Cedega 5.0 Released

kormoc writes "Transgaming has released a large update to Cedega. This release (5.0) changes how the entire product works, merging the GUI with the actual program, as well as implementing features such as pixel shadier 1.4 support, in order to get games such as battlefield 2 working. The release notes list all the new improvements as well as the newly supported games. This seems to be the best release to date and expands the feature set to work with a large number of new games."

Comments

Re:As a gaming platform?

[l_bratch]

This seems to be the best release to date
It would be pretty good if they hadn't ruined the command line support... You now have to jump through hoops to avoid having to load the GUI prior to loading any games.

I agree though that from the Cedega engine point of view, it's a very impressive release.

Re:Cedega will never get my money.

[vp0ng]

This is exactly the kind of company that the Linux community needs to embrace to bring it more into the mainstream. Cutting them off because you have to pay for it only hurts Linux in the long run. Get in the mainstream. Get noticed. Gamers are a huge PC market, and more often than not, they build their own systems and are not afraid of computers or learning new systems. With the ability to play their games, more and more will flock to Linux. But it needs movements like this one. I will happily give Transgaming my money for a subscription.

Interesting business model.

[QuantumG]

I signed up for Transgaming earlier this year. Like many others I gave them my money so I could vote for my favourite games. Unfortunately, like in just about any democracy, my vote wasn't worth anything, so my favourite games never made it to the top of the TODO list. That said, I still think Cedega is a good product and if Transgaming focused more on building a developer community than paying developers they'd get a lot more games working.

Re:Cedega will never get my money.

[Anonymous Coward]

only word that comes to mind is "tool".

you figure it out.

the word FREE as in "I want everything and don't want to pay for it" annoys the dog piss out of me... I prefer my FREE as in "I want everything. I want it to work. I want to be able to fix it myself if it in fact it does not work like I need/want it to. oh and if it meets these requirements.. i'm willing to pay."

my objection to windows... is that is doesn't meet those requirements...

Cedega is a hell of a program and has taken the Wine(x) to a whole different level when it comes to Game compatibility. it's worth the price of a subscription...

Re:Cedega will never get my money.

[vp0ng]

Windows comes preloaded on all major PC's now, but it's not free. It's built into the price. Believe it or not, you DID pay for that copy of windows on your college laptop.

Cedega increases the cost of gaming.

[s-twig]

In terms of Linux, Cedega increases the cost of gaming, not only indirectly by having to own a better system to counteract the performance loss in comparison to Windows, but also because of their subscription fee. It's just doesn't seem right, you have to pay two companies to have your software work. There are plenty of other end user friendly ways of making money.

Software Installation

[DreadSpoon]

Something I find vastly amusing is that, using Wine or Cedega, it is generally easier to install Windows program on Linux than it is to install a Linux program on Linux.

Cedega: Pop in the CD, run the installer, run the updater (if its not automatic), done.
Native: Open a terminal, run a shell script, watch it not quite work because your distro is 2 months newer than the software, manually hack the shell script to work, copy files over, manually create menu entries, download a tarball to update the game with, unpack the tarball, run the updater script, done.
Native w/ Package: Find the package, realize you grabbed the wrong one because most people have no clue what the difference between .i386.rpm and .x86-64.rpm is, use a one-click install tool if you're lucky or open a terminal and manually install it if not, realize you are missing dependencies, install dependencies, done.
Native w/ Package Search UI: Search through 10,000 poorly organized packages trying to find the right one (if you're lucky it is actually in the repository), install, done.

Most Open Source/Free Software/Linux folks seem to think that the last option is _clearly_ the best choice. I'm not so sure. Last I checked, NWN or Doom3 or Heretic II were not included in any RPM/DPKG repository, at least not any configured by default on any of the mainstream distributions.

The package selector interfaces in Synaptic or whatever is popular these days is also pretty much crap - when you have 10,000+ packages, you need something a little more efficient than a list with some hierarchial and practically meaningless categories like Amusements/Games.

Re:Software Installation

[capicu]

er... am I the only one who thinks this post might be a rewording of the Doom 3 Is Hard To Install in Linux copy-paste troll?

Benefit-of-the-doubt time:
- Yeah, you're right. I used wine for the first time earlier today. I nearly pissed myself laughing when the windows installer completed flawlessly. (Then I nearly cried when after an hour of trying nothing I installed would actually run)
- Most linux users do know the difference between i386 and x86-64. Most people don't, but remember that linux is for the most part made by and for linux users, not by a company for a customer, so this doesn't matter.
- You know perfectly well that they can't put commercial products in a free-access repo
- Package management is now at a stage where you can easily install a program, if it is in your distro's repo, and you know its name. Search technology in general is still fairly crappy, but give it time. I believe that this is something that the Mandriva/SuSe-type distros will be fixing soon.

NOT A FLAME. I'm honestly just addressing some of your points - your post made me think (about package management), oh and reminding you of the nature of linux.
Anyway, you shouldn't become disheartened with all of this. There are some pretty good open source 3d engines being worked on right now. Pretty soon we're all going to be able to get rid of that windows partition.
The only thing that will be left soon is that old chestnut: devices. I've never seen a digital camera or camcorder connect properly to linux. My graphical artist brother can't use his tablet in linux, my little sister can't use her microphone or webcam on MSN to talk to her "m8s" from "skul".

Re:Software Installation

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, do you expect everyone who wants to use a computer, for games even, to have a doctorate in computer science? Why would we want the set of all GNU/Linux users to "have anything important to do with software development."?

It still costs less...

[Weaselmancer]

...than buying a copy of Windows XP.

Re:Software Installation when you are a n00b

[garrett714]

Native: Open a terminal, run a shell script, watch it not quite work because your distro is 2 months newer than the software, manually hack the shell script to work, copy files over, manually create menu entries, download a tarball to update the game with, unpack the tarball, run the updater script, done.

I've never had to manually hack a shell script to make an install work. Copy what files over? Once again, never had to manually create menu entries but if I did it's pretty simple. Downloading a tarball to update is no different than downloading an .exe to update a game in Windows.

Native w/ Package: Find the package, realize you grabbed the wrong one because most people have no clue what the difference between .i386.rpm and .x86-64.rpm is, use a one-click install tool if you're lucky or open a terminal and manually install it if not, realize you aremissing dependencies, install dependencies, done.

Looks as though someone is a bit shaky when it comes to installing packages on his Linux box.

Native w/ Package Search UI: Search through 10,000 poorly organized packages trying to find the right one (if you're lucky it is actually in the repository), install, done.

Once again, looks as though someone is a bit shaky when it comes to installing packages on his Linux box.

Good theory...

[sterno]

Great idea but here's the problem. If you're a game development company and you can only afford to code for and support one platform, which would you choose:

1) Windows with 90+% of the market
2) Linux with 5-10% of the market, give or take

Also, keep in mind that anybody who's a serious gamer has a Windows machine, or dual-boots.

So is wine ahead or behind with dx9?

[Sark666]

I remember reading about progress with dx9 making it into wine. http://directxwine.sourceforge.net/

Did this ever make it into .9 beta? Kind of curious how the two compare now.

Re:So is wine ahead or behind with dx9?

[oliverthered]

That's not quite true, vertex buffer object and other performance patches aren't in wine cvs yet, I'm finishing off stabilizing Directx (including allowing DirectX 8 to use the improvements) over the next month or so, including Pixel Shaders 1.4.

After that I'm going to commit the performance patches that should bring wine to a comparable level to Cedega (some of the patches give a huge performance increase over Cedega).

There are still a lot of no DirectX related issues that need fixing in Wine so that games are playable.

IMO. Cedega aren't putting much effort into DirectX in Cedega, my patch from 2005-06-13 has many of the features Cedega are touting as new in their 5.0 release.

Re:So is wine ahead or behind with dx9?

[oliverthered]

The fixes are usually generic unless the fix is to work around a bug in the game, e.g. Warhammer 40k doesn't load textures properly so there's a specific fix to get nonpower2 textures working with that game.

But will it play Civ 4?

[Darby]

I'm wondering if Civilization 4 will be playable with it.
It sure as hell isn't playable under Windows for a metric assload of people.
It's not MSs fault, just poor programming released too early, but maybe the memory leaks won't kill performance after only a couple turns.

I'll have to try it when I get home.. Well, if I get home....stupid PERC cards.

Re:As a gaming platform?

[The_Dougster]

I must say, unless you are a diehard Linux fan and absolutely cannot be seen running Windows, stick with Microsoft's OS. In my experience with it and gaming, it just works. Linux needed sh1tl0ads of configuration and tweaking to get it to work right.

There is some wisdom here. I've been using Linux for over ten years, and you will be hard pressed to find somebody that likes it more than I do; however, the sad fact of life is that if you like playing modern games, you probably need to keep a windows partition around.

I do, and always have dual (and triple) booted my systems. I currently keep FreeDOS, Linux, and Win2k bootable on my personal home system. I also have Hurd and L4/Hurd somewhat bootable for experimental fooling around.

I use FreeDOS as basically a recovery system and have my GRUB bootloader's home on the FreeDOS drive. Other than that, I rarely boot it, but then again it only requires about 350MB so I keep it around just in case something really bad happens to my system.

Linux is my main system, and I run Gentoo (I'm very experienced with Linux, remember). I have an excellent Linux gaming system going with Nvidia 5900, full power OpenGL, Wine, and lots of Loki games. I regularly download Linux beta versions of games from Sourceforge and install into either my home or /usr/local to play around with them. Linux is my home system and I have a massive development infrastructure installed there. I'm an engineer, and if I want to make a science program, I boot to Linux and fire up Python.

I keep Windows 2000 as my bootable windows system. I use it mostly for games and CAD. If I can migrate a game to Linux in Wine, then I do so eventually, but if not I don't sweat it. It is a major hassle keeping my win2k system updated with virus protection and all that horseshit, but its necessary if you want to play games. I like win2k because its a no-nonsense windows version and I'm not looking forward to the time when I have to upgrade it.

There's no shame in dual-booting. At least you are learning Linux and using it when appropriate. In maybe 10 or 20 years, Linux will be a real powerhouse, and I've used it since it was a baby, but until it comes into its prime, use it when it makes sense and don't be a zealot.

Balance in all things grasshopper.