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."

Comments

And...

[Mayhem178]

...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.

Re:And...

[skoaldipper]

As usual, I'm sure their benchmarks were acquired from a machine with a very specific setup requiring hours of tweaking to get right.

FTA,

we had used a modest setup to better represent the systems of more computer enthusiasts that may be using Cedega or WINE. The motherboard was an ASUS M2NPV-VM with GeForce 6150 (+ nForce 430) integrated graphics

Modest setup? Representative? 800x600 for Doom3, 12 fps? By those standards, my kaleidoscope is the Cedega/Wine equivalent to dropping a real LSD wafer.

Re:And...

[Spikeles]

It's obviously possible for game developers to target Cadega

WRONG! It's thinking like this that makes developers/publishers lazy when it comes to Linux. You don't target the emulator. You target the PLATFORM. The GNU/Linux platform has many benefits going for it, just look at I.D Software and how they support Linux with binaries of all their popular games, Quake series comes to mind. If game publishers would just pull their heads out of their asses and realize there really is a games market for Linux, we might start to see some of the more popular games being ported. It's a piece of fricken cake to port a Windows application over to Linux if you just used standard libraries in the first place without resorting to Win32 calls, and those can be ported without too much bother either. IF i had Linux binaries of my games, you would never see me on Windows again.

Re:And...

[k1e0x]

Wine often works better.

This is because where at one point they were the same code base.. Wine has been attempting to provide a full implementation of windows. Cedega on the other hand has just been hacking and older alpha version of Wine so that it works with certain popular games.

If you follow this to the logical end.. eventually Wine will have a full implementation of windows on unix where new games (and anything else) will run.. and Cedega will have a bunch of hacks requiring constant tweaking for newer games.

Re:And...

[philgross]

Er... No. "standard libraries... without resorting to Win32 calls"? It's not the Win32 part that's the issue, it's the DirectX part, a high-level, high-performance interface to 3D hardware. OpenGL is somewhat comparable, and in the mid-90s was the polished alternative to the weak hack that was DirectX. However, OpenGL evolves by committee, and has many conservative stakeholders such as CAD firms, while MS totally controls DirectX, and has been pushing hard for it to be used as widely as possible. Each iteration has made it much more powerful and better suited to games programming, as well as tracking the rapid advances in consumer 3D hardware. Further, if your PC game uses DirectX, it's much easier to port it to the Xbox360, and vice versa.

Both Parallels and VMWare are working on cloning the DirectX API so VM applications can have accelerated 3D, but it's a big task. The DirectX libraries are massive, and each version has major differences with the previous one. VMWare is working hard just to get DirectX 8.1 compatibility, i.e. two revisions ago.

Some of the big graphics engine makers continue to support OpenGL, but even so, how do they financially justify spending the time and money to port their games to a platform with a tiny desktop market share, and where a significant percentage of the users expect everything on their machine to be free and open source?

This is a passionate and well-argued plea for mainstream developers to develop for Linux, but I don't think he convinced too many game company CFOs.

I would refer you to the sad post from John Carmack, regarding the disappointing sales of the Linux version of Quake III back in 2000. So far, not too many companies have wanted to risk seeing if things have changed.

Re:And...

[robbiethefett]

"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." i really disagree with that statement. i think Cedega is, in fact, a great step towards bringing linux gaming into the mainstream. let me extrapolate.. the reason cedega is significant is because there are users willing to pay money to a subscription service that is specifically geared towards gamers who's preferred OS is *nix. in other words, there is a number of people purchasing a product for the express purpose of playing video games under the *nix OS's. The reason i think that is significant is because in order for a subscription-based service like cedega to work, there has to be not only a user base, but a fairly dedicated user base. that is to say, people who keep their subscriptions to cedega are most likely not someone who plays games under *nix sporadically, but rather people who play often, and are interested in playing newer games. i say they are probably interested in playing newer games because if you just play counter-strike or whatever your game of choice is, then you would probably just configure wine to run that one game, rather than buy a subscription to a service that tries to keep up-to-date on the newer stuff. the bottom line? cedega proves there is a market for games under *nix. basically, if a market exists, companies will step in to make money off of that market. if Cedega subscriptions suddenly skyrocketed, i bet you would eventually see large game publishers releasing native linux ports of games. sure, progress is slow, and the market is tiny, but with with time is it really insane to think that this small market will become statistically significant to large companies?

Linux is better for games than vista

[cyphercell]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item =681&num=2

Re:Linux is better for games than vista

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny how your priorities change with life. Once I shunned Linux becuase I couldn't play games
on it. Now I actually enjoy the fact that my Linux system wont play games. I call it a grown ups computer system.
Since I dumped Windows so many years ago productivity went up by a factor of ten. Many times I was tempted
to install Wine and some games, but then thought better of it.
It's very revealing that Windows is seen primarily as a gamers platform. I'm at that age where I treat
a computer as a serious tool and all my peers and family also want "grown up" computers so they don't use
MS Windows. Most people who seem to use it are teenagers. If it wasn't for games would there be any argument
for Windows at all?

Re:Linux is better for games than vista

[Dr. Manhattan]

Linux is better for games than vista.

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.

Re:Linux is better for games than vista

[BobPaul]

If it wasn't for games would there be any argument for Windows at all?
How about properly formatted /. posts instead of newlines randomly thrown around? I don't think the
OS h
as anything to
do with how oft
en I press the return
key.

Re:Linux is better for games than vista

[Sancho]

Now I actually enjoy the fact that my Linux system wont play games.

I'm sorry, but I just don't get that. That's like saying, "I'm proud that my car isn't capable of attaining speeds of 200 mph safely." There's nothing wrong with having the capabilities, as long as the capabilities don't interfere with necessary components.

I think your statement must be pure elitism. You're proud that you've set yourself apart. Being proud of having a limited system, even if you don't need or want the extended capabilities, is something I just don't understand.

I don't really care to run VMWare. An equivalent statement is, "I'm proud that my FreeBSD system can't run VMWare."

Re:Linux is better for games than vista

[mahmud]

The Cedega software doesn't expire on you. Once your subscription ends you just can't download updates. You don't "rent" it.

Re:Linux is better for games than vista

[Drooling Iguana]

They may have changed their policy since the last time I checked, but I'm pretty sure subscribing to Cedega just means that you can download the new versions of the program when they're released. If your subscription expired, the last version you installed will still work, you just won't be able to get updates.

Re:Linux is better for games than vista

[HermMunster]

I've never considered Office a barrier for acceptance for home users. When most of the people I support become aware of Open Office they are just very pleased at the fact that they can get a free word processor, spreadsheet, etc. This isn't to say that there aren't barriers there. Some are pretty major.

Microsoft has been scanning the horizon to ensure that no one begins to kick at the blocks that prop up their monopoly. They are constantly looking for new ways to create more blocks. Some of these blocks are directx, drm, application/windows APIs, network interoperability (or the lack thereof), WGA/WGN lie, FUD, patents. Writing for OpenGL means you are writing for multiple platforms which gives a greater overall share.

Another new block is DRM. Yes they have had DRM in their product in one fashion or another for decades--copy protection on software back in the 80s, activation keys in the 90s. The WGN/WGA lie in the 00's is a psychological game meant to make the consumer less in control but to give them a feeling they are being protected. They are essentially forcing the consumer to allow Microsoft to spy on them under the guise of protecting the consumer from organized pirating--this is the fundamental lie. The average consumer is already covered because they generally purchase from the likes of Dell, Gateway, etc. Only a small percentage of sales are from systems integrators and the odds of getting one that is dishonest is even more minuscule. Today it is the essential arm-twisting/drafting of the hardware manufacturers to comply with their draconian DRM/CRM procedures.

Their APIs, not just DirectX, are also locking blocks, that block you from other platform development. Most companies don't have the time to learn multiple platform APIs in order to develop software. Apple recognized this (well NeXt computers did) when they were creating their development tools. Another block they use today are patents. Microsoft is not making a patent portfolio to protect itself, it is making it to prop up the monopoly and to attack competitors such as Linux. Software APIs for productivity applications aren't the barrier they once were. You can see that they will, over time, become less and less important as more and more programs build up for the competitor's platform. Since that form is diminishing there must be other ways for Microsoft to lock you into their platform. Gaming is a key API that they can change regularly. If they can keep changing the gaming API regularly then no entity can conceivably create a 100% compatible layer for other platforms. That's another reason why it is just silly to have game developers writing for directx instead of for OpenGL.

Networking interoperability is another key block that Microsoft uses to block migration from Windows to other platforms. If the interoperability is difficult or impossible even over the short term, large, medium, and small companies will very likely decline migration to Linux (or even OSX).

Patents and FUD seem to go hand in hand. Microsoft knows that if they say enough negative about Linux and threaten enough that migration will be slowed. If they create enough of a patent portfolio that will also slow development as competitors are constantly attempting to figure out what they can legally do and what they can't. DRM is similar in that it can't be copied and used in competitors platforms. The DMCA destroys all hope of that, at least if the user wants to stay 100% legal.

I don't know what the current installed base of Linux is and I'm sure most developers don't either. My estimate is that it is somewhere between 10 and 50 million computers.

When you use all of these together, including FUD and attempting to hide the sheer number of Linux (or any competitors true numbers) you can see how strong these blocks are. It only takes companies and individuals to start knocking more of these blocks out faster to bring down the monopoly. It isn't just having a product or even advertising your product or even gi

Re:Linux is better for games than vista

[kklein]

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

Re:Linux is better for games than vista

[forgotten_my_nick]

tbh, if Linux worked out of the box then it would be ready for desktop.

I've tried to put Linux on a Dell XPS M170 but I am having absolutely no joy on getting the wireless card working which I need to be able to connect to the net to just download updates.

If it was painless, or I could even figure it out with simple instructions that don't require some knowledge of Linux I'd have moved all my machines at this stage. :/

Other then that I can see no benefit to using Windows at all.

Re:Linux is better for games than vista

[Hal_Porter]

Ouch! I think my comment was way too subtle for the mods.

Umm, no. This is slashdot here's how it works.

People here like Linux and hate Windows. But they know that the selection of games for Linux is much worse than that for Windows. When they suggest Linux to the first person shooter obsessed jocks at school, the jocks point this out before giving them an atomic wedgie.

Now someone posts a well crafted piece of sophistry to explain why this weekness is actually a strength, which is severly flawed in that it could also be used to explain why disability is a good thing. E.g. "Since I went deaf, dumb and blind, I've had far more time to work on my open source, terminal based, pinball game".

The sophistry is Informative, because it gives them a snappy comeback. They can savour the memory of it when they're hanging from a baseball hoop by their tighty whities. It's Insightful since no one posted it before. But someone like you arguing with them is a Troll because it makes most of the audience angry. Of course, some percentage of the audience gets annoyed with this every so often and leaves, but that just makes the problem worse.

In many ways, individuals doing this sort of thing in their free time are far worse than employees doing PR for a company. The employees are getting paid to reclassify weakness as strength and so on, Newspeak style. Once they leave the office or change jobs, they hopefully stop believing in it. But if you're doing for free, your free time and modding down the opposition, you must have actually brainwashed yourself so completely that you can't accept any argument, no matter how valid, that doesn't match your worldview. That's plain scary.

What a horrible review

[dreamchaser]

If you're going to test the performance of an emulation layer you certainly don't do so using graphics intensive games on low end and/or integrated graphics solutions. They should have at least used a midrange GPU. There are numerous other problems with the whole thing. Basically, not everything works and the performance of what *does* work is on par with the Linux equivalent based on the poorly thought out testing methodology.

Don't waste your time.

Wine and WoW

[MarcoG42]

I use Cedega to play WoW so I don't have to boot to the much maligned Windows partition on my machine. It's there so my girlfriend (I'm not a liar, I swear!) can watch her 'time shifted' television shows on our HDTV, since I have trouble getting dual head output to work on my nvidia card in Ubuntu.

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?

Re:Wine and WoW

[exwhyze]

wine-0.9.29 works 'out of the box' with WoW. Probably a couple earlier versions do, too.

Re:Wine and WoW

[BobPaul]

Wine handles Wow just as good as Cedega. If you're paying for Cedega just for WoW, stop... there's no benefit. If you use it for other games as well, then it's probably worth it. Just MHO.

Check here:
http://www.wowwiki.com/Linux/Wine
and here:
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=648 2

Re:Woo Hoo An an other 1st person shooter.

[SavedLinuXgeeK]

Why doesn't Crossover spend more time with other games that are more inovative, and fun. Cedega != Crossover. They develop their own products. Also, why are they testing cedega with a game that has a linux port. That just seems silly.

So we're paying for what?

[Inner_Child]

Looking at the benchmarks, there's what, one test where Cedega outperformed Wine? What exactly is this monthly subscription fee supposed to pay for, minimal if any improvement over Wine? I understand that it supports newer games than Wine does, but I'd rather put my money into an open-source project than throw it into a monthly fee, especially considering the minor differences.

Am I misunderstanding something vital about Cedega here, or is Transgaming really asking us to pay for the same functionality?

OpenGL

[PipOC]

Maybe I'm missing something, but aren't Doom 3 and Enemy Territory OpenGL based and Linux native? Benchmarking them with Cedega is pointless.

Re:OpenGL

[Sark666]

Well, not really, those games are opengl on windows as well. They only use directx for input/sound.

Re:WINE Is Not an Emulator...

[richdun]

Because the redunancy of acronyms doesn't cascade to their derivative projects?

Re:Get back to me...

[kuzb]

thank you, mr. stalin. we'll gas them as soon as we round them up!

Re:Get back to me...

[A beautiful mind]

They ARE open source. CVS access is available, sourcecode is GPL.

What you have to pay for is the convenient "snapshot" taken at a stable moment plus the packaging. You also support development that way.

Vista RC1 ???

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Woo Hoo An an other 1st person shooter.

[Anonymous Coward]

FPS is equal footing for all players and it is your skill that allows you to do well.

Absolutely, completely wrong. Turn based strategy is the true test of skill. It doesn't matter if you're an 80 year old paraplegic in a wheelchair or a 16 year old teenager. Everyone competes equally. FPS is just about who can react faster. Big deal.

Re:Get back to me...

[X_Bones]

Close. The open-source bits of Cedega are LGPL'd or AFPL'd. The closed-source bits (the Cedega GUI, the copy-protection modules, and IIRC some DirectX goodies), plus the binary packaging and official support, are what you actually pay for.

Re:Get back to me...

[The MAZZTer]

What good is the CVS if it doesn't run?

I tried it, and it compiled correctly, but it failed to run because it was missing some library that I couldn't find anywhere. Plus, it overwrites WINE. >:(

I talked it over with some more experienced linux users and they are of the opinion the CVS version is intentionally hard to use, and even lacking in features, in order to force people to buy the commercial version.

Re:Get back to me...

[packeteer]

Transgaming negotiated with game companies and are required to close the source. The agreement was that if game companies are going to share their copy protection code with Transgaming then they need to not release that code under the GPL in Cadega. Seems ok to me.

Obviously free software is good but if a company is worried about the "viral nature" of the GPL they need to have some assurance that when they work with free software they are not going to get their code displayed for all to see. Ya the Transgaming people made a deal with the devil, get over it.

Re:Get back to me...

[BobPaul]

Sort of open source. It'd be nice if they contributed changes upstream to the WINE project. Many of the problems they've had with games certain (esp older) games not working would be fixed if they used a recent version of WINE. (Un)Fortunately WINE wised-up and stopped using the MIT license, so Cedega development has suffered.

CrossOver Office contributes their changes, and they continue to exist and earn money. We could have had good D3D support in Wine a long time ago if Transgaming wasn't a bunch of freeloading asshats.

Re:Get back to me...

[mikearthur]

That simply isn't the case.

Firstly, the sourcecode has never been GPL, it is a mix of AFPL, LGPL and proprietary licensed code that is not included on the CVS.

Secondly, the CVS hasn't been updated for ages.

Re:Some karmawhoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Wall of Text hits you for 43124 (crushing).
Your equipped items suffer a 10% durability loss.
You are dead.

Re:It's slashdotted but here's a mirror

[Scott Lockwood]

Nice... Even the mirror is slashdotted. :-) lol

Useless

[cortana]

But if you try to redistribute it, Transgaming will change their license to prevent you from doing so.

what about directx?

[__aalwyc6372]

since wine aims to provide a directx compatible windows api, is directx a hack too?

Re:Some karmawhoring

[PitaBred]

To more effectively karma-whore, you should first consider learning the base skill of paragraph-whoring :)

Don't support Cedega

[AlexMax2742]

...they're pure slime. They threatened debian maintainers with a licence change unless they withdrew a free, easy to install debian package from debian repoisotories. And they at one time had a promise on their page that said as soon as they crossed a certain number of licenses, that they would reopen the code and contribute back to wine. That promise has since been taken down.

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.

Here's the logic...

[sterno]

I'm glad my car doesn't go 200mph, because the temptation of all that raw horsepower will be too great to resist. High speed pursuits and law enforcement derived beatings will certainly ensue. It's a used geo metro for me.

Re:Some karmawhoring

[Anonymous Coward]

You got owned by the fact that you were too lazy to use the preview button.

Re:Performance issues are the real problem

[mandelbr0t]

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. And I think that all of us who remember Loki Games know that this will not work. Transgaming allows a project to put a business face on some deals that desperately need to be made to support gaming on Linux. Cedega works with game companies to provide an API that works equally well on Windows and Linux. This approach is better, since what happens is that game companies continue to develop games on Windows where most of their market is, without causing any extra work for the Linux side. Admittedly those who develop to the WINElib API will get the same benefits without the devilish business dealings, but who develops games on Windows that's that enlightened?

A rewrite as a port is generally too much work to be profitable, especially when the target market is at best one tenth of the original market. There's been some very rare exceptions to this, such as the Linux Neverwinter Nights client and some id games, but in those cases there's almost as many Linux people who play as Windows gamers. The drive to synchronize the higher-level APIs has a better chance of overall success (where success is defined as any DirectX 9 or previous game will run on Linux) in the long run, IMO. Whether transgaming.com is actually required is certainly worth debating. I'm still giving them my $5 every month even though I'm not using it right now.

Terrible benchmarks..

[pak9rabid]

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...

Actually

[renegadesx]

In my experience Doom III played better on Linux than it did with Windows on the exact same system.

Re:WINE Is Not an Emulator...

[kubrick]

Cedega Emulates Direct Ex Games (Almost)?

[ok, so I had to cheat a bit...]

Re:LOL

[bettlebrox]

>Funny how they benchmark two of the very few popular games that have native Linux clients, indeed.

That's the point. So they can compare the Windows version, the Linux version, & the Windows version on both Wine & Cedega. This lets the folk doing the benchmark figure out how much overhead there is to wine & cedega and show if it perform better, worse, or the same than playing games natively.

Re:Performance issues are the real problem

[Pecisk]

I remember why Loki Games went down - NOT because they went under 'cause of bad sales. They just got bad/criminal CEO, who done anything possible to bancrupt Loki Games without any remorse. And he succeeded.

Afaik, Loki Games was very successful creating needed infrastructure - and they knowledge in doing so was industry high. See SDL, see their installer, see OpenAL which they actively pushed and which now has some support in industry.

It was sad that Loki had to go away just because of some greedy jerk.

Late to the party...

[xtracto]

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).