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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."
So exactly what is a shady pixel, and how does a pixel become shadier? Are there degrees of shadiness?
Let's say you have two pixels: one pixel threatens people on the sidewalk for money, and the other pixel runs a numbers racket. Which one is shadier?
John
It's based on WineX, which was a Wine fork that had better DirectX support.
it's wine
Red Leader Standing By!
Does anyone regularly use Cedega to play 3D FPS and if so are they playable with a non-cutting edge system? (thinking last generation card or whatever.)It would be nice to lose the XP install on my Hard Drive.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
From what I understand, IBM already tests the Notes client to ensure that it functions properly under Wine (or at least as well as it does under Windows). how long before game producers start to target these kinds of compatibility libraries? I understand that the linux gaming market is small compared to the whole, so direct support is unlikely.
Any game programmers care to comment if/whether their company would deliberately code a product so that it would run well under something like this? Would you code with the compatability library in mind?
That, and they're profiting from work done by the Wine developers without giving anything back. Let the flames burn strong..
You can download the cvs-version for free. But you woun't get the directx-support, iirc.
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
You can find it on most of the major bittorrent search sites, if you just want to try it to make sure it'll work for your setup.
Not legal, I'm sure, but then you'll know and can pay for it if it does work.
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.
(Futurama) Fry: "My folks were always on me to groom myself and wear underpants. What am I, the pope?"
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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...
technically the core and gui are still seperated, its just not that obvious anymore. The binaries are now a little more hidden in the home directory of the user.
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.
(Futurama) Fry: "My folks were always on me to groom myself and wear underpants. What am I, the pope?"
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.
.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.
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
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.
What developers? The majority of games that are released for linux now are by the same folk who've pretty much always released games for linux (ID Software, Epic for their unreal games). There is significant work by icculus.org folks to port a number of games to linux (medal of honor, serious sam 1 + 2) but a vast amount of the work done at icculus is of very little interest by the time it's released (most of it isn't released and is still in alpha/beta form. While playable, they are buggy). Don't get me wrong though, the icculus guys absolutely rock, and it's not their fault, but since loki went away, the number of windows games with linux versions has declined considerably. Neverwinter Nights is one of the only other big ones I can think of, but it still can't play video cutscenes.
Without cedega/winex/crossover/wine people, there are very few games to play under Linux. I can only go so far with quake4, doom3 and ut2004 before I get bored of them.
...than buying a copy of Windows XP.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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.
.exe to update a game in Windows.
.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.
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
Native w/ Package: Find the package, realize you grabbed the wrong one because most people have no clue what the difference between
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.
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.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
The transgaming folks have contributed alot of their work into the core wine stuff back. They also said they'll open up everything they can assuming they reach their subscription goal, which I believe they haven't reached, although admittedly there's some contraversy around how to account for where they are toward their goal.
Their DirectX work is largely something they keep to themselves, but honestly, it's their right to. They took a wine version at a specific point where the license allowed them to do it, and they forked it. They didn't abuse the license, the license specifically allowed it. Sure some people later on felt jipped and changed the license, but that doesn't really reflect on the fact that someone should have considered it when the original license was chosen, especially if they didn't want this to happen.
Plus, they're putting alot of hard work into the DirectX stuff. I can't fault them for wanting to hang on to it for a while. It's a very niche market they're targetting and they could use the revenue.
The other component that they get alot of criticism for is the copy protection portions of the code, and I believe this is actually the only part not in CVS and there's a reason for that, it's licensed intellectual property that they aren't at liberty to give out the source code for. Since the legality of no-cd cracks is still in a legal gray area, plus the stability of some cracks are questionable, it's nice that they're able to implement this so we can run pristine binaries of the games.
Not quite. You won't get the same sort of CD copy protection compatibility, as they can't legally release the source. Even vanilla Wine has DX9 support now. The CVS version of Cedega would be pretty much useless if it didn't have DirectX support.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
That's very true...cedega will attract more users in the short term
What about in the long term, however? Something to think about: Does Cedega cause some gaming companies to refrain from providing a native Linux port for their games because they run "well enough" on Cedega? As you probably know, gamers are also into hardware: they need the fastest possible performance. Therefore, there is an advantage to playing games natively in Windows. If these games aren't ported to Linux, then we could see gamers move right back to windows.
I don't hate cedega--I use it. Just providing some food for thought.Ride the skies
Try Gentoo Portage http://www.gentoo.org
http://www.gentoo-portage.com/s?search=nwn
See NWN with data and server right there.
http://www.gentoo-portage.com/s?search=doom3 for doom3
And Portage put games into catagories.
Like: games-fps, games-rpg, games-puzzle. etc.
AND the best part, to install. emerge nwn
It will download any and all deps for you!
Linux-gamers have put up a review, if anyone are interested.
Doesn't seem too shabby.
The Microsoft dominated computer industry won't go away until Wine is merged into the Linux kernel so that it gets optimal performance and actually out-Windows Windows itself. Just imagine if the entire whole of Cedega was merged into the Linux kernel to be a completely self contained OS that runs all Windows applications including virii, wormii and and server applications. Just imagine what a combo like Linux + Cedega + IIS would wrought on the world!? It would be awesome. Microsoft would drop dead in it's tracks and no one would ever use Windows again. And not only that, you could run IIS at the same time that you have Unreal 2008 running at 20,000 frames per second with total perspective vortex shading. This would go a long way to improving the work conditions of many IT grunts because the production servers would now be useful for more important things than serving out the corporate web site. :)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I'm a Transgamer subscriber. Having downloaded and installed 5.0, and used it abit. I'd say 5.0 is a double edged sword. The positives on it is that it fixes alot of problems with older versions and fixes support for the Steam patch that recently broke it before. However the negitives to it is that it completely kills the use of Point2Play which I enjoyed using. Now you have to import all your old settings into Cedega's new GUI which at first might not seem like something bad until you relize that all your old custom made launchers and syslinks and now useless. All in all it's not a bad release, they could have just left some features alone. Now I and many other users have to change syslinks, and rework the old launcher programs we had before.
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The public CVS version of Cedega is horribly out of date and is missing a lot of pretty criticial stuff, not to mention quite difficult to compile and set up. It's just NOT worth messing with unless you really want to look at the code, rather than just get a 'demo' of Cedega. Rathar that fight to get the CVS code to compile and run, there's a 'timedemo' version of Cedega available at http://nzone.com/object/nzone_cedega_downloads.htm l. It's not Cedega 5.0, but it's a lot better than anything you'll pull out of CVS.
I game, therefore I am...
Basically, Transgaming is making money off a free project without really giving anything back to the community.
Apart from all the patches they contribute back to Wine, that is. But I suppose you're free to ignore those if it makes it easier for you to justify your mindless hating.
I remember reading about progress with dx9 making it into wine. http://directxwine.sourceforge.net/
.9 beta? Kind of curious how the two compare now.
Did this ever make it into
You're FUDing. Stop it. There has been one (1) incompatible change to glibc in the last ten (10) years. If you look, you'll probably discover that your distro still ships the older libc.so.5 library. And the kernel interfaces (the external ones, which your games use) have been more stable still. I'm not aware of any commonly-used syscall whose calling conventions have changed incompatibly, ever. Backwards binary compatibility is very important to the kernel people.
More generally, programs linked on machines running truly ancient distros continue to run fine on modern ones provided you install the appropriate compatibility packages.
It seems to me like you're just whining about progress. Do you have a specific complaint about a binary on your system that no longer runs?
Not according to these.
But hey, pulling things out of your ass is good fun, right?
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.
I was thinking about re-subscribing to check it out, then stumbled accross this poll. For some reason, 3/4ths (at this time) of the people responding have negative feelings about the update. That's not a very good sign.
It's based on WineX
Actually, it is WineX. WineX was TransGaming's origional name for Cedega.
Most of wine should not be in the kernel. However (parts of?) wine server would be better off in the kernel. One major performance problem that wine has is everytime you need to use something in the wine server, you need two context switches. For some programs this doesn't happen often, but for others it makes wine half the speed of Microsoft Windows.
If wine server was in the kernel there would be no context switch.
Note that I'm not arguing that moving wine to the kernel is the best solution to this problem. Only that it is one.