Cedega and Linux Games 422
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.
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?
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.
Speaking as a Game Marketer and Linux User... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Is there a market? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is there a market? (Score:1, Interesting)
The main reason you don't see more cross-platform games, though, I think has to do solely with upper management. They imagine a huge support pricetag for a small market. Loki showed that that's not really the case, but management is timid and easily frightened.
Re:Speaking as a Game Marketer and Linux User... (Score:3, Interesting)
You'll probably find Linux users will write their own installation script if you don't provide one and then there is no problem.
From the development point of view theres no disadvantage to using SDL over DX apart from maybe devs have more experience with the MS platform (it's a rare one that has no SDL experience though, its usually the first port of call).
Another way of looking at it is this, plan for portability even if you have no intention of a Linux release. It costs nothing more to write portable code if you plan correctly and you at least then have the option. Then if a million Linux users cry "this game is SDL please port it" then you can judge the market from there.
The problem is. (Score:2, Interesting)
PC games in general don't have the market they use to. I remember going into some place like Babbages or EB(now everything seems to be Gamestop) and they would have almost two full walls of games. Walk into any store now including Best Buy or Circuit City and the selection is smaller with the fact that PC games don't generate revenue like they did at one time.
So with the smaller interest there is commercially to develop games for PC I'm sure it is especially difficult to find a company that wants to port their games to Linux. I am puzzled why games like The Sims don't get ported to Linux with the sales they put up. Or did they port Sims and I didn't notice. Not that anyone is missing much.
Re:No games? (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Cedega 4 was cooler (Score:2, 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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:No games? (Score:4, Interesting)
CodeWeavers anyone? (Score:1, Interesting)
Putting linux gaming into a real perspective (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No games? (Score:2, Interesting)
Another game I liked was Savage. An excellent RTS/FPS combination that had a Linux port available. As I'm liable to do, I didn't play it for 12 months, then when I tried to logon, discovered I needed to update it to play and there was no update available for Linux, so I wasn't able to play it anymore. Last time I buy something from that company.
I'd really like to see games like Rome:Total War (or even the old Medieval Total War games), but they don't even work under Wine/Cedega, and there doesn't seem to be much chance of them working in the future.
Re:No games? (Score:3, Interesting)
* Quake 4
* Unreal Tournament 2004
We all know that Linux isn't a platform for gamers, but still there are a few games for GNU/Linux.
I don't happen to enjoy FPS as my favorite type of game. Doom 1 to 3, Quake 1 to 3 and several versions of Unreal, that's all the same game to me. Thank god games aren't limited to FPS...
Re:Cedega is a step in the right direction (Score:3, Interesting)
The existing Windows games out there are unlikely to ever be ported, and so there is Cedega. If Cedega drives more and more people to uninstall Windows from their desktop, the market for future games to be made native in Linux will be more attractive, which is what Linux gaming needs. This isn't a perfect world we live in, but there are some benefits to Cedega.
Please stop bringing up this rediculous point that has been made several times in this thread (maybe by you). OS/2 failed for dozens of reasons, most importantly because IBM is the worst company at marketing its products, EVAR (sic). Trivializing the failure of a multi-million dollar product in a multi-billion dollar market down to "Windows compatibility hurt it" is an exercise in revisionist history.
TransGaming Response (Score:3, Interesting)
In response to the comments on TransGaming's contributions to the Wine project, we began development of Cedega while Wine was still under a BSD-style license which fully allows the creation of proprietary derivatives. During the time before the Wine license was changed to the LGPL we contributed dozens of patches to the Wine project including key infrastructure for DirectDraw, DirectSound and DirectInput. The LGPL change made it more difficult for us to work closely with the WineHQ community, but nevertheless we continued to contribute code in areas such as DirectSound, OLE, COM, DCOM, the Wine IDL compiler, a 2D DIB rasterizer, and the WinInet APIs. We also made proposals for improving Wine performance through the use of a prototype shared memory WineServer. Those wishing to view our contributions can easily find them in a simple search of the wine-patches archives:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=wine-patches&w=2&
We continue to work with the Wine project, with Cedega incorporating several of the WineHQ DLLs under the LGPL license. Full source code to these DLLs is of course available from our website. We're also thinking carefully about how we can cooperate further in the future.
On the topic of ease of installation and use of Cedega, the TransGaming team has taken huge strides recently to make Linux gaming much easier. With the inclusion of the Game Disc Database (GDDB) using Cedega has never been easier. Simply insert a supported title in the drive and Cedega will detect the disc and use the optimal settings for both installation and game play. No more messing or tweaking with settings.
Is Cedega hurting Linux gaming development? This topic is hotly debated by armchair quarterbacks, however, as Linux gaming is our business, we have some pretty in-depth and intimate knowledge here. We have been talking to game publishers and developers for years and the fact is that most game publishers prefer to stick to the markets that they know and understand - standard console and PC projects. Working on other platforms would require not only a direct investment of resources, but also means fewer resources directed to traditional console or PC projects that the publishers already know how to make money on.
TransGaming works very hard to show publishers that exactly the opposite is true - that a vibrant gaming culture exists on Linux.
Unfortunately, the misconception that all Linux users believe that software should be free-as-in-beer makes many of the decision makers feel that even if they were to produce a Linux game it would simply be pirated rather than purchased. Fear of wide scale piracy plays a significant role in preventing quality commercial games from transitioning to Linux.
TransGaming is still pushing to prove the value of the Linux market and will continue to do so at every opportunity. Meanwhile we will continue our work to improve Cedega, to provide better support for more titles and to give customers the ability to play their favorite games on the platform of their choice.
Take care,
-Gav