Cedega Being Replaced By GameTree Linux

An anonymous reader writes "TransGaming Cedega, the software forked from Wine that allows running Windows games under Linux, is being discontinued and replaced by GameTree Linux. This new software is also free. From the new website: 'TransGaming is pleased to announce the continued development of Cedega Technology under the GameTree Developer Program. This repositioning of the technology that powered the Cedega Gaming Service will allow the entire Linux community to gain free access going forward. Cedega is a cross-platform enablement technology that allows for Windows-native games to be executed on both the Linux desktop and embedded Linux platforms.'"

Comments

frosty piss

[Anonymous Coward]

So is this a namechange or is any real change of stuff going on here?

Re:frosty piss

[hedwards]

Yes, they're discontinuing the subscription plan and will be working with developers. Personally, I will continue to not buy anything from them as they don't seem to give much, if anything, back. That may have changed, but Codeweavers at least contributes most of their patches back to Wine.

Re:frosty piss

[clump]

It should be noted that CodeWeavers employs both Jeremy White and Alexandre Julliard.

Re:frosty piss

[cbhacking]

I wonder if they're going to attempt to incorporate Wine code (assuming that licensing is made compatible)? The most recent versions of Wine are honestly just *better* at playing Windows games than Cedega is! Cedega had some advantages - convenience and commercial backing (CodeWeavers, the backing for Wine, usually seemed more interested in business apps). However, if you were willing to use Wine, you could actually game a lot better on it than on Cedega.

I'm reminded of EVE Online. They released a Linux version of their client, which was just a Windows version wrapped in Cedega. It was an immense download, and while it worked, the advanced graphics options were disabled - Cedega didn't support them. Most of us just continued using Wine, which aside from a few glitches and a more complicated setup was better in almost every way. CCP (makers of EVE) eventually discontinued the Linux client, saying that the game ran so well on Wine that there was no reason to pay Cedega for their version (the client was free to players; presumeably CCP was eating the cost of the Cedega license). At the time of discontinuation, Cedega still didn't support the advanced graphics options, but Wine did - and the glitches were all but gone.

Re:frosty piss

[jonwil]

I dont know if its changed but one thing Cedega was better at was support for copy protection used on games (the binary builds of Cedega include stuff licenced from the makers of those copy protection technologies)

IIRC Wine developers were reluctant to try to support these technologies because of concerns over the DMCA and lawsuits from DRM manufacturers.

Re:frosty piss

[cbhacking]

I'm not sure whether those concerns were ever addressed, but Wine implements just enough of the Windows kernel APIs to make the more common DRM schemes work. I'm not sure how it fares on the newest stuff - though it works fine with Steam, which is about as much DRM as I'll tolerate on a game these days - but Securom and so forth were specifically made to work.

Re:frosty piss

[Anonymous Coward]

You're much better off just downloading a cracked executable for those protected games. Less bullshit, more stability, no headaches.

Re:frosty piss

[hairyfeet]

Now be perfectly honest: Did you not buy from them because of philosophy, or because it cost money? Because despite what Linux users say about wanting things like gaming every time I see someone actually try to support Linux by catering to them, like Cedega or Loki, they end up going tits up. From where I have been sitting as an interested but on the sidelines observer, the only way to actually make money with Linux is to 1.-Sell support contracts to corps, ala Red Hat or 2.-Embed it into a device and sell that, ala every Router out there.

So why should all these companies that currently make Windows only consumer programs, like games and Photoshop and the nice picture app that came with the camera you gave grandma for Xmas, actually spend all that money to give Linux users product if they just don't buy squat? Because from where I'm sitting despite RMS saying it is about "free as in freedom" the only stuff I see popular on Linux is "free as in beer".

So answer honestly Linux guys, how much money have you spent on the software that is currently installed on your PC? Because hiring coders, constantly having to deal with the changes in the kernel, this I'm sure costs serious money. I've probably got at least a grand sunk into the software I use not counting the money I paid for Windows, and having that money sunk gives me motivation to learn to get the most out of it as well as that money motivating the developers to support me by writing more apps. Where is the motivation in Linux? Because you can't feed your family or pay your mortgage with pats on the back, and unless you are selling to corps that seems to me all you get from writing for Linux.

And while Wine is nice lets be honest: The average Joe isn't gonna jump through all those hoops trying to get the Windows software they need, which as I just pointed out has very little reason to come out natively on Linux, to run correctly. So like it or not you kinda need companies like Cedega that make it simple for the masses. So how is Linux ever gonna get the apps and the OOTB ease of use that the masses require, if one can't make a living supporting consumers on which is easily arguably the more difficult platform to write for?

Re:frosty piss

[walshy007]

So answer honestly Linux guys, how much money have you spent on the software that is currently installed on your PC?

Full ticket price? NWN set me back $80, quake 3 set me back $50, quake 4 set me back $60. Baldurs gate 2 set me back $80, mostly older titles I know.

Humble indie bundle I donated $25 to.

Thing is, if the game company tells me (ala ID software) that they will eventually open source the game engine code but not the art so you will still pay for it, I'm a hell of a lot more likely to pay for their stuff.

Closed source has far too many drawbacks to be worthwhile to me on most occasions, if the game engine is open it means so long as the game is semi popular it will always work on my platform of choice.

Money is not the issue, the issue is people (or at least me) don't want to fork out $60 for a game where you are screwed when the engine breaks because of lack of updates. Or in a couple years when the multiplayer servers get killed and you can't play online.

I've dropped about a grand on wii games simply because I'm guaranteed they will continue to work so long as they have a wii. Only way to ensure it will continue to work on the pc is to have the engine source open and have people actually interested in using it.

Added bonus is you get free labour for the port, and code improvements over time which the company did not have to pay a cent for.

Re:frosty piss

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not exactly that "Codeweavers at least contributes most of their patches back to Wine", it's that Codeweavers are entirely behind Wine, employing Alexandre Julliard and most of the important devs of Wine, hosting winehq.org etc. The proprietary parts of CXO/CXG are mostly related to ease of use, MacOS ports, copy protection and support. And Codeweavers is really a cool company with excellent (if a bit crazy) communication, friendly behavior towards their customers, etc.
I own and pay updates for CXO Pro (thus having access to Crossover Office AND Crossover games for about $30/year, and often less due to their occasional great promotions), and it's really worth every penny.
I just bought a lot of games on Steam/GOG during the holiday sales, and I've been really astonished at the number of games that run more or less flawlessly on CXG. Basically almost everything I bought runs, including Company of Heroes, Left4Dead 1/2, all the Half-Life, the Flatouts, Civilization IV and expansions, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.... Some actually run that are indicated by GOG as not running on Win7 (http://www.gog.com/en/mix/games_that_are_not_windows_7_compatibile_yet)... I get better compatibility for Windows games on Linux than on Win7, how ironic is that ?

I don't know what this new thing from Cedega will give, but I for sure will stay a customer at Codeweavers as long as they keep their ways, and I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future. Long life Codeweavers !

Re:frosty piss

[shutdown -p now]

Just a reminder that Cedega is not a repackaging of Wine. It's a proprietary fork, from back before Wine went GPL (which it did precisely because Cedega - then WineX - felt entitled to use Wine as a solid base, but not so keen to contribute their improvements back to the community). For this reason, they cannot port code over from Wine, and has diverged a lot from it since.

I've bought Cedega back in the day when they were superior for Linux gaming, but abandoned them when their they started to noticeably lag behind vanilla Wine in most games that I care about. I haven't been running Linux-only for several years now and don't know how things are today, but from what I heard, the gap has only widened since, to the point that Wine is better for vast majority of games.

What I also recall is that one other reason why TransGaming was very much disliked is due to their "source available but don't dare use it" license. See, they used to provide the code to most of Cedega (IIRC the various DRM bits were excluded), and you could actually fetch it from a public CVS and build it yourself to get a working product for free. However, TransGaming has stated that the source code is made available for "community improvements", and not simply for people using it to get a free if not full-featured version for themselves (that despite the license for the code making no such distinctions!), and that, if source code access would be abused, they'd remove it completely. They especially hated how the various source-based distros (such as Gentoo) provided automated fetch-and-build scripts allowing users to get Cedega for free with a single invocation of the package manager. Given how the product itself was largely based on a community-developed, FOSS code base, it was seen as a particularly offensive slap in the face, more so than if the code was just closed.

Re:frosty piss

[Kjella]

So answer honestly Linux guys, how much money have you spent on the software that is currently installed on your PC?

Quite a lot, if you total up my .wine directory. The problems is a catch 22, there's several things I miss to the point where I'd pay for it both when it comes to games and other software but there are no offerings. Of Linux natives I did buy World of Goo on Linux release day, beyond that I haven't found much worth buying to be honest. There hasn't been a mainstream game like "Neverwinter Nights" or "Unreal Tournament" once was released for Linux in years. Not even a sustained megahit like WoW that could easily afford to cover every platform has a native Linux client, it's wine all the way. Steam for Mac gave them a revival but the spillover effect to Linux as the other non-DirectX platform has been pretty much zero. Of course there are people who picked Linux because it's cheapest or are purists and that wouldn't pay much for a closed source anything, but I think many are pragmatic enough to see using a closed source app is not going to "infect" your platform and is no worse than using a Windows or Mac machine - which I'm pretty sure many of us must from time to time.

Re:frosty piss

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Mother fucker – do you use it?

Re:frosty piss

[TheRaven64]

CodeWeavers, the backing for Wine, usually seemed more interested in business apps

I'm not sure about their Linux version, but for the Mac they ship CrossOver and CrossOver Games, the latter (obviously) focussed more on gaming. I downloaded them when they issued the free download for a day because the CEO lost a bet. I don't use them anymore because the stock WINE is better (although the guy who was doing the Mac builds hasn't started on the 1.3 series yet and I'm too lazy to build them myself - last time I tried I eventually got something that worked, but didn't have OpenGL support...).

I've played quite a few games from gog.com in WINE on Mac. There's even a tool called WineBottler that will wrap a Windows app in a .app bundle, either with its own copy of WINE (for redistribution) or using the system version.

Re:frosty piss

[drinkypoo]

Almost all the software on my PC was Free except Nero CD, for which I paid twenty+ten bucks (3.0 + 4.0 upgrade, not that 3.0 was failing to meet my needs at the time.) And it's not like it's not easily downloaded, either; there's even a keygen. I ran a downloaded copy with generated key for a while until I proved to myself that Nero was as stable as the PC version, which for the record didn't happen until version 3 (2 was the original Linux release.) So basically, just like Windows!

I would buy games that I actually want to play for Linux, but none seem to be coming out, except for cute little games like the stuff in the indie bundles. None of it has turned out to have much replay value for me though. The Linux game I used to play most was freeciv until they reworked the AI and you had to basically cheat (do stuff you know it fails on) in order to beat it. Now I'm back to Civ 2 (which I did pay for) inside a VMWare Player (which is free) because Virtualbox's graphics drivers are total shit and the other options have PITA management tools.

Re:frosty piss

[David Gerard]

This is really not safe - in the default setup, for instance, the Z: drive is Unix / (file tree root). Wine DOES NOT SANDBOX in any actually effective manner.

People have run viruses with Wine. Wine is compatible enough to run malware!

Any binary running in Wine can do anything that user can do, like trashing the home directory or filling /tmp .

If you want to be cautious, run it as a different username (with access to your X11 screen). Wine is compatible with toxic waste too.

Re:frosty piss

[Kjella]

No, Phoronix (the champion of verified news) has repeated a rumor from an equally unreliable source which was based on a few strings that showed a script had a case for linux - as if that couldn't just mean it was a standard cross platform script, no cleary this is rock solid proof that Steam is coming to Linux. They've also later denied that any such thing is in the works.

Re:frosty piss

[siride]

Windows XP was released in 2001. Try running modern Linux programs on distros from 2001 and tell me that it's easier than Windows XP. The dependency issue is really a non-issue: just include the DLLs in the app directory and you are done. If you want to make it complicated, you can, but you don't have to. It generally just works. Again, tell me that's harder than autotooling a project and having it correctly build and install on even modern Linux distros. I've made software for both Windows and Linux and I've ran into problems just being able to build simple C apps across distros, but rarely any problems running apps on different versions or architectures of Windows. MS does that well and let's not pretend otherewise.

Re:frosty piss

[h00manist]

Remove all Windows users who haven't paid for anything, and how many are left? 100% of Windows users are not within US borders, but mostly in the rest of the world, where the word piracy doesn't mean much, it just means free. Microsoft created Starter Edition just because of this issue. Many, many users buying cheaper computers without the Windows costs, factory preinstalled with Linux, just because of costs. Most of those were formatting the PC with XP when they got it, but some kept Linux on, plus all users got a Linux CD and some Linux experience. And that alone was a concern for Microsoft.

Re:frosty piss

[Bert64]

While many viruses can be executed by wine, most of the methods they use to insert themselves to run at bootup won't work on wine, and once the wineserver processes is terminated so is any of the malware.

As for having the root filesystem mapped, this is more for convenient but can (and usually should) be disabled, that said unless your running it as root it won't have access to anything outside your $HOME or /tmp, and even if it wanted to trash your homedir most malware is not wine aware and wouldn't know where to find your homedir under a unix filesystem hierarchy anyway.

It also is possible to sandbox wine, by removing the default convenience mappings such as Z:, most windows malware will try to put itself in the systemroot which in the case of wine is a fake area, possibly even a "bottle" which is specific to a single application. Chances are if the malware does decide to trash anything, it will only trash that one wine bottle.

Because the malware is unable to start itself at boot (and therefore is only running when wine is running), wont be able to hook into the kernel to hide itself, and is most likely only contained within a single wine bottle, the malware itself poses far less of a problem than it does under a native windows install, and is much easier to remove

Re:frosty piss

[Bert64]

Wii games are good for kids, but kids are very good at scratching games...
Thankfully pirates come to the rescue and provide a very useful function that is missing from modern consoles - the ability to copy the media and play the copy, thus giving you the ability to make another copy when the first one becomes damaged.
Years ago, when music came on cassettes it was standard practice to make a copy and play the copy.

Bad summary

[the linux geek]

Is it supposed to be GameTree or TreeGame? Who knows.

Or how about support the real WINE developers?

[tlhIngan]

TransGaming did some really nasty things back in the days - after all, it was so bad that the WINE devs decided the best thing to do was relicense WINE from BSD to LGPL. While TransGaming is legally in the right since they forked the code prior to the license switch, what they did still doesn't sit well.

Why support them when you can support the WINE guys by buying CodeWeaver's Crossover product? At least CodeWeavers directly supports WINE, and all the patches CodeWeavers make to support new games and apps make it back into WINE for everyone to enjoy?

Even the WINE guys recommend CodeWeavers.

Re:Or how about support the real WINE developers?

[zzatz]

I don't know where you got that idea. Previously granted licenses operate under the license terms that applied at the time that they were granted. The copyright holder can change the terms for future licenses, but not for already granted licenses.

If the earlier license included a time limit or a revocation clause, then that could apply. But you can't retroactively and unilaterally change the terms of an already issued license.

Linux needs a mass-users-attraction strategy

[h00manist]

Linux and other open source OS's appear to be needing a coordinated mass-users-attraction strategy, or group of strategies. I think too many a lot of us tend to be too idealistic of "what users should", and design things for that. Some observation and study of "what users do", frequently are very surprising and simple things, leading to only very slight adjustments of how something is presented or works, leading _huge_ numbers of people to change their behaviour. Companies make tiny adjustments in the color or consistency of soap based on customer feedback, for example, and gain or lose market margins.