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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 ?
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!
or will it run on my DX2s and P75s?
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.
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.
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
I can tell you that it already works. They released a preview copy of Cedega 4.2 to their Emerald members (those who have been subscribed for 18+ months). Steam has worked fine in Cedega 4.0.1 and up in the past, so Steam obviously wasn't a problem. As for Half-Life 2, it runs very well.
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
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.
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.
"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.
Cedega is based on the Wine codebase before Wine converted to GPL - in fact, that was part of the motivation for Wine to convert from a more BSD-ish license to GPL.
However, Transgaming does give code back to Wine occasionally, and some Wine contributors will allow Transgaming to also distribute their changes.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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.
Is this [charging for software/subscription] not a violation of the GPL, and exactly the sort of thing it was written to prevent?
The GPL was not written to prevent charging for software, either a flat-rate charge or a subscription - from the GPL: "When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish)" (my emphasis)
Now, I'm not a lawyer, and it is possible that Transgaming are breaking the GPL - but certainly not by charging a subscription.
This is where the serious fun begins.
In other news: WINE get sued by microsoft for IsNot Patent :)
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
1. WineX source available free on Transgaming's CVS
2. I run x86_64 (AMD Athon 64) and run WineX all the time - just compile it as a 32 bit application. Run with NVidia drivers.
3. You're not going to get a OpenGL port. So the decision is to either play HL2, or not play, but waiting won't help much, besides lowering th price in a few months.
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)
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!
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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?
Because ALSA is STILL not really ready for prime time.
Lots of people, including myself, have problems with it and continue to use the OSS drivers (listed as deprecated) in the 2.6.x kernels.
For instance, the SBLive! ALSA driver doesn't support volume control on the digital output (whereas the OSS driver does), and I've also had issues with ALSA based applications having stuttering audio and other issues that are not present under OSS.
Frankly, OSS worked fine, I'm not even sure why they come up with an entirely new API when they could have just improved on the existing one.
-Z
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?
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)
Not a subscriber, but I think that's close. They have a publicly-accessible CVS containing the portions of wine that are provided under a mishmosh of variously-free licenses, and the commercial product consists of the build of that, plus some extra stuff ("aggregated" if you will) that's provided sans source. Theoretically, anyway; I don't know if anyone's ever tried to verify it. :)
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.
Don't worry, I'm sure somebody will write an ASCII only version that you can play by opening a remote 'ssh' window.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
the main reason is the OSS API isn't capable of being used in a h/w independent way across all of the many many different designs for audio interfaces that now exist. when you look at the contrast between, say, the RME HDSP and an SBLive!, you will see the kind of thing i mean. interleaved versus noninterleaved access, the incredible complexity of many modern h/w mixer designs ... OSS has no way to represent any of this other than with h/w specific helper apps that use dozens of h/w specific ioctls.
the other major reason is to avoid direct open/read/write/close calls. even though its the Unix Way (TM), you will note that ever since we moved on from VGA video, very few applications use the Unix open/read/write/close API to access video devices. they use an abstraction and/or a library (X, svgalib, OpenGL etc). ALSA is an attempt to do the same thing for sound, thus making many things possible that are not acceptable with OSS (because everything in OSS is in the kernel; simple example: there is no floating point support in the kernel).
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 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
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.
Pisses off users and fails to stop piracy - sounds like the perfect compromise between DRM and ease-of-use to me.
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.
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Well, its really hackish, but it sort of works:
Bring up the console
net_start
sv_lan 0
deathmatch 1
maxplayers #
map [mapname]
restart
To connect to the server,
connect ip:port
eg:
connect 111.222.333.444:27015
Note: the models are screwy (there is actually no gordon model that comes with HL2!), and it crashes a lot.
Don't worry though, the full SDK is coming out "soon" (heh, somehow that doesn't sound so convincing from Valve), and when the full SDK is out there will be DM mods galore.