Major windows based games update

[davemc]

There has been a few topics about how to get your major titles working on Linux, and has already been discussed, Cedega is our only hope right now particularly for the new and bleeding edge stuff that wont work in wine without major work, and even then with questionable stability. Here is the latest blog from TransGaming --

"Last month, we were hard at work putting the finishing touches on our support of the GL Shading Language (GLSL) for Pixel and Vertex Shaders 2.0, and Framebuffer Objects (FBO) for off-screen rendering. Our developers have found even more ways to improve performance and have continued to eliminate regressions. We revised our implementation of Direct3D Occlusion Queries based on some new performance data we obtained, which has improved frame rates on some video cards for a number of games, including Battlefield 2â„¢ and related titles. We also fixed some issues that some users were experiencing with Vertex Buffer Objects (VBO), and squeezed out the regressions that had crept into our handling of pixel buffers and were affecting some games.

While testing some of the online multi-player capabilities in some of our supported and soon to be supported titles, we discovered a number of issues. To resolve these, several outstanding winsock and wininet issues had to be addressed, and some potential buffer overflows were also fixed. This should lead to more stable online play. While we were at it, we fixed a few bugs that dealt with the amount of memory that we report back to applications. This only affected systems with more than 2GB of memory, and only in specific circumstances.

We also did some work to improve Cedega's integration with certain window managers, including GNOME and KDE. This will be noticed mostly in Steam-based applications, where certain windows previously had borders and title bars supplied from the user's window manager in addition to the ones drawn by Steam itself. This didn't look quite right and often caused mouse focus issues. We no longer draw these extra window decorations when requested not to by the application.

We have also improved Cedega's GUI to provide the ability to copy the system and hardware information into the system clipboard. This will make it easier for users to provide this information when making support requests, so please, make use of it! As well, the GUI will now clean up after itself and remove temporary files created when installing an engine update directly from the web, within the GUI.

Another improvement that will undoubtedly be appreciated by users with high-end graphics cards is improved handling for amounts of video ram greater than 256MB. Our validation routines for this had been written several years ago, long before cards with 512MB or 640MB of video ram were available, or even heard of. As such, it was somewhat deficient and incorrectly reported only 32MB of video memory to applications when unexpectedly large values of video memory were encountered. If you are fortunate enough to have such a card, you can work around the issue until the next release is available by specifying 256MB of video in the relevant location in the GUI. (Specifically, in the Edit -> System/Hardware Information dialog.)

This month saw a number of user-supplied patches make their way into the main Cedega code base. Notably, T. Beckmann provided a stubbed implementation of faultrep.dll (which is required by some newer games), SLIST support in kernel32.dll, and support for Windows XP-style document locations using environment variables. R. Crittenden supplied us with some richedit dialog fixes, and we have also integrated riched20.dll from WineHQ. Our continuing thanks goes out to these users as well as the WineHQ developers for all of your hard work and effort!

Part of reaching that vast untapped Linux gaming audience is just being able to communicate, and as such we encourage everyone with the ability to aid us in doing so. This past month, Y. van Oers submitted a Dutch translation for the latest version of the GUI, which is now available for download via--the GUI. (Betcha saw that one coming.) If you would like to see Cedega translated into your favorite language, please visit http://transgaming.org/i18n/ for directions on how to create and submit a localization. It doesn't take very long and gives you something to do while waiting for your PS3 games to install. Be sure to include your contact information with your translations, and prepare to flex your i18n street cred today!
Games

Elder Scrolls® IV: Oblivion™: This game is running quite nicely in our current development packages for the next major Cedega release. This is made possible with the addition of support for Shader Model 2.0, floating point textures and an improved FBO implementation.

Neverwinter Nights 2â„¢: TransGaming has continued investigating NWN2. We have fixed one of the patcher issues, but there continue to be a number of other installer and patcher issues. As well, the version of copy protection used by this game is not currently supported by Cedega.

Civilization® IV: This game continues to work with Cedega 5.2.10. The 1.52 patch (or later) is highly recommended. The upcoming release has a number of fixes which should benefit both NVIDIA and ATI users. Look for it coming soon to a desktop near you!

Command and Conquer 3 Tiberium Warsâ„¢: The demo for this game is now available to FilePlanet subscribers and, as such, we managed to get our hands on a copy of it. There are some issues with the installation, but after copying the install from Windows and making a few necessary adjustments we were able to run the game using our latest development packages. The full version of the game should be available in a few weeks.

Steamâ„¢: Steam continues to work in Cedega 5.2.10, although there are intermittent issues caused by certain types of pop-up advertisements. As mentioned above, our current development series contains improved compatibility with various window managers and the extraneous window decorations are no longer present. We are working on tracking down the intermittent issues caused by the ads as well as looking to resolve some additional mouse input problems."


From what ive gathered, the bulk of folks who have issues with windows based games, have it on the newer titles mainly due to the things ive highlighted above. For MMORPG's such as World of Warcraft and Dark age of Camelot, the issue is not just the above things, but getting through system checks and engine upgrades as well as the gaming site scans your system for hacking routines or for game updates.

[random guy]

well when it comes to cedega i have mixed feelings. one one side it is great progress, a very good program, cant run everything perfect but it does a decent job considering the fact that windows programs dont understand their own source code because it is such a mess so trying to emulate windows api has got to be similarily difficult.

bad side: they dont contribute back to wine which is a really sad. at least they release the source code so i guess wine developers could monder that but it still seems like cedega just forked and ignored its father.

i dont play many recent titles though, nor have much free time now a days although i am looking forward to the release of command and conquer any day now which historically are addicting to me.

[davemc]

Cedega did fork from wine in the windows gaming arena only. I wrestled with this as well and came up with a couple things. First, they ARE the only game in town when it comes to cross compatibilty for games. To me this is just huge because Windows is here to stay and is where the vast majority of the gaming market resides and thus, gaming companies cater thier code to it. Linux is crippled by this because so many people would look upon a full scale move to it if it just didnt have cross compatility issues with things like this. Gaming companies are nuetral on the subject and just want to cater to thier user bases needs, and wont port to Linux unless a sizeable portion of thier userbase demands it. Now, who in thier right mind would not make the jump to Linux if all thier big app's were supported? Second, there are no distro's today that are dedicated to supporting wine and windows based apps, especially games. Trust me when I tell you that should this happen, and it proves to be as successful or moreso than Cedega/Crossover, while at the same time containing all the rock solid, bleeding edge goodness that is Sabayon, you will have a Linux distro that will have every element necessary to absolutely crush the M$ market share on the Desktop. Im sure I dont have to tell any of you what the ramafications of this would be, but it would be earth shattering for the proprietary scene, and revolutionary on so many fronts from innovative processes to politics, Linux will change the very way people think about thier world, as it already has for those lucky enough to take the plunge.

[random guy]

that is very motivational.

Second, there are no distro's today that are dedicated to supporting wine and windows based apps, especially games.

by this do you suggest that no distros include cedega or crossover office? becasue there are a few that do actually. mandriva powerpack for one (although i have tried it and didnt like it so much, included great apps but i didnt like the base much)

Gaming companies are nuetral on the subject and just want to cater to thier user bases needs, and wont port to Linux unless a sizeable portion of thier userbase demands it.

ya they want to make money, which is not a bad thing at all. i am really pleased with atari for releaseing ut2004 in windows and linux and including them on the same disk. i have a friend that has the windows version of x3 and wants to get teh linux version when it comes out in may but it is werid to buy the same game twice.

i dont know how hard it is to port a game if you have the source code anyway. pretty soon companies will see that games like unreal are taking over for linux game market share and will want to get in. but then we run a risk that microsoft will presure them to not port like how they pressure computer retailers to not sell computers with an os other than windows preinstalled.

[forrestcupp]

Cedega isn't really obliged to contribute back to wine anymore because they have both evolved to the point that they are completely different code. Anyway, do forks usually contribute back to what they were forked from? Like does Beryl contribute back to Compiz (it looks like they will be soon)? Even so, if Cedega helped Wine get up to their level, they wouldn't be able to make any money, which is what Cedega is out to do. There is nothing wrong with making money, but I just don't like the idea of shelling out a monthly fee to play games that I already shelled out a lot of money for.

Wine has come a long way, though. You can play games like HL2 and Doom3 without paying for Cedega.

[voxiac]

Anyway, do forks usually contribute back to what they were forked from?

Codewevers do contribute back to wine:
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/support_wine/
And they are still able to make money. BTW they began to focus more on games with their Crossover 6.0. (still not at Cedega's level, I guess)

[totedati]

for me only the "copy protection" mater of thing is what stop gaming in linux ... cedega can not contribute back to wine because of this .... how you can do a secure copy protection schema in a open source world !? ... Same problem with all this internet gaming craziness ... How you protect the game engine to be hack'ed and modd'ed when you source code is open !? A hard problem .. temporary solved releasing only compiled binary even for opensource games ... and game producers care A LOT about this tipe of things .... And for porting problems ... is only a matter of switch from directx to opengl. A lot of mainstream game titles already have both engine implementation in windows. For me a very little effort is nedded to 'port' a opengl windows game to a opengl linux game. Look at games like quakeIII arena, the linux executable is a mere 3-4 MiB? A piece of cache ). The main effort is in level design, and artwork wich is the same in linux or windows ....