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Transgaming Introduces Cedega 6.0
Tux Penguin writes "Today Transgaming introduced Cedega 6.0, which is the popular Linux game emulator based upon WINE. Among the new features in Cedega 6.0 is support for a number of new games, Shader Model 2.0 support, new FBO extensions support, and ALSA audio. Phoronix has provided a performance preview that has Doom 3 and Enemy Territory benchmarks from Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux, WINE, and Cedega."
...I'll bet that it still doesn't work right.
Honestly, in the past I've had more success running games with just straight up WINE than Cedega. I had a 1 month subscription, and it was a complete waste, cheap as it was. Not a single game worked as advertised.
As usual, I'm sure their benchmarks were acquired from a machine with a very specific setup requiring hours of tweaking to get right.
Linux has its uses, and they are many. Gaming is not currently among them, and this hack (yeah, I went there; Cedega is a hack, nothing more) is not the solution to bring Linux gaming into the mainstream.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
On topic, kinda: I use Cedega because I'm lazy and don't mind the $5 it cost me to get a copy. I read the review linked in TFA, and I'm curious; how well does WINE play with WoW? Is it worth the (little, i'm sure) extra effort to get up and running to put that $5 towards something else the next time an upgrade comes around?
If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.
Anyone else notice...
"For our Vista "Longhorn" benchmarks we had used Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate RC1 (Build 5600)".
Sure. Because that will give you a good, impartial quality result.
Bloody muppets.
So far, for me, Vista sucks for games. I'm entirely unsurprised. My system is almost identical to the one Phoronix used in these tests.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I am going to address the FPS portion of your comment. The reason why I personally and I suspect many others enjoy online FPS games is because it is raw skill/talent vs another. Most games skill/player ability has little to do with the outcome of the fight. I am currently playing Eve-online and I enjoy playing it. The PVP aspect of the game IMHO is not very fun and very far from balanced. A !skill player in a hugely expensive well equipped ship will annilate a highly skilled player in the same ship but using more midrange quality of the same gear. Just because of the game mechanics.
FPS is equal footing for all players and it is your skill that allows you to do well.
since wine aims to provide a directx compatible windows api, is directx a hack too?
for running Windows games under Linux.
What needs to happen is for gaming companies to write Linux versions of games so that there won't be any performance issues due to running in some Windows environment or emulator.
I think the fact that many are buying Cedega and other Windows environment programs to play Windows games under Linux shows that there is a need for Linux native games.
My brother is a Gamehead and the only reason that he uses Windows XP still is because running the Windows games under Linux gives him great lag and performance issues. He says that if they wrote Linux native versions of the games, he'd switch to Linux.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
And on top of that, according to reliable reports, cedega is only marginally more stable than Wine ever was. Which in my opinion is not worth five bucks, especially given how much progress Wine has made in the last year or so in terms of compatability. Heck, the latest version can even run WoW with minimal amounts of fuss (according to its rank, which is Gold). And I'd rather wait for someone to brute-force copy protection in a free way instead of having to be at the mercy of those that provide it.
Cedega doesn't need your support. Wine does. Give the latest version a spin, download it, and provide bug reports for your favorite games so the remaining bugaboos can be fixed up.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
What a HORRIBLE review done in TFA. It only compares games whose rendering engine is OpenGL (doom3 and enemy territory). I don't give a shit about how Cedega "emulates" OpenGL games. All it's doing is forwarding those requests unmodified (or maybe *slightly* modified) to the native OpenGL subsystem running on the Linux box. What I, and I'm assuming all others out there are concerned with, is gaming performance when Cedega is actually emulating Direc3D calls. Not only are there barely any game companies left that use OpenGL for their games, but the ones that do (ID Software, Epic) already have versions of their games for Linux. The fact that games utilizing Direc3D are omitted from the Cedega benchmarks listed in the article implies to me that it's probably not even worth the trouble of trying it out...
Okay, once more, with feeling: Linux is a toy. A powerful toy. An-almost-infinitely-customizable toy. But a toy nonetheless. I say this not as a troll or as flamebait; I say this because the people who use it, use it because they enjoy fiddling around with config files. Even if they actually like using it--and of course they do--using it requires one to fiddle with config files in ways that one would only know how to do if he enjoyed learning about such things. I'm sorry, but that is a tiny subset of the computer-using public. Most people don't want to fiddle with things to get them to work or use weird, off-brand knockoff software developed by groups of people who do it as a hobby. It is a toy.
Invariably, this comment upsets a lot of people and there's the obligatory "It runs the internet!" and "dont be rediculous i use it for my business!" (sic) replies. But none of that means it's not a toy. OpenOffice or Crossover Office do not a real computer--as most people actually use them--make. Most businesses do more than type and make spreadsheets.
Here is a quick list of software my parents' company, for whom I do IT from time to time, uses. These are industry-standard applications:
PowerClaim
Xactimate
Internet Explorer (for dealing with the head office)
Without these, their business does not run.
Now, let's go to the applications I use for my job (university lecturer / researcher):
SPSS
RUMM 2020
BILOG MG
Facets
DIFPack
Micrograde
Do you see a single item in that list with Linux compatibility? Most of them don't even have Mac versions. Most of these are heavy-duty software packages designed to handle specific tasks for business and/or research, and they are mostly only available for Windows. I'm sure that in the case of the stats packages, I could find something that could limp along and provide most of the functionality under Linux, but why would I do that? Everyone uses these packages, and that means if I send my SPSS .sav file over to a research partner in another country, he'll be able to open it and see if he sees what I see in the data.
None of these packages are a hassle to install. All of them work on virtually any Windows system. Windows is not a toy. It works well with little fuss, it has unrivaled developer support, and you can play Battlefield 2 on it.
Don't get me wrong; I like Linux. I have Ubuntu running on my laptop here at home. I love installing software off the net. I like some of the FOSS apps better than their proprietary counterparts. I enjoy that sense of calm you get from knowing that, if you ever get wifi to work without getting a new PCMCIA card that has better driver support and have it hanging off the side (banging into everything all the time), you could use this thing forever, free of all the problems associated with having software on your computer--because you'll never really have any. Until the argument for Linux isn't centered on how little you'll miss Windows, and goes to all the really great software available for it, Linux will remain as it is--a toy.
See, you don't install Linux to get things done; you install Linux to install Linux. It is an end in and of itself. That is not true for installations of Windows, and not as true for installs of MacOS. Those OSes are for people who have something other than codemonkeying to do; Linux is for the codemonkeys who do most of their work in a text editor anyway so why bother having access to anything else? Further, th
Not to forget that OpenGL can not be compared to DirectX as DirectX besides Direct3D, there are a lot of other full fledged features as DirectInput, DirectPlay, DirectSound, DirectMusic, DirectSetup, DirectX-Media and DirectX Media Objects (Look at wikipedia for a description of all of those), all of that in one lean package and consistent APIs (through all of them... of course the darn version function suffixes are shit).
Whereas in Linux you'll have to make a mutant join of SDL(with all the half assed libraries that were never finished to play) OpenAL OpenGL Allegro X11 , TCP/IP freetype, ffmpeg etc etc etc etc...
I know because I have developed games in both of them.
As a personal opinion, I still prefer the OpenGL modeling approach (against the Direct3D one), as it is cleaner. I use it when doing scientific 3D visualization apps (which do not need all the other media things).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'