WineX 3.2.1; Transgaming Partners with SuSE
Version 3.2.1 of the Wine forkWineX has been released byTransGaming Technologies. Changes:
- Several different possible crashes in Half Life. Someof which were generic race conditions.
- Homeworld 2 cut scene and intro movies now work.
- Multiple sounds playing at once when starting a newgame in Homeworld2 no longer happen.
- Most web pages launched in game should now actuallylaunch.
Moreover, apress release was fired in announcing a new partnership betweenthe aforementioned TransGaming and the German Linux distributor SuSE:
TransGaming Technologies announced its partnership with SUSE LINUXthis month to bring SUSE LINUX users access to high-demand PC games on their desktop with Wine Rack. The SUSE LINUX Wine Rack is an add-on package enabling buyers of SUSE 9.0 - Personal or Professional - toenhance their Linux experience by being able to run Windows games onthe Linux desktop through the power of TransGaming’s WineX 3.2. WineRack also includes other exciting applications.
I try and abstain from the political debate WineX usually seems to generate,but feel free to discuss (in a civil manner) the ramifications below.
One final note: as before, the pre-packaged build of WineX is only availableto TransGaming’s subscribers, hence the lack of a download link in this post.
December 23rd, 2003 at 12:49 pm
Most of us have faced the choice of playing windows games ( ugh: reboot ) so as to play with friends who maybe dont have linux or games we can’t yet run in ‘wine’ or for which there is no linux native port. Some will say winex is no danger to linux gaming as we know it but what about the port of ’sacrifice’ we never got ? I also would like someone to explain to me the incentive game companies will have to do cross-platform coding ( which is essential and optimal and thus desired ) of their games if it just runs ‘ok’ in wineX ?
I’ve tried winex long ago and found while it workes ‘ok’ for some games..maybe perfect in a ‘few’ games ( there are what..after several years now only ‘5′ games that have a ‘5 star’ rating ????!!! ) but most of the windows games that I want to run flat do not either install or run in wineX at all and I can point to those games:
AquaNox
StarTopia
Morrowind - last I tried it it wasn’t working but maybe it is now but Idoubt it is 100%
starwars episode I : RACER
Dungeon Siege
Startrek : startrek creator
startrek starfleet command: empires at war II
…..and many other new titles on the market that likely aren’t even on the list.
DirectX is a moving target they are never going to be able to hit 100% and that coupled with too many games just dont work 100% is enough for me to not want to endorse it.
I also am VERY highly morally offended that they team up with ASpyr to bring NOT LINUX more gaming but the macOSX. I have absolutely nothing against macOSX but wasn’t the goal here to bring linux more games…has only a handful of people even NOTICED ???…and dont tell me well its their business model expanding..I’d have no problem with it expanding AS LONG AS linux also received the same games but it is not.
I think thats enough reasons to at least atm definintely not support winex. They also promised to release code back to wine completly after X number of subscribers–has this ever been hit if so why hasn’t it been released ?
I think linux gamers should get ‘behind’ companies that already have given us ‘native’ linux games like s2games.com and nwn.bioware.com and the valiant effort of linuxgamepublishing.com.
Either play with a crutch through wineX or play real directly ported linux games through those mentioned. Your choice affects not only you but other linux users trying to see the OS become more popular by game companies porting to us…which in turn will drive the rest of the trailing industry to us as well.
thx for reading
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December 23rd, 2003 at 4:24 pm
Why did they implement that? I’d rather see them avoid crashes, instead of adding them.
December 25th, 2003 at 12:53 am
As others have pointed out, DirectX is just a standard API that is being added to, not one that is constantly mutating into something totally different.
As for how I look at WineX. I just see it as a third party DirectX API for Linux. And that’s all it really is too.
And yeah it isn’t perfect, but I understand that the current subscriber version is pretty good actually. Most people judge it by the CVS version which isn’t quite the same. The CVS version is the version for developers, not for game players, and is kind of borked for playing games even though it’s the same basic API.
As for this hurting Linux…I’ve seen solid arguments on both sides of the issue. Personally, I don’t think it’s going to make existing porting companies to stop porting their games though. They do so out of love more than out of economics anyway. And I think that as Linux becomes more popular on the desktop, and in particular, more popular among gamers (and it will because Linux may have fewer games, but it plays the games it does have far better than Windows does any day on the same hardware) that more and more games will be ported. In fact I have seen this over the last few years, there have been more games ported, and more porting companies at work.
And since when has hacking out our own compatability ever hurt the Linux, Unix, or Open Source communities? We’ve been doing it as long as we’ve been around. We’ve been doing it for longer than Linux has been around, and even longer than MS. How is WineX any different? The WineX people basically said, “If they won’t give us DirectX we’ll make it ourselves.” And isn’t that exactly the spirit of the Linux community right there?