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Games Software Entertainment Linux

Three Years of TransGaming Discussed 56

Posted by simoniker from the ups-and-downs dept.
jvm writes "In 2001 TransGaming launched their product WineX with the goal of bringing Windows games to Linux with 100% compatibility and speed by building on the WINE project. In a lengthy, critical post, Curmudgeon Gamer uses those three years of perspective to assess the company, its product, and its role in the Linux gaming world. How is compatibility progressing? What about the source release after 20000 subscribers? And what's up with porting games to MacOS X instead of Linux?"
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Three Years of TransGaming Discussed More

Three Years of TransGaming Discussed

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  • Strawman (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PyromanFO ( 319002 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @11:25AM (#8416713)
    And I think at some point we have to look at the Linux platform and ask: Where is our effort better spent? The answer is not necessarily in making Windows software work on Linux, but rather making Linux a better platform for software development. If there is one thing that Loki's short life bought the Linux world, it was a significant investment in the infrastructure on which future games have been built: SDL, OpenGL, and OpenAL. (For example, I believe that Unreal Tournament 2003 on Linux uses all of these libraries. I'm guessing the same is true of Unreal Tournament 2004, although I haven't asked Ryan or Daniel to be sure.) By comparison, it seems unlikely that all the money and effort expended on WineX will have any benefit except to a handful of users for whom a modest number of Windows-only games work well. Linux, as a platform on which to build software, will become no more attractive from even widespread use of WineX.

    When will people quit parading around this tired old strawman? "Why have two GUI Desktops, you could spend all that energy on one desktop? Why have more than one X Server, one is good enough! Why have several sound systems, OSS works just fine!" Repeat after me, competition is good. WineX can't hurt the Linux community, only offer incentive for Windows users. If the only game someone plays is Half-Life and WineX lets them play Half-Life in Linux, that's somebody who now uses a Linux desktop. How does that hurt anybody else? One more Linux desktop means one more number to point to when making news games, begging for a Linux port. Numbers are the only thing that matters to publishers when it comes to ports.
    • competition is good, and divsersity is good as well. Why not have more then one desktop? why not have a replacement for X server? if XFree86 keeps up then it might be illegal to use it in the ways it presently is used now. diversification prevents mono culture, which is exactally what is wrong with a lot of major software corps (i.e that big one in Redmond). If we only focus on just one then what happens when legal issues, technological evolutionary dead ends occur, etc

    • Re:Strawman (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Christ-on-a-bike ( 447560 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:54PM (#8417188)
      If the only game someone plays is Half-Life and WineX lets them play Half-Life in Linux, that's somebody who now uses a Linux desktop. How does that hurt anybody else?

      That's not the general case. As has already been discussed, someone who just wants to play their already purchased Windows games almost certainly has a Windows install around, letting them do this without hassle. They might perhaps pay up for winex, but if they want to pick and choose their games, they are going to spend quite a lot of time gaming on Windows. (E.g. lots of new games are DirectX 9 - no play on winex for them.)

      In the general case, we have quite a few Linux users, some of whom are willing to spread some cash to get games on their Linux machine (I'm one of them). I could either buy winex + some Windows games, or I could buy Linux native ports. Which is better?

      I think it's much better to give my money to the people selling Linux native ports:

      1. Some of my money may go towards maintaining and popularizing open source/cross platform gaming tools and libraries - in particular, OpenGL.
      2. My money 'tells' the developers/publishers that there is demand for games on Linux.
      3. The native ports run better and cost less (figuring in the cost of winex). (What I want to see is Doom 3 on Linux playing just as nice as on Windows - not Half Life 2 on Linux through winex, and sucking royally, if it runs at all.)

      I don't think the scenario of winex bringing gamers to Linux is very realistic. (I certainly didn't switch over because of games.) In a situation where people are already dumping Windows, what is needed is to spend money on Linux ports and thereby give feedback to developers.

      But buying winex + Windows games gives no positive feedback to games developers at all. Therefore, winex doesn't bring developers over to Linux either! As we have seen, TransGaming can't be relied on to push cross platform development strategies, because they make money by implementing DirectX. They want developers to use DirectX!

      Numbers are the only thing that matters to publishers when it comes to ports.

      Do you think that software houses continually carry out usage studies to figure out whether they should put out Linux ports of their games? That's not how it works. AFAICT, if one of the lead developers has a nice feeling about Linux, then it will get done. Otherwise it won't. If the developers are all in love with DirectX, it definitely won't get done (and neither will a Mac port). The story of Linux gaming is being played out in developers' heads, not in usage statistics.

      • Re:Strawman (Score:5, Interesting)

        by PyromanFO ( 319002 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @01:06PM (#8417243)
        First, it's not about bringing Windows gamers to Linux, it's about keeping Linux users in Linux instead of having to reboot to play their games. There's alot to be said for no longer having to dual boot and WineX helps people do that. Mainly I see this with multiplayer games. People have one or possibly two games they play heavily in a given 6-month period. If WineX lets them run both those games and they otherwise want to stay in Linux, they'll become a full time Linux user, more likely to buy games with Linux support. It's not about getting people to convert, it's about allowing people who want to convert the ability to do so.

        Second, the developers aren't the only one's who determine what gets ported where. Publishers would start putting pressure on developers if we say even a 10-20% share of the desktop market on Linux. How many Mac games get published? Macs are a smaller share of the desktop than Linux right now.

        Third, I agree totally on the buying games with Linux ports instead of emulation. WineX doesn't hurt that at all. Nobody out there is saying "Well, it works with WineX so we won't do a Linux port." Theyre saying "nobody's using Linux on the desktop, why do we care?" Every person we can allow to use Linux full time just adds to the mindshare of Linux on the desktop. Things like Crossover Office, Wine and WineX help that. I know our office at work wouldn't be rolling out Linux on the developers desktops if we couldn't access IE and Outlook. They're not about to change the entire infrastructure but they'll allow us to use it if it doesn't cause them too much trouble. It works the same at home. If people can use their favorite apps in Linux they will be much happier with the switchover. Then they'll gradually move to native Linux applications because they will always work better.

        Basically, WineX just allows gaming to get it's foot in the door. The future will most definately be native Linux clients, but until that's a reality we can't just ignore the situation out of principle. WineX allows people to play games under Linux that would never get a Linux port, it eases the pain of switching from Windows and causes them to have to reboot into Windows less. I don't see how that's a bad thing.

        • Re:Strawman (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Christ-on-a-bike ( 447560 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @02:08PM (#8417576)
          OK, we're on the same page. But you seem to think getting people gaming on Linux (creating the market) is more important, while I think getting the developers on board ('mindshare') is key.

          I don't know if anyone knows which part of this process is really more crucial. For one thing, there were certainly Linux ports coming out (like Quake 3) when the market was very small. That kind of thinking by developers has to be encouraged. On the other hand, there are some publishers that are immune to mindshare and might never OK a native Linux port; Vivendi and EA spring to mind.

          We need to get the developers to recognise the potential of Linux and move to cross platform tools. winex hurts this mindshare growth because it effectively promotes DirectX! So buying winex is bad.

          If I were trying to convince a gamer to use Linux I would sell them on UT2004. I would say, "OK, you can't play Counter-Strike on Linux. But it does run UT2004, and you can bet it'll crash less, look nicer, be more secure, etc." The hardcore gamer (you?) only needs Windows to run their other games and will be prepared to dual-boot (or possibly run winex). The casual gamer (me) might be prepared to just drop CS and live without his Windows titles. To me, winex makes Linux look like a crappy Windows replacement. To grab peoples' attention I think it should be sold as different (as Macs are).

          So it comes down to this: is the negative developer mindshare of promoting DirectX worth the potential Linux growth winex gives us by stopping dual-booting?

          According to my argument, the answer is 'no', because there aren't very many hardcore gamers who are pissed off about dual-booting and so won't use Linux.

          • Re:Strawman (Score:3, Informative)

            by Kleedrac2 ( 257408 )
            Hate to intrude on your conversation but as was reported on /. here [tinyurl.com] you can run Steam (Counter Strike 1.6) under linux! And Half-Life [tinyurl.com] (Counter Strike 1.5) runs fine too! :)

            Kleedrac
          • But the two goals of attracting developers and attracting gamers are not mutually exclusive. Developers are not going to bother creating a Linux version of a game unless there is a user base that will support it.

            The slice of pie for PC gaming is shrinking as it is, a $1 billion market compared to the $10 billion console industry. PCs are shrinking, and consoles continue to rise. At that rate, PC developers must appeal to the lowest common denominator, and for probably 95% of the consumer base, that's W

        • Speak for yourself. For me it IS about having native Linux games. I don't run WineX. Have you got your copy of Gorky 17 or Ballistics preordered?

      • Re:Strawman (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Fallout2man ( 689436 )
        Before you can expect more developers, *nix needs a direct competitor to ALL of DirectX. Currently there's OpenGL and OpenAL, currently though OGL's a bit out of it (once they finally release 2.0 to the public it'll be back in the game), however DirectX is more then just D3D.

        There's DirectMusic, DirectInput, DirectSound, DirectShow AND Direct3D. If someone can make a single unified programing library that can do all those sorts of things for *nix, then I think it'd make the platform ten times more attract
        • And SDL provides, imo a better api than directx for almost all of these tasks. Directshow is just plain rubbish, direct3d is nowhere near as clean and easy as OpenGL.
        • Go Check out SDL [libsdl.org][libsdl.org]. 'Nuff said.

          --vranash
          • The SDL's a start, however it can't do everything OpenGL or OpenAL can do, so while it's got the all encompassing part, it lacks all the latest high-tech features to be quite up to par with the rest.

            I should also note I forgot to add DirectPlay, which allows for easy handling of networking.
            • You sure? Last I checked SDL has a wrapper around opengl, and I believe it has an audio output driver for openAL, dunno if you can actually get complete api access from within it though.
    • You're right. Why don't they just can Windows XP and go back to Windows ME. I'm sure that lots of people felt that it was just "good enough."

      By the way. OSS is a piece of shit. ALSA is a professional-grade, expandable audio subsystem that is fast and extremely capable of using plugins and other stuff that you couldn't do with OSS.

      People need to stop thinking about shit like Transgaming and focus thier $$$ to prople that actually care about Linux games, like LGP, Epic, Icculus, id.

  • SDL was a god-send (Score:5, Informative)

    by magic ( 19621 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @11:39AM (#8416781) Homepage
    Thanks to SDL, I was able to port my Windows-only 3D code base to have full support for OS X and Linux in only a few weeks. The result is G3D.

    G3D [sf.net] now has professional game developers, researchers, and students at several universities all developing 3D games and demos that run natively on all three platforms. The nice thing is that SDL was easier to use than the native Windows APIs.

    For Linux to continue to be viable it needs to have a viable desktop. The desktop needs to have infrastructure that is easier to use than the Windows APIs and platform-independent in order to convince developers it is worth their while. As a developer, I don't want to use even more platform-specific APIs in order to support a (comparative) handful of users. I am willing to learn and use a new API if it makes Windows programming easier and gives me a free port to new platforms.

    SDL, SDLmixer, OpenAL, and G3D are great for games. I'd like to see things like wxWindows for GUI development reach the same level of stability and native performance. Right now it is too hard to make a GUI application that runs on 2 or 3 platforms and looks as sharp as a native Windows app on Windows. It needs to be easier to write such a program using a platform independent API than the Win32 API in order to get more "real" programs on Linux.

    -m

    • Re:SDL was a god-send (Score:4, Informative)

      by Christ-on-a-bike ( 447560 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:08PM (#8416922)
      I'd like to see things like wxWindows for GUI development

      ITYM wxWidgets [wxwidgets.org]....

    • Lack of support (Score:3, Informative)

      by Via_Patrino ( 702161 )
      Linux still lacks support for opengl2, it doesn't have support for functions like, pbuffer as a texture, render to texture and pbuffers mapping on a quad.

      And as someone said before [slashdot.org], on another article, most of the games supported by winex are opengl, the number of supported directx games is very low. But I won't repeat what he said, read yourself.

      And the source is already released, you can get it using winex-cvs, but it's not gpl.
    • Right now it is too hard to make a GUI application that runs on 2 or 3 platforms and looks as sharp as a native Windows app on Windows. It needs to be easier to write such a program using a platform independent API than the Win32 API in order to get more "real" programs on Linux.


      I always tend to wonder what is wrong with Java? You get a nice gui api that's well documented and looks slick that works on any platform with a VM.
  • It's quite possible, if people don't renew thier subscriptions that the 20,000 may never be reached.

    Conversely, someone could say one day "Let's all subscribe for just one month" and code will be released.

    (100,000 a month is the goal by the way)
    • Don't worry, they automatically bill you for renewal whether you want it or not.

      I learned that the hard way, but I agree with what they are doing so I let the charge stand.
    • I just let my subscription expire for the first time in 3 years precisely because of the WineX lack of focus. Are MAC gamers paying these assholes 5$/mnth for MAC games? Hell no. I'm tired of only being able to play Max Payne and a couple other games. Hundreds of DirectX6 games that I'd like to play and which should be EASY to provide support for just continuously get dropped as they spend (mostly fruitless) time trying to get things like Battlefield 1942 to run well (guess what, it still doesn't last t
        1. Are MAC gamers paying these assholes 5$/mnth for MAC games?

        No, they are paying about $30-60 for a one-time payment for a single game. In WineX terms, that's 6-12 months -- OK, on sale $20 or 4 months.

        For one, you're paying for a single game.

        For the other, you're paying for the ability to play multiple games.

        The two aren't similar.

        While I'm not currently a WineX subscriber -- Savage is too fun all by itself -- I can easily see joining up again for a 1 year subscription. $60/year is trivial if yo

        • Look, I've paid those guys ~$180 for the ability to play about 2 games in Linux (Max Payne (a 4) & Star Empires IV (about a 3)). Every other game I had didn't work, or worked so crappily that it wasn't worth playing on WineX.

          Here are the OTHER things that are wrong with Transgaming that that other guy didn't mention:

          1)Their forums are the worst set up forums I've EVER SEEN ANYWHERE. They are some sort of proprietary forum software (I think one of them wrote it themselves) and they SUCK beyond all po
          • Right now, I have plenty of Linux games to play, so I'm not playing Windows games under WineX.

            The only thing that annoys me about WineX is that as the libs get updated for the distribution of Linux I use, WineX no longer works. If I'm not subscribed to WineX, I can no longer play the games. (I don't dual boot...too much of a bother.)

            While my stack of native Linux games is a few times higher, I have sucessfully played a quite a few games using WineX (from memory); Diablo II (before Wine could), Civ. I

          • Dude, you DO realize SE4 has run fine using WINE (NOT WINEX!) for like over 2 years right? I've been playing it off and on on just about all of my linuxboxes and with the exception of bugs in the game itself (had some access violations that showed up more often in WINE than under windows, were present in both however) it ran just peachy.
    • Personally, I wouldn't be surprised of Transgaming just abandoned their promise outright. Needless to say, i wouldn't be holding my breath that even if 200,000 users were subscribed that they would release the entire code.

  • my new subscription (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sdibb ( 630075 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @11:47AM (#8416828)
    I just recently bought a subscription to winex, and I must say, while its *nice* to have a Windows installer on Linux to install pretty much anything, and since I've installed only a smidgen of my Windows games on here, the ones I keep coming back to are the native Linux ones. Namely, Neverwinter Nights, my ScummVM games, and Unreal. Even with WineX, the games are noticably kludgy on a fast system, and I'm too stubborn to do a dualboot just to play the three or four games that won't even install under Linux.

    While WineX is nice, it just doesn't cut it, and nothing beats a native linux port.
    • I just keep a separate ms-windows box just for games... nothing else. Everything else gets done on Linux :)
      • Any chance that that a VNC link could make that dedicated gaming box seem like an... emulator board?! I'd be surprised to find such a thing viable, but it sure would be nice to just shove the FPSs on to a matx nForce2 with GigE. Anyone tried this? Just a thought...
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Money (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Matthias Wiesmann ( 221411 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:02PM (#8416905) Homepage Journal
    The switch from porting games to OS X instead of Linux seem obvious to me: there is some chance of making money. While you can discuss the relative market shares of OS X versus Linux until the sun dies out, the two markets are quite different.
    • OS X users are used to pay for software, there is piracy of course, and open-source and free software, but companies, including Microsoft, are making money selling OS X software. Linux software by default is free.
    • Most linux users are using a x86 processor, and have thus a machine that can boot Windows. I have seen a lot of people using Linux for desktop use, but most of them have still some version of windows lying around, typically as a dual boot option or for running VM-ware. The only option for Mac users to run windows software is virtual PC and it is not suitable for gaming - not recent games at least.
    If you consider this, making games for OS X makes sense, the people are more willing to pay, and you can sell them a more expensive version of the game (By the time a Mac version comes out, the PC version of said game is discounted). This would be a hard sell for Linux people, as most of them have the option of rebooting to play the cheap windows version. So you basically have a low volume version that has to be as cheap as the high volume version. Tough.

    I know more people who use Linux than OS X (I work in a academic setting), yet I only know one Linux user who bought a Linux game, it was Heroes of Might a Magic by Loki, and he bought it because it was discounted (basically at the time Loki was going out of buisnes). Most OS X users I know have bought a few games.

    I think there might also be technical issues (variety of sound system in different Linux distributions) or legal (lawyers of gaming companies being nervous about the GPL), but for me, those are secondary, the core issue is the target market.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Money (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Christ-on-a-bike ( 447560 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @01:09PM (#8417263)
      I agree with what you say about dual booting, but this is wrong:
      OS X users are used to pay for software, there is piracy of course, and open-source and free software, but companies, including Microsoft, are making money selling OS X software. Linux software by default is free.
      That's stupid. Linux people aren't into warez. If anything it's the Windows gamers that are more likely to be used to getting stuff for free (like Windows and Office). I know gamers that swear by Windows 98, because it's lightweight and doesn't have any of that crappy product activation.

      As a Linux user who doesn't dual boot, I feel richer than a Windows user because I didn't have to shell out for an operating system. Thus I have more money to spend on games!

      OK, that's anecdotal. But so is your insistence that Linux users won't shell out for games. I will and I do.

      P.S. Remember also that porting games Windows->Linux x86 is a hell of a lot easier/cheaper than doing it Windows->OS X PPC. Indeed, some developers will already have some kind of Linux x86 toolchain because their dedicated multiplayer servers run on Linux.

      • Re:Money (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Matthias Wiesmann ( 221411 )

        That's stupid. Linux people aren't into warez.

        I never implied this and anyway it would not little sense, as there are not many linux games to warez.

        If anything it's the Windows gamers that are more likely to be used to getting stuff for free (like Windows and Office).

        Windows users are not the issue, they are the majority and the core market the games are targetted at it.

        ...But so is your insistence that Linux users won't shell out for games. I will and I do.

        The real question is, will you sh

        • I wouldn't normally buy overpriced/late Linux releases, so I think I fit your description of a Linux user. I don't dual-boot but if I really wanted a Windows-only game, there are plenty of Windows machines around to play it on. I guess there are more Mac than Linux users who just refuse to use Windows.

          OTOH there is a packaging issue here. UT2004, like UT2003 will be released with Linux binaries in the box with the Windows ones. Other games have had freely downloadable Linux binaries which can be used

          • I still think Linux gamers have a big advantage in that developers tend to favour x86.
            You might be right, or not [theinquirer.net], only the future will tell...
            • Ha, you got me there. Front page /. story and all. Let's hope PPC/Mac gets more games, they might lead to releases for PPC/Linux as well! It's all good.
    • Every Linux game I own, I have bought, I refuse to use WineX because that is just an excuse for developers not to port games to the Linux platform. Hopefully, the numbers will come out that Linux has suppassed Apple on the desktop, then maybe Linux will get more games, if Aspry can do it with the Mac and stay in buisness, I'm sure another porting house can start up for Linux games and can do it, just not with the buisness sense of Loki. I hate when people say that Linux users would not pay for anything. Tha
    • Gamers will buy linux native games, but only if they can get better performance than they do using windows or winex. It all comes down to performance. Right now I just run games in windows. It's brainlessly easy to install and setup games and they run just fine. The only way I'd switch is if I get a nice performance increase in Linux. For now I'll just keep dual booting.
      • It'll also help if they don't keep b0rking the ABI's in the C++ libraries every two or three revisions of gcc. I've got Terminus, one of the original Win32/Linux/MacOS games and it no longer runs on my system's since it was compiled with gcc 2.95 or something. So in order to run it I'd need to compile the entire library dependency set for it using 2.95 and end up wasting 50-200meg in duplicated libraries. Quite frankly with many of the changes GNU have been making to their utilities (not to mention linux

  • 7 games (Score:1, Insightful)

    by lubricated ( 49106 )
    If you check out their website only 7 games work perfectly. All the other games have irritations and work differently on linux than windows. 3 years and only 7 games work.

  • Props to TransGaming... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RyLaN ( 608672 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @05:03PM (#8418703)
    Although didn't announce it until recently, VALVe Software's Steam runs better with WineX than it does in windows. The reason for this is simple, in Windows the url loading mechanism works, and there are numerous spots that have adds. With WineX, the URL loader does not work so I can play without annoyances.

    Ignoring this, it is possible that Transgaming is the reason there will be no Half-Life2 on Linux. VALVe promised the Linux community a port after they made a Linux version of the dedicated server, but now we learn that H-L 2 will be DirectX 9 only. VALVe may have assumed that linux users could play the game under WineX, and thus it wouldn't be worth it to make a native port. I hope that TransGaming protests by making no effort to support Half-Life2, and urges their subscribers to do likewise.
  • I've never messed with WineX, but I am going to in the near future. My desktop computer is dualbooted with Debian Linux and Windows XP (for gaming only). Even though it doesn't really effect anything, I feel dirty about having the Win32 platform lurking around in the confines of my harddrive... even though it isn't causing much harm by me running Linux.

    Mad propz to Transgaming as I would love to see every thing that Windows has over Linux be ported to Linux. I think this software is a giant leap and will
    • If you dual boot only to play games, so why Windows XP?
      98 or ME will play all the games, and boots soooooo much faster (and if you're dual booting, boot time is important.
      • Please. Windows ME was a mistake. That is the worst version of Windows. As far as 98 is concerned; that would be a pretty horrible idea to use for gaming, as Microsoft is stopping support for it in April. What use is running an OS to play games if I can get the latest software for everything?
        • I also do not like ME. I dualboot to 98SE to play games. It's just that a friend of mine have hacked ME to boot really fast.
          As for Microsoft support.. who cares? As long as the games runs fine, and they do, it's ok.

          > What use is running an OS to play games if I can get the latest software for everything?
          I did not understood that sentence.

  • Better code structure (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Goodbyte ( 539941 )

    For obvious reasons it will always be better with a port than running games through wineX or similar. The problem with porting is IMHO that it is never planned for when developing games, it may be an item on the "wish list", but is easily dropped when time get sparse.

    My suggestion is that the open source community could help developing the Linux (or any other os for that matter) specific parts. Release a precompiled library with the game core, and let the community build a renderer around that!

    All it ta

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