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Half-Life 2 Under Linux Review
as writes "TransGaming Technologies, a developer of software portability products that allow game developers and publishers to develop games for one system and deploy them across multiple platforms, has released version 4.2 of their Wine fork Cedega on 7 December 2004. The new version of Cedega 4.2 offers support for Valve's bleeding edge action shooter Half-Life 2. linuX-gamers.net has tested Half-Life 2 with Cedega 4.2 and has written a short review of the game under Linux."
One likely cause of some of his graphics problems (framerate) is the use of an nVidia 5xxx card. I've played with a 5600, and it seems to be emulating dx9 in software, but saying the card is dx8. Generally it's just very slow.
I tried setting the mat_dxlevel command line arg to 80 for reasonable performance, and later to 70 for a nice high framerate. This does cancel out a lot of the pretty shaders, but to be honest I really didn't notice them all that much before turning them off, and haven't missed them since.
> I don't know about you, but it sounds like there are some serious problems with the Linux version.
looks like you didn't read the article. There is no linux version only windows emulation.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
1) Steam is bad, yes, but the shiny Half-life 2 box was so pretty I overcame my compunction.
2) I'd already installed Cedega 4.2 from CVS, so I don't know how new users would do it. Good luck.
3) Half-life 2 didn't load the first time.
4) The game loaded the second time, but I don't know how long because I took a nap.
5) I changed the resolution and the game locked up.
6) I couldn't see the cut scenes, so I skipped them.
7) Graphics were rough, framerate was low, sound skipped. It was a fine experience.
8) Hacking my video card settings hung my machine.
9) I'm a little bit disappointed.
That's about it. Have fun.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
How does using the game with Cedega register as a Linux sale??? The games publishers aren't going to get any feedback that it was a Linux sale at all... they'll just see it as an ms-windows sale and thus won't have any incentive to port it to Linux. Using Cedega to run new games isn't doing Linux gaming any good. You should be boycotting the game and telling the publishers exactly why you are doing this.
When an exciting game is announced by a publisher, take the trouble to go to the website and check if it will be available for Linux. If not, let them know you're not happy by using the feedback provided. If they don't know they're losing customers, they'll think everybody is happy.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I've tried winex about half a dozen times over the last three or so years, and every time my conclusion has been that it's more trouble than it's worth.
Games generally push the limits of affordable technology. If a cutting-edge game is designed solely for windows, it usually pushes the limits of memory, CPU, and graphics to such an extreme that it's barely playable on a typical gaming PC. HL2 is no exception. If you take that barely playable game and then run it through an additional layer of overhead (winex) then it's going to be less than "barely playable." How could it not be?
Doom3 is cutting edge, yet it works great in Linux. The powers that be at Id were nice enough to devote sufficient resources to insuring that a native Linux version existed. Maybe it was done out of respect for the community that makes the high-availability servers possible that host the multiplayer doom (and quake, and RTCW) games. Whatever the reason, Id deserves the Linux gaming community's support.
The makers of HL2 seem to have shown very little desire to support Linux. They don't want the Linux gaming community's business. I can accept that, and move on. If the game is so friggin great, I'll suck it up, buy Windows XP home for $100 or so, install it on a 10G partition, and play the damn game. It probably won't take any longer to get going, or cost much less (if any) in the long run.
allow you to run on hardware different from the original
That would be a hardware emulator.
win32 implementation for Linux
No, its intersepting win32 calls and translating them to something the Linux system understands. It is emulating a Windows environment.
There is nothing about it being an emulator that means it has to pretend its running on different hardware then it is, for instance VirtualPC running on a Intel machine. Its still an emulator, but it is providing exactly the same machine type and hardware to the guest OS. Wine emulates a Windows environment, it is an emulator.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."