I have never been a huge gamer, if a new game comes out I will sometimes play it for a day or two and then be done with it. Linux has always been a great os for me but if I was a hardcore gamer I’m not so sure that would be true. That being said there are many great ways to play games on Linux, Wine and Cedega being the two main ones.
The problem is that Wine (I have no experience with Cedega) is not perfect, however it has been able to do some great things. I have been able to get world of warcraft, Microsoft office, msdnaa (you need to download an exe in order to download the software and why not try out vista for free, and yes I’m still with Linux even though windows is free for me) and many other applications running under Wine. There have been many that I have not been able to get running also, evil genius for example.
Chances are none of this is new to you but stay with me. About a year ago, maybe six months. Google came out with two products for Linux, Google Earth, and Picasa. The really cool thing is that they did not rewrite the code they instead opted to modify there code and then use Wine to make it all work. Now while I’m not sure of the legalities of distributing GPL software and proprietary software in the same package I assume its all on the up and up, google would never do evil.
Yesterday on digg I saw an article about the latest release of Soldat, What I found interesting is that when you go to the download page they list there requirements as follows
“Requirements: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista or Linux + Wine; DirectX 8.1;”
Now I found this really nifty. I know that Unreal Tournament and a few other games have had Linux releases, but I’m not sure how successful they where. This really makes me wounder however, how hard it is to make a program that is wine compatible / works with Wine and secondly is this a viable option for game makers.
Is the cost of making your applications Wine compatible less than the extra revenue that companies would see if they made there applications work with Wine. I know this was touched on at Ubuntu open week ask mark session. Seeing wine as an option to play a game just inspired me to post about it.
I would encourage any software producer to at least make there applications run under wine even if they where to lose money if only to maintain product dominance in your market otherwise like Mark said we will just make open source equivalents. But thats just my two cents.
Edit: Oops it seems that Google Earth Linux port is a native Linux application built with the open source Qt application development toolkit. Thanks Everett.
Yesterday I saw an article that talk about a project for porting Direc3D library on LINUX and OSX do you know something abount it ?
Nope I know nothing, link?
Speaking as a game dev myself, the WINE environment is kind of cryptic and hard to follow. Trying to run your game under WINE to see if it works will tend to have it work crappy and slowly (leaving you with no reason why or whats wrong), or do things like instantly quit with some crazy cryptic warning about some or other thing that makes no sense at all.
The WINE folks really need to improve their tools before mainstream devs care about supporting it. Right now its hit or miss to run a game under WINE because its hit or miss whether doing so will reveal any significant information about why it failed to run.
If the WINE environment was improved to the point where devs got some sort of indication as to why it didnt work – something clean and obvious – they might actually bother to either route around the ‘bad’ function, or perhaps even fill the functionality themselves in the WINE project. But right now its a mess of random error messages and error codes and who knows why your project doesn’t work.
So we stare at the mysterious output and give up for another year and hope that the WINE people who actually understand that crap can fill it in by then.
Also
http://www.fallingleafsystems.com/
Are the folks you want. I know them IRL, and despite the amount of BS called, I know they could pull it off. Its just quite a ways off still.
For just about anything except games, we can and do create our own replcements, and much more and beyond. However, this is not true for games, for a lot of reasons. And even if, from today and ever forward, every game would come for Linux as well, it wouldn’t help all the games that already are released and never will be ported.
For this reason I really wish that someone with a load of cash would sponsor a huge 6-month-or-whatever-it-takes hackathon on getting Wine DirectX 9 complete and with good otherwise optimization, coverage and integration into GNOME/KDE/etc.
For a LOT of people, games, and often already owned games, is the one thing they can’t live without. For me, it’s also the difference between working and not working, although I do almost everything with Ubuntu, games usually just doesn’t work even with al lthe tweaks in the book and I work with games…
While I don’t feel running Windows applications is the way to go, I do think that running Windows games still is something of a must. And even though the Wine team is doing heoric work week after week, in practice little happens for the end user, and for all I know it may never get there in this tempo.
This would be the killer app. For games. (And Photoshop, if possible).
Stoffe, While it would be great for someone to put a lot of money into wine, personally I don’t feel that wine is the solution. That said I would love it if someone did what you say but really I don’t think its needed.
Personally I think that as linux gains traction companies are going to be forced to make there programs linux compatible otherwise an open source solution will come along and they will lose there market share.
For me games really arnt the issue, but I know as soon as its easy for games to be played on linux we will have a lot more users and things will really start to take off.
As for the wine guys they do a great job and I’m told cedega is very good for a lot more games. I’m just not sure that anyone is going to invest that kind of money in wine.
Google Earth was a real port, IIRC, while Picasa was wine-ified.
Thanks for pointing that out.
I love soldat, but it dosen’t play well with Wine. The textures are messed up, you have to edit a datafile to swap the in-game font for something readable, and the entire thing lags horribly, even in a normal game.
Of course, that was with the last release. Maybe this one fares better.
Worked fine for me, I just ran it stock, using the latest wine from the wine repos.
Now if only I was good at the game.
James any idea if they said it worked with wine for the last release?
I can’t really believe into the fact that porting games to Linux would be a lot of work or that Wine would be easier. At least not after following how Icculus ( http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus ) works. It seems to take only a few days for that one man to make a port of game X, Y, or Z for Linux. Testing and ironing out bugs takes more, but basically equivalent libraries and tools are available. Trying to add in one more extra component (Wine) there seems simply risky and source for a lot of agony to me.
The funny fact is that most of the games ported by Icculus work on same hardware on Linux faster, more stable, and they also look better.
The only thing is that, isn’t emulating Windows perfectly what killed OS/2? They were always behind Microsoft.
Anyways, don’t all you game devs have an OpenGL port of your engines already? Why ot just use OpenGL instead of DirectX overall? OpenGL runs on all systems (game consoles), even Windows, whereas DirectX is only for the Xbox and Windows.
Oh yes, when I said DIrectX, I meant Direct3d. Crossplatform tools already exist for the other parts, like OpenAL and SDL.
If games matter – and they do to *many* people, you need a way to run them. And if you get the world to do OpenGL/OpenAL/SDL or whatever mix today, and compile for Linux etc – it still doesn’t change the fact that we have a lot of games today that will not run without Windows. And good games are still good after a long time – right now I’m playing Planescape: Torment from 1999 and I’m having a great time.
Cedega is like Wine – it really only works for a few high-profile games that some took the time to make work, otherwise it’s pretty much hit and miss for everything else. For both Cedega and Wine, there are countless people that will tell you otherwise, but it always turns out that they are just trying to make arguments for their beloved platform without actually trying it. Which is the worst marketing ploy ever as it backfires so hard when someone actually tries it. I really wish people would stop doing that. Yes, some stuff works, some even works perfectly, but mostly you end up with nothing.
Also, I’m really uncomfortable giving money to Cedega even if it did work, because of the promises of old that a) were broken and b) slowed down Wine propers DirectX support for years. Nothing illegal or so, just very immoral. I do pay for CrossOver though, mostly to support the good guys.
In conclusion: everything except games is or will be covered. For existing games, a migration path is necessary for anyone who has a Windows game they love. New games should of course ideally be native, but old ones never will. Normal applications and games do not follow the same logic here.
If *you* don’t care about games, of course you will not agree. But know that many of us thinks this is absolutely necessary, or we will have to keep those stupid Windows machines/partitions around. And while I’m free otherwise, I see many people turning back just because they give up on dual booting. For the games. They are that powerful. Which is not so strange, since the games industry is a good chunk larger than the movie industry since a few years back… do you really want to ignore a market like that?
Not saying “do this for me”. Just saying that I think something needs to be done, and one way forward would be to bring Wine up to a good level, which for the most part is a matter of programmer hours. Needs to be good programmers, needs to be a coherent effort like it already is, but in the end, most of the stuff is known and can be implemented given man hours.
I’m sure there are other possible ways to go, but don’t forget the games or you forget the audience.
Wow, Thanks for all the comments, I’m still looking into how much easier (If at all) it is to program an application that will work with wine vs cross platform applications. I know for example that even higher level languages like python still have a lot of os specific code when you try to create a cross platform program and depending on what is required I think one could spend a lot of time porting that code.That being said I have no experience trying to create a win32 application for wine.
I had never meant to praise or criticize wine, cedega, or any other application that lets you run win32 program, because they have both worked and failed me in the past. However I do praise the effort and think that there continued success can only lead to more linux users.
The original point of the post was to point out how I thought it was nifty that soldat claimed to run with wine (and it worked for me), and I don’t know the solution to the game problem but do know it is a problem.
I have really enjoyed reading all the comments, so again thanks.