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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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Unreal Tournament 2003 ...
Unreal Tournament 2004
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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!
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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
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))
It was set inside 'Black Mesa' a research institute, that no doubt had all sorts of radioactive nastiness being carried around by cool looking robots.
,\
Plus the developers thought, wow, sounds like a cool name for a game.
Throw a symbol of the 11th letter of the Greek alphabet around and you have a top notch game.
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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.
HalfLife is the point where it absorbs half of your life, where you should probably doing more productive things
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.
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.
You dont' have to because you can DL the steam client, log in with your account and just DL any game you have purchased already.
I have HL1/CS on three computers. When I want to play I just click on the game, put in my login and off I go.
I love it. I lost my HL CD but still had the case, all I needed was the key number off the case.
And you do not need to have a net connection to play the single player mode
Free Mac Mini
"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.
And you're just misinformed.
You can play HL2 without a net connection, its called "offline mode". The only thing it requires a network connection for is the initial activation, and thats no more odious than Microsoft's current required activation practices, and I bet you've got Windows on your PC. (Or did you leech or crack your copy of it, mr. high and mighty?)
As other people have pointed out, once you have a steam account, you can fetch and play HL2 anywhere.
Sure Steam has its issues, mostly being an annoying adware program that currently pops up messages about HL2, but will probably start popping up all sorts of ads when Valve wants some extra cash. Also after years of watching MMO services crash and burn the first day, Valve let Steam's activation servers crash and burn for their first day, showing that some people just don't learn.
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 :)
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