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  • CrossOver Games Coming Out Tuesday

    I forgot to mention this earlier, but CodeWeavers is releasing CrossOver Games this coming Tuesday. March 25, 2008.
    Michael Larabel
    https://www.michaellarabel.com/

  • #2
    Good it's about time someone put cedega out of it's misery.

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    • #3
      Hmm... Codeweavers is drawing up battle lines. I wish both of them focused more on porting than this crap.

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      • #4
        Though I would rather have efforts focusing on ports, the fact that there is a third line for getting games that already have been released for Windows and have them working on Linux and other i386 Unix systems, is actually a good thing. However, just like ninendowarrior it would be much better to have actual ports.

        I, however, understand the many impediments in the way of ports, and for starters if the parent company of a given product doesn't see a profit or potential market, they won't enable any other potential porter company to do it. In the mean time "compatibility layers and API wrapper code" will have to do.

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        • #5
          I do wonder at the development cost of building a devel library package that would accept the Windows game code as is and compile it under Linux. Perhaps the reality of it still has some port coding overhead, but I'd like to see something like this under GPL and have any game company just pick up the library and recompile.

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          • #6
            It'd be cool to have a program or plugin of sorts for "translating" code. Specifically it would be most useful if such a tool could translate DirectX code into SDL code. Problem is that automating such a task induces a lot of problems in itself, and the tool would have to deal with a lot of different coding styles, mistakes, and hacks, that alone makes such a tool almost impossible to write, because even if the DirectX functions, classes, objects and other API features are standard, it is the particular context in which these are used within an application's code that render automated translation almost useless. The best approach would be to actually write from scratch the applications with portability in mind, which thanks in part to the success made from some Linux distros and (some may say mostly) Apple's inroads into the market share, portable code may actually have become a priority for companies.

            I for one would love to see more companies use platform agnostic tools and libraries such as SDL, many commercial Linux games use it, and some don't, and SDL can even be used with DirectX and OpenAL (I'd almost say that's an ideal solution to deal with DirectX and OpenAL in Vista, in the absence of DirectSound), and could make things much easier for porters to focus on areas that don't have a native counterpart, like graphics with Direct3D and OpenGL, where translation from DirectX through SDL could be easier to do to OpenGL through SDL. I don't know of any commercial application or game that uses SDL on Windows or Mac. I'm not saying there aren't. Not even Blizzard (for which the founder and headmaster of SDL works for) uses it for their projects (that I know of, at least). I'd sure like to see more support for SDL from game developers.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by niniendowarrior View Post
              I do wonder at the development cost of building a devel library package that would accept the Windows game code as is and compile it under Linux. Perhaps the reality of it still has some port coding overhead, but I'd like to see something like this under GPL and have any game company just pick up the library and recompile.
              You mean like winelib?

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              • #8
                Originally posted by deanjo View Post
                You mean like winelib?

                http://www.winehq.org/site/winelib
                Heh... If it were just that simple, we'd be using it for pretty much everything and have a lot more titles out than we do out of LGP, RuneSoft, etc.

                You have to replicate ALL the bugs for that to work that way- and even with 1.0, we really don't have that yet. May never have it. It's also worth noting that some of those bugs aren't in the ABI for Windows, but in VC++ which they use. It allows very, very attrocious things to be compiled and mostly work. Doing a winelib wrapper doesn't fix that or fix that you're binding against a Windows-centric view of everything. It's why WordPerfect for Linux isn't still selling. They used Winelib for the later on version of the product- and it sucked bigtime, as much for the bad code as the clunky result from using Winelib.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by deanjo View Post
                  You mean like winelib?

                  http://www.winehq.org/site/winelib
                  Sort of. But I'm not happy with winelib. I just don't see it ever being anything substantial. Those guys are too busy trying to emulate Windows.

                  I just think the focal point should be on the api that developers use, not reimplementing Win32 API. It was just an idea anyway.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Svartalf View Post
                    Heh... If it were just that simple, we'd be using it for pretty much everything and have a lot more titles out than we do out of LGP, RuneSoft, etc.

                    You have to replicate ALL the bugs for that to work that way- and even with 1.0, we really don't have that yet. May never have it. It's also worth noting that some of those bugs aren't in the ABI for Windows, but in VC++ which they use. It allows very, very attrocious things to be compiled and mostly work. Doing a winelib wrapper doesn't fix that or fix that you're binding against a Windows-centric view of everything. It's why WordPerfect for Linux isn't still selling. They used Winelib for the later on version of the product- and it sucked bigtime, as much for the bad code as the clunky result from using Winelib.
                    Good point. I don't necessarily think about entirely reimplementing things. It's more like a wrapper api for something else. Perhaps reroute to QT/GTK and some to SDL and so on and so forth. But anyhow, it's never straight forward. Benefit-wise, I don't know how useful it would be, but it did sound like a good idea.

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