Transgaming has announced Cider, their WINE-based gaming virtualization for Intel Macs. This is similar to their previous Cedega software, which served as a way to play Windows games on Linux.
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Since this is developer based this is actually much better. It allows game developers to very easily port their games without doing as much work. So the end user doesn't have to do anything special. If this catches on, they might be able to make it one small step more to get this working on Linux as well. Which would be pretty cool
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as i said in a previous post, linux's greatest stregnth AND weakness is choice
you cant even guarentee a distro will come with ATI nor Nvidea 3d drivers. Does your distro use XFree86? XOrg? and so on. For this to be commercially viable on the linux platform i think you would need some kind of standardisation, at least between the major distros (Ubuntu, SUSE and Redhat)
although having said this, dont get me wrong, if they make this feasible on linux it would be a HUGH boost
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You really just don't understand, do you? We are no longer living in 1996, you don't have to write specific code for the individual capabilites of every different 3D accelerator card that you wish your game to leverage, there are these things called APIs, DirectX and OpenGL spring to mind.
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The same exact problem exists in Windows. Are they going to have ATI's driver installed? NVIDIA's driver? SP1? SP2? No SP? Microsoft needs some sort of standardization, there can't be all this choice of hardware and software! Everyone should adapt the Apple way. Or maybe even there, there is too much choice. I mean, there you have entirely different CPU architectures, Intel or Apple mac? And what about all the different versions of OS X, many of which are incompatible with each other?
Don't get me wrong, but there is a million combinations on every different OS. Standardizing on one thing isn't going to work anywhere. Things change over time. They just have to choose one path and adapt, make it work. Other companies like nvidia have made it work, VMware made it work, hell even Real made it work.
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Do Apple users still expect quality and value for money, ok, well maybe not value for money then, as this may be a good opportunity for Transgaming to realise that they can't continue to produce such poor quality products and expect to get paid. Unfortunately with codeweavers it looks like a lot more thought and effort is going into the OSX edition than we've ever seen in the Linux versions and whether that will translate back into improvements for us linux users i'm not sure, the codeweavers version of wine is excellent it's just let down by the GUI tools. With cedega, on the other hand, it's not just the GUI that needs work, transgaming's implementation of wine is pretty buggy, doesn't provide good results in many situations even with the simplest of games and has a peculiar subsciption system rather than any option to simply purchase the product. Oh, and don't think you're getting a free demo, no way, you might discover how bad the product is and decide not to buy it!
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Of course, because using TCL/TK for your GUI ensures that it fits better than using either GTK or Qt...
The main reason is that they feel the current linux gui is adequate, i'm sure it would be trivial to produce one using a modern toolkit for better desktop integration but maybe they just don't feel it's worth it. On the mac side, of course, there's a lot of money to be had if they can deliver a polished product, simple as that.
Don't get me wrong, i really like CW but even Cedega has a GTK GUI, granted not necessarily a good one, it's like trying to sell users of windows XP a piece of software which uses a custom toolkit that not only doesn't respect their themeing preferences but is also extremely ugly and behaves completely unlike a win32 application.
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you cant even guarentee a distro will come with ATI nor Nvidea 3d drivers. Does your distro use XFree86? XOrg? and so on.
That really doesn't matter.
For example games would be using OpenGL and require a certain version and that it is hardware accelerated.
Doesn't matter if that is achived by a nVidia or ATI driver/chip or an Intel driver/chip or whatever other combination.
That's the reason we have APIs, so developers do not have to care about the actual implementation.
This is no different than on any other platform, or have you seen any Windows game requiring a specific hardware rather than DirectX $version compatible?
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It depends what the game in question is trying to do and are we talking about directX on linux with cedega here of directX without 3D acceletation on windows? On linux it would, i should imagine, just use Mesa and software OpenGL, on windows it's dependant upon what you're asking the game to do, if the hardware doesn't support shader operations it may not run at all.
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Sigh. I really don't know how they keep going. If they produced a nicely packaged working product with some really good graphical tools I think most Linux, and Mac, users would jump at it and they would be a fairly well off company. I really don't know what they're doing.
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how well does directx work on a system without the graphics drivers installed?
I guess it won't work, however I have never seen a game which uses DirectX but does not have it listed as a requirement.
it requires more than just a card plugged in to use the api effectively...
True, that's why I wrote they will require a certain version of the API and that it is hardware accelerated.
It doesn't matter which card/driver combination fullfills that requirement,
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2006-06-25
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There really is no surprise here in the responses from the community.
The Mac users came out and sort of gave a quiet cheer before spouting some downside to other operating systems and why everyone should "adapt the Apple way."
Then all the current Cedega users came and bashed it because it still doesn't work 100% on Linux so why should they have to share dev time with the Mac community! (oh how life is cruel)
The truth is that this software is a library that games are compiled against. Not dynamically as the game runs. It does not work like Cedega/Wine, which translates DirectX and Win32 API Calls into relevant Linux/OpenGL system calls. This software/library is used by the developers at compile time. There is no Cedega/Wine software installed on the users system and the user should never see it (except a Cider logo on the splash screen). This method provides a little more than Cedega ever could simply because developers will compile the software against this crossover library and test the game before they ship it, instead of TransGaming having to build support for and test each game against Cedega.
Once this library is setup and working, it will take nothing at all for the library to be crossed over to Linux (Linux and Mac are both POSIX compliant OS's). The main reason I see them developing this on Mac instead of on Linux is that they can guage their feedback better because Macs only have a few configurations. That doesn't mean that linux is too eclectic and will never get a compatible version of this library, it just means that it wont get the first version.
Stop whinning, this is some really great news for non-windows gamers (linux and mac alike).
