX stuff, 3D calls are converted to OpenGL. Some people have found that games can even run a little faster under Wine, but in most cases there is a small performance hit, probably equivalent to a few frames per second.
We bitch and bitch about how much we hate corporations sticking it to us. We hate DRM, we hate devices that phone home, we hate buying a game, and then being unable to take that game over to a friends and just play it.
And yet, everyones head is so far up Valve's ass, that noone seems to be bothered with how odious this steam thing really is.
I mean, you can't play single player without a 'net connection. You cant drag your disk over to your friends house and just play.
It stinks worse than ANYTHING I've ever seen. This is the absolute worst ass-reaming any pointy haired manager ever decided to give the consumers.
You all are just grabbing your ankles and grinning.
I won't buy, leech, crack, play, or even talk about Half Life 2 anymore until they reissue it in a format which I can just install and start playing the single player game without phone-home activation, or being bundled with your ad delivery service.
Fuck you Valve. I will never purchase games via Steam. Luckily I have Halo 2, Metroid Prime 2, Doom 3, and a pile of other titles to keep me entertained.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If anything this will make people not port the products to run in linux because they'll tell you to just use a WINE product to run them.
Free Mac Mini
Or, if they weren't such cock smokers, they'd have seen that they could sell more copies of the game by abstracting out directx and opengl stuff.
Didn't the unreal people do this?
BF1942, Doom3 (before Linux release), and other games work just as fast as in windows. Believe it or not.
They'd better change the acronym before Microsoft patent half of it...
You know, TransGaming just recently got their webservers back online after some downtime. Next thing, they make it on Slashdot. ... have mercy.
The mods will assume that you're trolling, but that's unfair. Some people just don't know how WINE works. (Of course Slashdotters will accuse you of living in a cave, but whatever.)
I trust that you're being honest so I'll just answer the question.
"WINE Is Not an Emulator" is one of those recursive acronyms that was invented after the fact. It used to stand for WINdows Emulator. But the important thing is that the new name is pretty much right; it isn't an emulator, it's a translation layer. Windows EXE and DLL files are directly executed by the CPU; WINE's job is just to implement all the Win32 API calls that they make.
Transgaming took a branch of WINE and added some fixes, some workarounds, and a much better implementation of the DirectX APIs. Specifically, most Direct3D functions are translated into their OpenGL equivalents, so the graphics are still hardware-accelerated (assuming you have a Linux-supported video card).
So to get back to your question,
there is generally very little performance loss when WINE is compared to Windows. The binary is running natively on your CPU, and the video calls are still hardware-accelerated. The only difference is another level of API indirection.
It's interesting that some programs actually perform better under WINE, due to differences in the Win32 and Linux kernel architectures.
Yet other companies produce mac versions of most popular games. So if that little % is worth the trouble, why not Linux? I think it will happen really soon.
The speed at which Wine is supporting new games seems to indicate a certain amount of support from the game manufacturers. At the very least they're probably getting their hands on pre-releases in order to prepare for compatibility once the true game comes out.
This isn't as good as having an actual native port for Linux, but at least it indicates that there is an awareness that Linux and cross-compatability are a consideration.
Well it's using DirectX, which makes it much harder to port (as opposed to the majority of games running under linux, which use OpenGL).
However, seeing what can be archived with OpenGL, I really wonder why many developers don't consider it an option. Developing games in OpenGL and distributing (unsupported) linux binaries can't be much more expensive.
I don't read replies by ACs.
If you look at these download stats, you'll see that the non-Win32 platforms make up more than a third of all downloads.
On the 'fringe' platforms (OS X, Linux), you can achieve a much higher market share.
- Andreas
In other news:
Cedega a program designed to run Windows/DirectX game in Linux, is going to be supporting a Windows/Direct X game in Linux.
Wow, you are a prick...
Many games are running faster with wine! I tried stracraft and works 2-3 times faster on linux than in windows 2000 on the same computer!
:)!
Don't play too much, go to work
abss
http://www.intrebare.ro/
Is this not a violation of the GPL, and exactly the sort of thing it was written to prevent?
Here's the Transgamming forum.
291 votes in less than a week? Well seems they have some users who want it.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
I can get steam to work under cedega right now. It plays counter-strike and half-life and such at respectable frame rates, but only up to 800x600. If I turn it up anymore it drops to 1 fps. In my windows XP partition, which I only use for steam, I get perfect vertical sync refresh rates in 1280x1024 32 bit color. Also some mods like natural selection are buggy, but working.
If I can't play every mod at full resolution with no buginess, its not much better than not being able to play at all.
ID software released a doom 3 binary for linux, why can't valve do the same? It might be more difficult because they use directx instead of opengl. But half-life 1 ran in opengl mode, and you only needed directx for the menus and stuff. and with steam, you don't even need the menus since you have the steam interface instead. It shouldn't take that long to convert from one library to another. And if they wrote Half-Life 2 to be directx only, balls to them.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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1. I have to buy winex and halflife 2? Fuck that.
2. I run x86_64 linux. winex isn't much of an option.
3. I'd rather a native OpenGL port if I'm going to pay CashMoney.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I always thought it was something along those lines but perhaps it had to do with the very "pure" sample of whatever Gordon used to start the resonance cascade scenario.
"Consumers rank the ability to play video games on their desktop as one of the top 3 important reasons for the adoption of Linux."
Is there a "not" missing somewhere in that sentence.? As in "... one of the top 3 reasons for NOT adopting Linux." For me, game support is the biggest reason why Windows still exists on my desktop.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
You are what you eat. LMAO
Slow Down Cowboy! Slow Down Cowboy! Slow Down Cowboy! Slow Down Cowboy! Slow Down Cowboy! Slow Down Cowboy!Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.
If it was written in half-decent object-oriented-code, it really wouldn't be all that tough. I mean, they did it with the first one, and that one even had a software renderer.
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
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It is not a hardware emulator, true, but it still has to emulate DirectX (unless Half-Life 2 uses OpenGL).
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
> If steam is ported to linux, perhaps more vendors will consider making cross platform games.
After spending a couple of days to get HL2 working (mostly steam working) I can tell you now that I won't be buying any games that require steam to play. Cross platform or not.
Because Linux users comprise less than 2% of the overall desktop market.
I hear this argument over and over. I don't think it is entirely correct though. Atleast not concerning games.
My mom doesn't play half-life 2. Nor does she run linux. Yet, she falls into the 98% of windows users that you are talking about.
What I want to know, is of the percentage of half-life 2 players, what percentage also run linux as a 2nd OS.
Also, it is important to know the percentage of linux users that are also avid gamers - thus indicating how many of the 2% market share would actually buy half-life 2 if it came out on linux.
While making broad "everybody should do it this way!" pronouncements are kinda silly, it does bear wondering why a company wouldn't want to grab all of a given market instead of just settling for a majority portion.
One would think that a software company would want to spread as far and wide as humanly possible...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
OpenGL is one part of the things that need to be ported. Sound and input also need to be dealt with, and probably on a much lesser scale, networking (the implimentations are probably almost exactly the same at the API level that the game developers would be working with).
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
In other news: WINE get sued by microsoft for IsNot Patent :)
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Once again, the big HoopLah is over someone porting a windows game to linux.....two months after it's released.
When the linux community finally gets their shit together, they will realize they need to negotiate with distributers **BEFORE** the cool games are released.
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
I'm not sure. I think a more important question is GNU. Is it Unix? Is LAME an MP3 encoder? Damn, this is why linux stuff is so difficult. The project names are just a bunch of arbitrarily chosen letters.
Then I pose a question...if WINE can do it on the fly (as I'm interpreting from the above posts), then why would it take them so long?
First - they have removed "bobbing-and-swaying" when you walk, it's like you're riding on a Segway, just like it was in "Wolfenstein 3d" (1992). People are complaining of motion sickness and I say that IS THE reason! Pretty silly. Then the story is kinda jerky - ok, it starts great, just like adventure game (though "on the rails"). But then all of a sudden (I did not get why) you have to run somewhere with "energetic" music playing in background, then you shoot... Well - I tested it only for one late evening, so I may change my mind later ;)
:)
;)
Also - the whole Steam registration business is SO silly. I mean - warezed version is everywhere and runs seemingly problem-free w/o any registration. Oh, well, these days there is a new ironic meaning to the word "paying" in "paying customers".
Having read all the "wowed" reviews I expected a bit more, it's not bad, but not earth-shattering: you do need good hardware (my 8500 is barely usable, even though it's definitely faster than all the 9200s), fully-physical world is not so fully physical, not to say that someone aparently scripted all the holes and ladders - it's all on the rails I tell you. Gordon Freeman is the "Invisible Man" (and totally dumb. Speechless). And of course - the environment is a mix of post-soviet Russia - everything's dirty and broken - and that "Equilibrium" movie (talking man on the screens is a strong flashback
Well - maybe I will force myself and finish it though. Some day. I've spent over a year of sporadic play on the first Half-Life after all
I've seen various documents on the Web that show how to build and install the Cedega CVS version. Apparently it is "impaired" and missing some code needed to play certain Windows games.
How are people's experiences with the CVS version? Do I need to subscribe in order to play most of the Windows games on their supported games list?
Okay well then, in the grand tradition of recursive acronyms like Gnu's Not Unix, Wine is Wine Is Not (an) Emulator. Wine emulates the Win32 API so that windows programs can be run on Linux. Direct3D runs in Wine, though last I heard not very well, and it's going to have to be well-supported to run HL2.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Good God, a recursive acronym embedded in a Slashcronym! TGIF.
To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. ("Ulysses", Tennyson)
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Thats my dawg. Mad props out to trans-gangsta team.
Maybe they don't want to put in the effort just to hear you cry some more. For instance ID software released linux binaries for Doom 3 and the majority of the things I read were that they poorly implemented, or the sound was slightly off, and that they should have been released the same time as the windows version. I'm convinced that no matter what you do for a Linux user they're going to cry about it. So why should companies go through the extra effort of pointless trying to please people that just bitch for the point of bitching ?
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Well, you've certainly convinced me that Linux has significant market share by posting the download stats of an Open Source game hosted on Sourceforge!
If they had done the upfront design work (and they may have, FAIK), they could have made the graphic subsystem modular so they could drop in an opengl implementation without changing anything else. Just perform all their optimizations in the individual graphic library wrappers.
No, I'd prefer no one pays them money for the windows version.
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I still won't buy Half-Life 2. Sure, it looks cool, and from what I've seen/heard will likely be a better game than Doom 3. I don't care. It's DRM-restricted. My computer has to spy on me and report back to the mother ship before I can even play single player. That Is Wrong. I will not support it.
Boycott Steam!
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
I'm sick of hearing all you folks complaining about Steam activation. You act as if it's your god-given right to play this game, without any restrictions whatsoever. Until you suggest a better solution, a better way to combat rampant game piracy, a better way to make sure the developers don't lose money, then keep your mouth shut.
Valve had to make a decision, and I think they made the right one. Is it easy to get HL2 working right away? No, it's a bit complicated. But with a little bit of time, it's not a big deal at all.
So please, stop your anti-Valve rant. We should be supporting game developers, they do great work! Their support for the modding community is without precedent, the game is remarkably bug free, and I know I'll be enjoying it for years to come. If you can't take a simple activation scheme in order to enjoy one of the best games ever, then you obviously don't really care about playing the game in the first place. And if that is the case, you've got no argument.
I like Steam. I love HL2. I think Valve deserves our support, not these holier-than-thou attitudes.
Plus the developers thought, wow, sounds like a cool name for a game.
That sounds alot more like a brainstorming session at the marketing department than something you would expect to hear from a developer.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Wel, first of all nice to see that cedega is capable of running Halflife 2.
But Halflife 2 sucks big time so move along, nothing to see here LOL
heh... or how many linux users have a dedicated windows box just for gaming purposes. (or a console)
No, the day it is cost effective to port code for a maximum 2% of the market, the day linux ports will be available. :) sorry!
Unreal did it, but they started their engine a loooooong time ago.
/was/ a reason to do it in the bad old days, because any given video card would have a stable OpenGL driver, or a stable DirectX driver, but never both at the same time.
There's really no reason to do it, unless you want to support Linux or Macs, which isn't all that profitable.
There
You (delibaretly?) completely misunderstood my point. Just because the platform does have *relatively* few users, it doesn't mean they're not worth catering to. For example, MacOS X sales of Candy-Cruncher outnumber win32 sales 2 to 1 (source: Brian Hook, founder of pyrogon (in an interview)).
- Andreas
Politics, Life, and More on my Aspiring for the Future
That would only be an issue for me were I not already avoiding the entire BASIC language like it's the black plague....
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
With Codeweavers doing so well with business applications and Transgaming doing so well with games, I would love to see Codeweavers and Transgaming merge into one powerhouse and merge the codebases into a unified product.
I have a sneaky suspicion that if you get the best of both worlds that the sum of the whole would be greater than the sum of the parts. In other words, the list of compatible software would not just be the sum of compatiblity of each but that together they may fill in enough holes to expand total compatibility.
Anyone from the Codeweavers or Transgaming camp care to comment on this?
I know you are, but what am I? teehee :D
The thing that really gets me is what heppens when Valve goes out of business, or gets bought out by some huge conglomerate who changes their direction? It has happened to huge numbers of game companies (my favorite being Black Isle, but even companies like Sierra exist in name only these days). Guess what. I can still play Fallout/Fallout 2 today. And in fact still do on occasion. Once Valve 'moves on' there is no way to play the $50 game I paid for (or in this case won't). This is why I find Steam so onerous.
Last you heard must have been a long time ago.
... but its nice to take advantage of that fact).
It runs Morrowind on my machine very well now except some delays loading the background music but that isn't a D3D issue.
It even has nicer looking graphics on my home Linux box than on my work Windows box (its a better computer mind you
I've used Cedega (the latest wine name from Transgaming) to run D3D and Windows OpenGL demos as well; its quite fun to see hundreds of frames per second in a 3rd party API implementation.
In the case of D3D, they're implementing an API and then sending those commands through to another API (OpenGL) which incurs some overhead, but it doesn't feel like much playing the games.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I have only two complaints about Cedaga:
It doesn't support The Sims. I happen to be a heavy-duty Sims addict (my first copy was the Deluxe edition, and now I'm running Double Deluxe), but it won't run on Linux, which is my preferred operating system. And it doesn't seem to run on ReactOS either, although I guess it's not much of a surprise because ReactOS is still in early development.
It's not free!! Sure, the source code is available, and I have no problems with compiling my own programs, but I'd really prefer a no-cost binary version because my system is sort of old (2000 Dell with at least half the components upgraded) and Wine/Cedaga would take forever to compile. Sure some people are filthy stinking rich but I don't exactly have the money to buy ever single software program I want - that's why I have a broadband connection and a CD burner ;-)
Just my 2 cents...
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
Transgaming has amazing contacts -- realize that they support many little features like CD copyprotection flags properly on a platform that isn't normally aware of those issues.
When a game comes out in a Linux port, I buy the game and E-mail the publisher thanking them for a great game.
If I play a game under Cedega and I have problems, I E-mail the publisher telling them about the problem and give them Transgaming's site and contact info about helping them make the it more compatible or fixing the bug if it is one.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I simply refuse to buy games that do not have Linux Binaries. Yes I know I'm missing out on some decent games, but it's the principle. Id, Epic, and Bioware can all look at their logs and see how many linux binaries were downloaded, and I am represented in there. They can say, we sold X copies, but Y% of them were Linux Users.
If I buy Warcraft III, or Half Life 2, to Blizzard or Valve, I am a Windows user. They look and say "Look at all the Windows versions we sold. Why spend any time on making a binary for our next game when we know how many Windows copy will sell?"
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
This is great news & all - except for no. There have been *NUMEROUS* complaints regarding performance in the game. If you can get it to not crash to your desktop, the audio lag / stuttering makes it almost unplayable.
Normally, I wouldn't bitch about speed when it comes to linux ports. Typically the games run a little bit faster, (I have no idea how this works, kudos to the WINE monkeys that have engineered it) but we're talking about serious lag in HL2 on uber fast GF6800U / AMD64 systems.
I believe ValVe still needs to PATCH the game, before transgaming starts porting it. Who wants to port a broken piece of sofwtare? I have HL2, pre-loaded for two months, and I'm telling you now that it's still riddled with bugs. Mine runs okay on XP2100 / GF4 ti4200 / 512mb PC2100 DDR.
When I say "okay", I mean it's playable, but that's about it. I'm down for linux gaming, but I don't think you guys want to touch this game until it's fixed.
When Microsoft was releasing versions of DirectX more often, along with OS'es and patches - it was harder for Wine to keep up.
But now that the release pace has slowed, it gives Wine a breather to really support everything that's there.
Plus of course they have a huge incentive to support HL 2 so I'm sure they were working pretty hard on it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Will this new version of Cedega support Direct X 9.0 graphics API? Is it simply letting the source engine fall back to Direct X 8.0 support?
I was under the impression that WINE had not yet supported Direct X 9.0. I can't wait for this! I can feel the MS grip slipping on my games hehe.
I read that Transgaming is having a relationship with Valve to get Half-life 2 going on Linux.
How about this:
You start to write some portable code so you're ready when the Windows market is diminishing.
It seems they are going to have an XBox version in 2005 (probably late), so if you don't like Steam and can wait then you have an option.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
WINE = Wine Is Not an Emulator
.. stupid acronyms. seriously i always wonder if all the creative juice was used up. how high do you have to be to end up with such a stupid name.
You're right, it IS oart of the acronym
one of many
STRAW - Straw TRAnslates Windows.
see.. i can do it too
Correction: Wine Implements the Win32 API on Linux so that windows programs can be run.
I know it's basically the same thing in the big picture of things, but it is a fundamentally different approach.
I guess "Slashdot: News for pubescent assholes." was deemed to long and difficult for people like you to understand.
Wine is more of a translator. It takes the windows API and translates those calls to the appropriate POSIX one.
Most things run just as fast in WINE as they do in Windows.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Transgaming forked wine and has not contributed all of cedega's worthy-code back to Winehq. Valve knows that there is a huge market for a HL2 linux port, but they refuse to do it. Instead Transgaming and Valve work hand-in-hand to make HL2 run in linux, rather terrible too. ..Boycott cedega and Valve.
irc.enterthegame.com #linux
Yes, there are some niche games that may appeal to one platform more than another, and therefore skew the data that way. But the fact stands: Linux users are a bunch of cocksmoking teabaggers!
"If a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a hand gun" - Dan Rather
One thing I have noticed with a lot of the reviews for games: when benchmarking, they always group OpenGL with DirectX 8 and have DirectX 9 separate, as though it's more technologically advanced. I'm somewhat sure that the newest OpenGL is as feature-ful as the newest DirectX. Somebody correct me if I am wrong.
Or you, for that matter.....
"Once Valve 'moves on' there is no way to play the $50 game I paid for (or in this case won't). This is why I find Steam so onerous."
You know what they say when you assume something...right?
If writing in another language that takes 20% more time only got you another 2% of the market share, would you do it?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
What I want to know is , where's the multiplayer support for Half-life 2..booooooooooooo
While Wine is quite compatible with newer games on certain hardware, it's still a far ways from 100% compatible with the majority of windows software or even games. It seems that the Wine devels are much more interested in supporting newest game X than some of the older uncompatible-but-still-popular games. This is understandable since new games are where the most $$$ is anyways.
However, as Wine does approach greater compatibility for new games, there is always a moving target. A new DirectX/GL spec would probably cause quite a lot of new work, and there's a lot of other stuff to take care of.
The truth is, even windows is not near 100% with windows software. That is, XP croaks on much older software, and of course other software only works on XP. The only way to run all is perhaps by dual-boot, but even then sometimes older stuff won't like your new hardware (or your hardware doesn't work on an older OS).
Wine could be a solution to these problems, as it can be more configurable than an entire OS. Set options to best emulate win9x VS XP on a per-game basic, and other flags (many exist already), and in the future perhaps it will support all the old stuff that newer Windows OS's don't.
It's like DOS support in XP, pretty much minimal. Some of the newer laptops here at work don't have 98 drivers, and XP won't run the old DOS apps that don't have win32 replacements. Linux on the other hand runs them fine with dosbox, so perhaps Wine can also offer the same backwards-compatibility for old Win32 apps.
Yes, but usually it's a correlation between economics and feasibility or risk. If a company can make $$$ with low risk, and/or have somebody else do the work, why the hell not? Basically it's saving them the trouble of writing a true port at this time, and the only risk is that Transgaming would release the game beta to the public (which would end up in them getting their asses sued off, so is unlikely).
I do agree that Transgaming is getting better at supporting new games. They should be, seeing as though the directX system only changes so much, and in reality they're not supporting the game itself so much as they're supporting DirectX, certain new win32 system calls, and perhaps every so often a new method of copy-protection.
In some cases now, Cedega actually dumps the DirectX data right to the video card to support features which OpenGL doesn't. It also significantly improves the performance. The feature requires one of the newer NVidia cards - I think all GeForce 5 and up, and some number of GeForce 4 Ti boards can use it as well.
Why is it that whenever for good or bad a product activates itself across the internet, it's "spying" on you and "reporting back"? Maybe, just maybe it's just activating the software. You know, checking your CD key against a database of known good keys?
Do you also worry about the mind-control possibilities of the government putting flouride in the city water supply?
(By the way, you can always put Steam in OFFLINE MODE in order to play single player without anything communicating anywhere.)
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I've owned Half-Life since it came out, and I've been playing Counter-Strike for nearly as long. I have grown weary of Valve's shitting on their customer base, and I for one am not going to take it any longer. I have decided that I will NOT be buying Half-Life 2. I will not give valve another dime, I don't care how great the game is. I've e-mailed valve staff members (who used to be suprisingly reachable) and told them my feelings about Steam and the way they treat their players to no avail (not even a form reply). This indicates to me that valve couldn't care less about people who've supported them all this time. So fine, if they want to treat me like shit, I'll be happy to return the favor and vote with my wallet. Down with valve, up with capitalism!
If you made 20% more profit, yes.
HL1 had an OpenGL renderer. Why would it be so far-fetched for Valve to develop one for HL2?
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
With Wine producing so much goodness, there is no reason for a native Windows user to switch to a Linux box. I fully anticipate Wine to be able to port every PC game over to Linux soon here. Not sound like an advertisement - but I'm switching to Linspire very, very soon.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
That was because when HL1 came out, there were cards that did not support DirectX and D3D. In fact, I remember that I was playing it with a Voodoo 2 card that had some kind of 'MiniGL' wrapper for 3dfx's Glide.
Things have changed in these six years.
[SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
"Transgaming"... interesting name
KARMA POLICE ARREST THIS MAN HE TALKS IN MATHS- radiohead
I have not had GREAT results with wine, yet I never have really tried. At least there is a game that will be easily and fully installable into linux. Next, we jsut need gaming developers to compile into linux! [I believe there was one game that did that]
_
Free 27" Sony WEGA TV
Wouln't it be fair to say, WINE... Emulates the Win32 API? *ducks*
Also don't forget that HL1 wasn't using a Valve engine, it was a modified version of something else (Quake2?), i.e. they didn't add OpenGL they just didn't take it out of the code they already had.
A more tinfoil-hat-type conspiracy theory would be that ATi invested money into HL2 so, with ATi cards having significantly slower OpenGL performance, it became a DX game.
Pisses off users and fails to stop piracy - sounds like the perfect compromise between DRM and ease-of-use to me.
Candy Cruncher.
Huh.
Why doesn't someone pull out the sales for the Linux and Mac versions of Quake 3?
Even better would be if someone's got a way of knowing how Unreal Tournament 2004 splits up by platform.
Have you ever tried writing a 3D engine?
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
OpenGL 2 supports all of the graphics features of DirectX 9. It also has the advantage of an extensions mechanism. If nVidia implements a new feature, they add an OpenGL extension callend NV_SOMETHING_REALLY_SHINY (or probably NV_EXP_SOMETHING_REALLY_SHINY, denoting that it is experimental, with it moving to the NV_ namespace once it has been tested.), and developers can test for that feature and use it in OpenGL immediately. Only Microsoft can add support for new features to DirectX, and their release schedule is relatively slow. This makes OpenGL the API to use if you need cutting edge features, as well as graceful fallback.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Just because they can doesn't mean they will... but the mere fact that they can is bad enough!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Is WINE available under Cygwin?
I'm still waiting for support for Colin McRae Rally...
no
Apart from some core functions and drivers everything under windows sits on top of something else, wine just makes most of the librays sit on top of the linux core.
The bare bones system call level of linux and windows are quite simila, threading, process supprot and IPC's a little differnt, files and sockets are both posix.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
In mu experience, games that do a lot of harddrive access work MUCH faster on Linux, for some reason. This is both with native games and those using Wine/WineX; for example, UT2004 and Doom 3 load levels in seconds on my Linux box.
Thanks for the troll... Linux is just fine running on the desktop... depending on what you do... if you just play games on your PC then great... run Windows.
I've said it once and I say it again... I don't hate Windows. I may like some of my MS's business ethics, but I don't hate their OS.
I do however choose to run Linux as my OS because quite frankly its gets the job "I" want done. If Windows got the job I wanted done, then I might be inclined to use it.
Announcements like these (admittedly as a Transgaming member I got this yesterday in my email) are good news to me. It means I can continue on without thinking about installing a dual boot system and still be able to play games I might like to play now and then. The same way as a paying Crossover customer I get to run a few of the Win32 apps i like to use. I don't want to have to boot between multiple OS's to get my work done. In my Linux+Cedega+Crossover environment I don't have to.
But if all you do is play cutting edge gamers... yes by all means, use Windows.
Bah didn't mean to go on a slightly offtopic rant...
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
Actually you are wrong. Emulation is the process of imitating another program for the purposes of creating compatibility. If you really want to you can call it a compatibility layer, but it is an emulator nonetheless. It emulates the Win32 API on an non Win32 machine. The acronym actually stands for Wine Is Not a (CPU) Emulator.
Proof Search for "Wine is not a"
Given that XBox games already have a degree of DRM to them, and the game will not be as new then, and it would limit the market - I really doubt the XBox version will require Live or even a network connection.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I want your dick up my ass.
This is exactly what it's going to be like when Palladium rolls out. It's going to be just like this Steam and Halflife 2 crap, but without WineX support.
I'm going to support Japan before I support Microsoft. Buy Nintendo and Sony for a future.
Has anybody with an ATi card been able to run any games under WineX?
I know the game I want to play (Dark Age of Camelot) crashes and burns with ATi's Radeon drivers on by Fedora box (that is, on the rare occassions when I manage to beat their driver into submission and compile for the latest kernel...).
I'll try again next release...
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
That could be because linux has much better disk-caching...
I might just be mixing it up with something else, but I do remember seeing an alternate definition of "half-life" -- essentially, it was "a time of sudden usefulness or importance." Makes perfect sense, considering the flak Gordon got from his scientist colleagues before he was suddenly the only one who could get help for them.
But yeah, take that with a grain of salt.
Most stores don't let you return a game unless it's broken. You must live in Crazy World where exchanges aren't the only recourse. Consider this: the game will have a copy protection scheme. Take your pick of a CD key combined with a goofy Macrovision disc that WILL be problematic for certain optical drives or Steam-based authentication during the install. I pick the latter.
There's also hdparm, for tuning. If you set it right, you can get a big performance boost.
So you're telling me you would rather download 5 discs worth of stuff and install it than download 5 discs worth of stuff, install it, and STILL cart your discs around?
The speed/performance of games under Linux/Cedega sucks compared to running a native Linux or Windows version.
Why didn't Valve just write portable code in the first place? They could/should have used OpenGL instead of DirectX.
A friend of mine at Valve tells me that they will be releasing a HalfLife2 update to add in the missing deathmatch functionality! I didn't buy HL2, because that's the part of the original HL that I really loved.
For those of you who are wondering what this is about, the new HL2 doesn't have deathmatch ability. The only multiplayer support currently is team-mode Counterstrike. This is a pretty fundamental thing to leave out, and is pretty much the only real criticism of the game I've read so far. Once deathmatch arrives, I'll be buying HL2 immediately.
Sorry this is slightly offtopic, but I thought it might be of interest to those of you reading this article thread. I was given no timeframe, except for the word "soon". That can mean anything, but at least it's on the way.
with the transgaming stuff installed please try European Air War and tell us all if it works.
The reason it didn't is that DirectX was not supported enough. Maybe now it is.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
>> WINE's job is just to implement all the Win32 API calls that they make.
Well, then wine is an emulator. It is emulating WINDOWS so that Windows applications can run in Linux.
It is not a translation layer, it is a windows API emulator.
WINdows Emulator is true.. CPU Emulation no.
An emulator can emulate anything, it doesn't have to be CPU/Hardware, it can emulate the Windows API.
[Dictionary.com]
emulate Audio pronunciation of "emulate" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (my-lt)
tr.v. emulated, emulating, emulates
1. To strive to equal or excel, especially through imitation: an older pupil whose accomplishments and style I emulated.
2. To compete with successfully; approach or attain equality with.
3. Computer Science. To imitate the function of (another system), as by modifications to hardware or software that allow the imitating system to accept the same data, execute the same programs, and achieve the same results as the imitated system.
Sounds like an emulator to me.
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
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So if it's Half Life 2, is it Full Life (Half Life * 2 = 1/2 * 2) or Quarter Life (Half Life ^ 2 = 1/2 * 1/2)?
Thanks, I won't be here all day.
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Its because of steve's reality distortion field
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Wine is the name of the opensource project (that started the whole thing).
Then theres a fork of Wine made by Codeweavers called Crossover Office (and originally Crossover Plugin). The Codeweavers product is aimed at (you've already guessed if you don't know) office/productivity software support, like Microsoft Office, Dreamweaver, Windows Media Player and more recendly iTunes. Codeweavers gives their improvements back to the community (I'm not sure Transgaming does).
Of course the product we are talking about here is TransGaming's Cedega, which is yet another fork from the original Wine project (was previously called WineX). They of course support games, directx and proprietary safedisk copy protection schemes.
Both products apparently try to avoid stepping on eachothers toes (so to speak). And both products approach licensing very differently (after forking from Wine proper, Transgaming had a bit of scandel about not giving back, old story).
Personally, I think its pretty funny loading up IE or Word under Linux. Its also pretty nice being able to use Photoshop and Dreamweaver without having to dual boot.
Quack, quack.
You don't need a net connection to play games via Steam. You just need it to initially activate games. I'm not sure what you're problem with Steam is. It works fine, never crashes and supports developers instead of publishers. What? You want to support Vivendi Universal, the continenet spamming publisher? You fucking hack. Stop being a hypocrite and get your facts straight.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
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Yes, but what's stopping a developer from starting out with, say, SDL in the first place? It seems like portability can be trivial if you start the project with portability as a goal.
Valve's probably got more money behind it that Epic, and it certainly has more money than Running With Scissiors, and they have their games ported to Linux. They could have at least started with an OpenGL renderer and then paid Icculus to handle the rest.
I think that Valve owes the community a client because they're more than happy to let us do the server-side grunt work. Let's face it: the more high-quality, dedicated servers out there, the more copies they're going to sell. So what if it won't make them another million bucks? Let the sysadmins play, too!
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
Download Steam...
Install Steam...
Have Steam 'authenticate' your game which, based on Half-Life 2's launch, anywhere from 5 minutes to a hour...
THEN you can start playing Half-Life 2 in single-player.
As opposed to...
Install a game off X CDs...
Play game in single-player.
Did I miss anything?
So, you have Wine with the DirectX support, it is no different to a game then the same DirectX function calls on MS Windows. Some games run better under Wine on Linux then directly under MS Windows. Though most games should still run a little faster under MS Windows because the Wine project got a much later start on writing a Win32 API implementation and especially the DirectX API implementation then Microsoft did, and Wine doesn't have access to the source code of MS Windows like the MS Windows programmers do. So there will be some less optimized Wine Win32 API's under Linux then under MS Windows.
However, the important thing to remember about all of this is that Wine is Not an emulator. VMWare and MS Virtual PC are emulators and emulate, in software, a hardware device. Wine just implements the same function names and parameters (the data you send into a function) that a MS Windows application will be trying to use.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Yeah, that's precisely what I meant to type, but it's not what came out and I was in a hurry :(
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It is not stupid. I think it was a good question, though it sounded like you made up your mind about the answer. I can tell you that you were not correct about emulation. I replied to someone that posted below your original post trying to answer his and your question which is here
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Stop arguing semantics, you dictionary whore!
The true fact of the matter is that WINE is more like a wrapper than an emulator, or even a replacement for the win32 api. It's little different than a transitional api that allows a RUBY program to call PERL functions. Or would you call that an emulator also?
Sure, you could probably find a dozen words that would accurately describe WINE in a vauge enough manner, but they would not be correct in context, or in usage.
In CS, an emulator is almost always taken to be a program that translates between two different sets of machine code. You know that, and 99.9% of the people that frequent this site know that also. Perhaps some dictionary dork that writes descriptions that average folk dosen't know what an emulator is, or dosen't care to relate it even if he did know it for one reason or the next, but the fact is that in our lexicon, emulator typically means one thing.
Emulation and translation are prettry close
To be honest i've completed it already the endings shit, dont worry about the game
there have been a couple makers that did that... generally what happens if they require activation and it looks like they are gonna go the way of the dino they try to be nice (if they are smart any way) and they release a "final" patch that toasts the activation... then its just a matter of digging though the sites (like OS2 Warp2 with the activation secheme) and finding the patch
The economics of it does work out. Many games have been ported to linux, and done so profitably. Sure, they may be able to get $X+5 by spending $X in marketing, but if they're going to make $X+5 dollars by hiring a $X programmer to convert a game to linux (its really not that hard), they can DO BOTH.
Perhaps its because while linux users only make up 2% of the market, nearly all of that 2% have high-end systems and buy computer games. There's also very little competition in the linux games market.
So yeah - you have 2% of the market who are into high-end gaming and want to support linux games,
VS
98% of the market, most of which a) dont have a 3d video card whatsoever, b) dont play PC games whatsoever, or c) arent computer-literate enough to install a computer game.
Sure, you're gonna target that 98% of the market, because it's still gonna come out to 5 or 10% of computer users buying your game...but it costs so little to port a game that that extra 2% is easy extra profit on an already-made game.
VMWare and MS Virtual PC are emulators and emulate, in software, a hardware device.
Yes.
An API is nothing more then the set of function that your program can call. What is a function? A function is just a grouping of code that does a specific task..
A CPU is nothing more than a set of opcodes a program can call. What is an opcode? An opcode is just a grouping of circuits that does a specific task.
VMWare and MS Virtual PC are emulators and emulate, in software, a hardware device.
You are completely wrong. Twice. VMWare is not an emulator. It's a virtualizer; it cannot run x86 programs without using a genuine x86 chip to do it.
Wine, on the other hand, is an emulator, because it emulates the behavior of Microsoft Windows, just as VirtualPC emulates an x86 chip.
There is NO definition of "emulator" that Wine doesn't meet! "Hardware emulator" is a subcategory of emulator, not something implied by the word "emulator" alone.
The WINE acryonym is a lie. (So is the GNU acroynym, by the way)
While you are technically correct,
Which means that you are technically wrong. Just to clarify.
100% and wrote your _own_ implementation, most people would not call it an emulator, but just another implementation.
And if in that reverse engineering I found a foolish bug in your library, would I do extra work to dupliacte it in mine? An "alternative implementation" will typically try to be better than the original. But if you go for bug-for-bug compatibility, you are emulating.
AC: In CS, an emulator is almost always taken to be a program that translates between two different sets of machine code.
If that weren't a lie, you might have a point. But "emulator" means NOTHING in CS. In CE, it has a meaning...
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
It would take a great deal of work to convert it to OpenGL so it can work natively in Linux.
That assumption is wrong, so your conclusion is wrong.
It wouldn't take a "great deal" of work. It would take 2 skilled Unix programmers a few months of hard effort. That's less than $200,000 of investment, and if it gives you 3% more sales, then it's completely worthwhile- because since HL2's sales are already huge, 3% of that is much more than $200,000.
The important part is that an OpenGL Mac port would be written in the same effort, which is where the bulk of new sales will come from.
Bzzt. You are the one trying to make it sound black and white:
As we've already demonstrated, there are many things wine does which are correctly classified as emulation. Ergo, claiming "there is no emulation in wine" is 100% false.
Here's two more 100% false statements, for comparison:
Many people would agree with those statements. Some people might even think they're getting useful information out of them. Nonetheless, they're untrue.
If the answer is "gamers", then consider this: If 20% more of my time is less than the profit from that additional 2%, then it would certainly be worth it.
If the answer is "desktop users", then the percentage is far higher than 2% for the combined users of Macs and Linux (something approaching 20% by now, I believe.) So yes, it would be worth the 20% extra time there as well.
To top it off, consider this as well, if you would: Who saays that you cannot expand the market by simply making the effort? This isn't a zero-sum game, after all.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
On the subject of stupid acronyms, how about gnu.
Richard Stallman bitches about people calling the OS linux and not mentioning the gnu contribution, but maybe that wouldn't have happened if they hadn't chosen such a crappy name.
have no fear the arse bag moderator that +1 trolled was just -1 unfaired, take that fucker!
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