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Cedega and Linux Games
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jul 31, 2006 06:41 PM
from the pay-and-pray-gaming dept.
from the pay-and-pray-gaming dept.
Linux.com's Stefan Vrabie has a look at the state of Transgaming's Cedega, which some claim to be the best current offering for running Windows games under Linux. While it may be better than nothing, the author still puts this solidly under the "plug and pray" column with the biggest drawback being the amount of fiddling required to make it work. From the article: "Cedega may not be the answer to games under Linux, but it's better than not being able to play at all, until gaming companies notice Linux users as a market and release games for Linux." Linux.com and Slashdot.org are both owned by OSTG.
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No games? (Score:5, Interesting)
With the Diamond Edition ($30 at Best Buy), you get both expansion packs, and you can follow some online directions [bioware.com] to install to Linux without passing through Windows.
I also bought Return to Castle Wolfenstein a while back. That was good, too.
Oh, and there's DOOM, DOOM ][, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, several versions of Unreal...
If you'll go the Open Source route, there's DarkPlaces [icculus.org], Cube [cubeengine.com], Duke Nukem 3d [icculus.org] (engine, anyway. You'll still need the gamedata.
Uhm...no games? How about, no hyperadvertised games?
Re:No games? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:No games? (Score:3, Insightful)
Either way, it's nice to have such things that are ported directly to Linux.
In the holy wars of whether WINE benefits the Linux community or not, I think it hurts more than it harms. If you want to game with your PC, dual boot...you know, with that OS your machine came with. If you want to use Linux, convince yourself to use only native games. If you REALLY REALLY want to game, get yourself an XBox.
Re:No games? (Score:4, Interesting)
In the holy wars of whether WINE benefits the Linux community or not, I think it hurts more than it harms. If you want to game with your PC, dual boot...you know, with that OS your machine came with.
==
I have to agree. As a former OS/2 user, in retrospect I think that having limited Windows compatibility hurt more than it helped.
Parent
Re:No games? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhm...no games? How about, no contemporary games.
Every semi-serious, hell every casual PC gamer has moved beyond all your listed games games years ago. You didn't present an argument for Linux gaming, you presented one against it.
Parent
Re:No games? (Score:5, Informative)
We all know that Linux isn't a platform for gamers, but still there are a few games for GNU/Linux.
Parent
Re:No games? (Score:5, Insightful)
So in the end, yes, there are games on Linux, however in five years you get as much new releases under Linux as you see in the Windows world in a week or two, which really brings the state of Linux games very close to "no games". The sad thing is that it hasn't really gotten any better, five years ago we where stuck with a few first person shooters, today we still are, just with a few updated ones.
Parent
Re:No games? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:No games? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:No games? (Score:5, Insightful)
2: It would miss the entire point of an operating system - to have a common environment that is configured once and has to be updated once to make all your applications work. The live dvd would bring a whole new meaning to the phrase "Unreal UltraMAX Elite 2009 doesn't work with my nvidia card!"
3: Offshooting from that, a live dvd would have to contain support for all future hardware that could possibly ever be designed.
4: I think what you're looking for is called a 'console'.
Parent
Well duh (Score:4, Insightful)
If every software company was as generous as ID then Cedega wouldn't be required now would it?
Is there a market? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not a rhetorical question. I have no idea how easy it is to make a game compatible with both Windows and Linux but I assume that it's a bit more complicated than changing backslashes to forward slashes. I also don't know how big the market is for Linux games but I doubt it's huge. If it takes an extra, say, 20% longer to make a game Linux-compatible I'm not surprised that it doesn't happen more often.
On the other hand perhaps it's just lazy design. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who doesn't share my ignorance.
Re:Is there a market? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is there a market? (Score:5, Interesting)
Loki didn't close shop for lack of a sustainable market. Loki closed up shop because the company president and his wife were draining the company coffers for personal use.
Parent
Speaking as a Game Marketer and Linux User... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Speaking as a Game Marketer and Linux User... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Speaking as a Game Marketer and Linux User... (Score:5, Informative)
releasing, supporting, marketing, testing, and (rarely) developing something for a platform a developer is not familiar with (and quite frankly, scared of)..
Versus...
Potential sales to a platform comprising largely of a "free" atmosphere (that I enjoy myself), of limited and wide distribution (there's no 'region' that could be targeted), with a poor track record of profit for game releases.
Two ways to bring gaming to Linux are to (a) reduce costs (such as making smaller scale, indy-style games), or (b) waiting the Linux community grow to a size where potential profits outweight the potential costs (which could be caused by (A)).
Parent
Eagerly awaiting (Score:5, Insightful)
If only.
Cedega is a step in the right direction (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to be constantly rebooting back and forth between Ubuntu and Windows XP as I switched between playing games (XP) and doing everything else (Ubuntu). Thanks to Cedega, I can now spend almost all of my time in Linux, as Cedega emulates nearly everything I want to play, and does so with minimal problems. I'm just about ready to give Windows a kick to the face and abandon it permanently. In my case, thanks to Cedega, there's now one more almost-purely-linux gamer and one less Windows gamer. Now that I game under linux instead of in Windows, companies do have more incentive to make linux ports of their games.
Not practical or profitable to develop for Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
There are too many Linux distributions, none of which have a big enough of the Linux market to be considered the de facto standard Linux distribution to develop for and build a customer service department to support.
Game applications are the most strenous and sensitive to the capabilities of the platform. Windows is pretty standard with DirectX. On Linux you don't know what's going to work; the very philosophy of choice with Linux translates to everyone's machine is just different enough in a way that makes developing a game for Linux a real frustration.
Finally, once you manage to get things working on a couple distributions, a new release comes out that invalidates your existing application. And in another 6 months another release of Linux is going to come out and invalidate your work again. A developer has a hard time keeping his game working under one distribution from one version to the next. Now multiply that by 10-20 for the most popular Linux platforms each releasing new versions every 6 months.
Shipping source code to your customers and expecting them to build it every time they upgrade their machine or switch distributions isn't a solution.
Combine the constant, frequent changes that aren't guaranteed to be backwards compatible like the Windows platform provides with the sheer number of distributions of Linux you would have to support to make it worthwhile, and then consider that all this effort just to support one platform might translate to an extra 5% sales and you have your reason why game companies don't develop for Linux.
Linux is a great platform to develop for; it's a terrible platform to support. This is what's holding Linux back from becoming truly mainstream. It has nothing to do with features or hardware support or useability. If a company can't reasonably develop and SUPPORT their applications for a platform and expect a reasonable amount of sales while doing so then it's not worth doing it when you can simply focus on another platform (Windows) that is much easier to support and maintain and hits 90% of your whole market in the first place.
Re:Not practical or profitable to develop for Linu (Score:4, Informative)
There are too many Linux distributions, none of which have a big enough of the Linux market to be considered the de facto standard Linux distribution to develop for and build a customer service department to support.
I bought just about every port that Loki did and I didn't have any problems playing them on on any >= 2.4 kernal version SuSE, RedHat or Ubuntu. Instead of a customer service department, how about a good technical support forum? The Linux Standards Base is your friend.
Finally, once you manage to get things working on a couple distributions, a new release comes out that invalidates your existing application. And in another 6 months another release of Linux is going to come out and invalidate your work again. A developer has a hard time keeping his game working under one distribution from one version to the next. Now multiply that by 10-20 for the most popular Linux platforms each releasing new versions every 6 months.
See above. All my Loki games have worked since SuSE 6.4/RedHat 7.0. As a user space game programmer why should you care about kernal changes. Just code to SDL/OpenGL (Both are backwards compatible).
Game applications are the most strenous and sensitive to the capabilities of the platform. Windows is pretty standard with DirectX. On Linux you don't know what's going to work; the very philosophy of choice with Linux translates to everyone's machine is just different enough in a way that makes developing a game for Linux a real frustration.
Thats nonsense. Code for the lowest good versions of SDL and OpenGL. You will be suprised on how many different distributions of Linux it will run on.
Shipping source code to your customers and expecting them to build it every time they upgrade their machine or switch distributions isn't a solution.
I have purchased over 20 commercial Linux games, none came with source. Are you trolling? You have never purchased/installed a native Linux game yet your an authority on shipping source with a Linux game? I call bullshit.
I buy my Linux games from here: http://www.tuxgames.com/ [tuxgames.com] (No I'm not affilated with the site).
Check out the loki games from here, http://liflg.org/ [liflg.org], pay special attention on how the installer works. You can get the installer sources for free from here: http://www.lokigames.com/development/setup.php3 [lokigames.com]
As a Windows developer, you can always code your game/application to work with wine. http://www.winehq.com/ [winehq.com] It seems to work OK for Google http://earth.google.com/earth4.html [google.com].
Your post does disgrace Interplay, SirTech, MindScape, SSI, Origin and many other great gaming companies from the 80s/90s that did (Intel/Non-Intel CPUs/OSs) cross-platform games.
Enjoy.
Parent
Wine works better for me. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cedega is produced by scum (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, some time ago WINE was under BSD license, that permitted proprietary modifications. After WINE was forked to WineX, then renamed to Cedega and closed their source, the WINE developers changed the license to GPL so future "freeloaders" are not allowed.
Now Cedega are going backwards because they cannot use the new WINE code. While WINE is going forward in the compatibility for things like DX9, the rest of the APIs in Windows, all Cedega developers are doing is trying to make it compatible with the latest and greatest of the protection schemes for CDs like SafeCD and such... Good for games, but for how long?
Parent
Re:Cedega is produced by scum (Score:5, Informative)
They can actually, and do still. Only a month or two ago they took several dlls from vanilla Wine (they, of course, are still licensed under the LGPL, not the regular Cedega license).
Furthermore, Cedega is generally full of hacks to make specific games work, which is good in the short run, but bad in the long run. This is especially showing now, as in many ways, vanilla Wine has better D3D support than Cedega. Expect this gap to continue to widen as time passes. There may be a point where Cedega starts using vanilla Wine's D3D implementation too.
Parent
Re:think about this from the other side (Score:5, Insightful)
So it's not a technical problem, it's a matter of market forces and games developers only having a finite budget for porting.
When/if Sony release a development suit for Playstation 3 that can be made to run on Linux/PC, then we'll start to see titles made available for it. I don't think that's likely though, or if it is, it won't be Free Software.
Parent