Wine 1.3.32 Furthers The DIB Engine, BiDi

It's time for another bi-weekly development snapshot of Wine.

What's made it through Wine in the past two weeks to be part of the Wine 1.3.32 snapshot is BiDi text support in the multi-line edit control, support for pattern brushes in the DIB engine, numerous MSXML files, and improvements to the PostScript driver. There's also the usual "various bug fixes."

The DIB Engine is part of the display subsystem that serves as a flat frame-buffer driver to handle Device Independent Bitmaps. Windows applications draw to this via the GDI. The DIB engine has been maturing recently in Wine and the work on this display engine continues in the latest release. The DIB work is probably the only noteworthy item in this release unless you were previously affected by one of the now-fixed bugs.

There are some improvements in this release to Wine's Direct3D implementation (WineD3D), but nothing too exciting.

This week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit I also caught up with Scott Ritchie to discuss Wine. In terms of the Wine 1.4 release he suspects it will come around the time of the Ubuntu 12.04 release (April), but nothing official has been announced yet.

Ritchie mentions Direct3D 10/11 support won't be ready for the 1.4 release, the USB support is hit-or-miss, but the input / audio / DIB work has been progressing. Later this month in Vienna I should also be having some beers with CodeWeaver's Stefan Dösinger to discuss the Wine performance.

Find more details about the Wine 1.3.32 release on WineHQ.org.