Transgaming to Support Half Life 2 Under Linux

rpdillon writes "According to Half-Life Fallout, Transgaming Technologies has announced that they will be releasing version 4.2 of Cedega, their Wine based software allowing some DirectX games to be played under Linux. The new version will be released Dec 7th with official support included for Valve Software's Half-Life 2 and Steam, Valve's online software store and distribution system, and a required component of Half-Life 2."

Or just badger Valve

[tod_miller]

Unreal Tournament 2003
Unreal Tournament 2004
Quake 3
Doom 3
Postal 2
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
more here... [wikipedia.org] ...

Half Life 2?

Go on Valve!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'd buy it!

wow

[adamruck]

If steam is ported to linux, perhaps more vendors will consider making cross platform games. Of course there is the whole market share thing, but its sure a step in the right direction.

I think I should send a link to this article to my linux friends who are playing hl2.

Re:Or better yet...

[entrager]

Because it's a sure way to lose money? Half Life 2 is a DirectX game (argue this decision if you want). It would take a great deal of work to convert it to OpenGL so it can work natively in Linux. It's not worth the development effort.

Confusing Quote

[khendron]

"Consumers rank the ability to play video games on their desktop as one of the top 3 important reasons for the adoption of Linux."

Is there a "not" missing somewhere in that sentence.? As in "... one of the top 3 reasons for NOT adopting Linux." For me, game support is the biggest reason why Windows still exists on my desktop.

Re:What is real "halflife" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, for one, the first iteration took place in a facility where various high energy physics experiments were being done (I'd like to get my hands on an "anti-mass spectrometer" myself). Radioactive material, in the canonical Hollywood form of glowing green sludge, is everywhere- and your hazard suit includes a built-in Geiger counter. One of Gordon Freeman's goals is to make his way across the Black Mesa facility to the Lambda Complex- the Greek letter lambda happens to be the symbol for the decay constant, among other things. Once there, one of his tasks is to turn on a nuclear reactor. Of course, you also cannot neglect the possibility that Valve figured they were making a sci-fi FPS, and casted about for a cool-sounding physics term for the title.

It should be noted, though, that the use of the term "half-life" is not restricted to radioactivity, as it is also used in the kinetics of chemical reactions.

Re:problems

[rpdillon]

1. WineX source available free on Transgaming's CVS

2. I run x86_64 (AMD Athon 64) and run WineX all the time - just compile it as a 32 bit application. Run with NVidia drivers.

3. You're not going to get a OpenGL port. So the decision is to either play HL2, or not play, but waiting won't help much, besides lowering th price in a few months.

Codeweavers + Transgaming

[div_2n]

With Codeweavers doing so well with business applications and Transgaming doing so well with games, I would love to see Codeweavers and Transgaming merge into one powerhouse and merge the codebases into a unified product.

I have a sneaky suspicion that if you get the best of both worlds that the sum of the whole would be greater than the sum of the parts. In other words, the list of compatible software would not just be the sum of compatiblity of each but that together they may fill in enough holes to expand total compatibility.

Anyone from the Codeweavers or Transgaming camp care to comment on this?

Re:slow?

[MikeBabcock]

Last you heard must have been a long time ago.

It runs Morrowind on my machine very well now except some delays loading the background music but that isn't a D3D issue.

It even has nicer looking graphics on my home Linux box than on my work Windows box (its a better computer mind you ... but its nice to take advantage of that fact).

I've used Cedega (the latest wine name from Transgaming) to run D3D and Windows OpenGL demos as well; its quite fun to see hundreds of frames per second in a 3rd party API implementation.

In the case of D3D, they're implementing an API and then sending those commands through to another API (OpenGL) which incurs some overhead, but it doesn't feel like much playing the games.

What about Direct X 9.0?

[Krondor]

Will this new version of Cedega support Direct X 9.0 graphics API? Is it simply letting the source engine fall back to Direct X 8.0 support?

I was under the impression that WINE had not yet supported Direct X 9.0. I can't wait for this! I can feel the MS grip slipping on my games hehe.

Re:What is real "halflife" ?

[rjshields]

Sounds like your room mate has a problem. You should refer him/her to online gamers anonymous [olganon.org].

Valve, listen up

[Anonymous Coward]

I read that Transgaming is having a relationship with Valve to get Half-life 2 going on Linux.

How about this:
You start to write some portable code so you're ready when the Windows market is diminishing.

Approaching compatability

[phorm]

While Wine is quite compatible with newer games on certain hardware, it's still a far ways from 100% compatible with the majority of windows software or even games. It seems that the Wine devels are much more interested in supporting newest game X than some of the older uncompatible-but-still-popular games. This is understandable since new games are where the most $$$ is anyways.

However, as Wine does approach greater compatibility for new games, there is always a moving target. A new DirectX/GL spec would probably cause quite a lot of new work, and there's a lot of other stuff to take care of.


The truth is, even windows is not near 100% with windows software. That is, XP croaks on much older software, and of course other software only works on XP. The only way to run all is perhaps by dual-boot, but even then sometimes older stuff won't like your new hardware (or your hardware doesn't work on an older OS).

Wine could be a solution to these problems, as it can be more configurable than an entire OS. Set options to best emulate win9x VS XP on a per-game basic, and other flags (many exist already), and in the future perhaps it will support all the old stuff that newer Windows OS's don't.

It's like DOS support in XP, pretty much minimal. Some of the newer laptops here at work don't have 98 drivers, and XP won't run the old DOS apps that don't have win32 replacements. Linux on the other hand runs them fine with dosbox, so perhaps Wine can also offer the same backwards-compatibility for old Win32 apps.

Re:Why I won't Support this.

[gphinch]

Blizzard is nice enough to release all their new games with both Mac and PC versions on the CD. I think that has to be worth something (as a Mac user, I admit), as Macs also represent a small percentage of the overall home computer market.

HL2 deathmatch coming (soon?)

[tuxlove]

A friend of mine at Valve tells me that they will be releasing a HalfLife2 update to add in the missing deathmatch functionality! I didn't buy HL2, because that's the part of the original HL that I really loved.

For those of you who are wondering what this is about, the new HL2 doesn't have deathmatch ability. The only multiplayer support currently is team-mode Counterstrike. This is a pretty fundamental thing to leave out, and is pretty much the only real criticism of the game I've read so far. Once deathmatch arrives, I'll be buying HL2 immediately.

Sorry this is slightly offtopic, but I thought it might be of interest to those of you reading this article thread. I was given no timeframe, except for the word "soon". That can mean anything, but at least it's on the way.

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