Wine 1.6: This Year With These Interesting Features

[ryao]

<sarcasm>Kinda surprised that people tell free software projects what to do, rather than sit down and work on it themselves.</sarcasm>

Taunting aside, we're working on this. But we were told d3d10 is the ?ber-most-important thing in 2008. It's 2013 now, and DX10/11-only games are still the exception rather than the rule(Battlefield 3 is the most requested one among them).

Re Steam: We are aware of this.

WINE is a difficult project to approach as an outsider. There is very little in terms of documentation available to enable new people to start implementing missing APIs. There also is not much documentation available on how one could debug when things go wrong. It would help both things greatly if there were high level description of the source code intended to get developers up to speed. It could be similar to the ZFS source tour:

http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+zfs/source

Integration with DTrace could also help. DTrace would be useful both for understanding how the code works and for debugging issues.

Lastly, would Codeweavers implement support for DESTDIR in CrossOver's installer? That would make integration with Gentoo portage *MUCH* easier.

[Artemis3]

<sarcasm>Kinda surprised that people tell free software projects what to do, rather than sit down and work on it themselves.</sarcasm>

The alternative, of course, is to hire people to do the changes you need.

[stefandoesinger]

Kind of surprised to see that DirectX 10/11 isn't given a higher priority. With Windows XP extended support expiring in just over a year, I expect that soon we'll start to see many games dropping Windows XP compatibility and demanding DirectX 10+ to run.

<sarcasm>Kinda surprised that people tell free software projects what to do, rather than sit down and work on it themselves.</sarcasm>

Taunting aside, we're working on this. But we were told d3d10 is the ?ber-most-important thing in 2008. It's 2013 now, and DX10/11-only games are still the exception rather than the rule(Battlefield 3 is the most requested one among them).

Re Steam: We are aware of this.

[newwen]

Fwiw, CrossOver isn't called "CrossOver Office" since about 7 years. It has support for lots of games these days, and CodeWeavers employs 4 people working on games(including myself).

It would be nice if Steam and Codeweavers worked together to integrate Wine or CrossOver with Steam for Linux to enable working windows games without Linux ports (gold and platinum) to be able to be played right from Steam.

Most Steam users won't switch to other platforms because they already have purchased large game libraries that wouldn't be able to be played outside Windows, because let's be honest, those old games will never get ported to Linux.

It's my humble opinion that this would make a good business case for both Codeweavers and Valve. There should be someway to monetize that collaboration.

[boltronics]

Kind of surprised to see that DirectX 10/11 isn't given a higher priority. With Windows XP extended support expiring in just over a year, I expect that soon we'll start to see many games dropping Windows XP compatibility and demanding DirectX 10+ to run.

[stefandoesinger]

You know, this is all wonderful and great, but I really wish they could just get Adobe CS, 3ds Max, and those CAD programs working so more people could use Linux to work quickly without a VM like VMWare Player.

The reasoning behind not putting effort into these programs is that they have license costs that go into the thousands of Dollars, so buying an extra Windows license to run them doesn't really matter.

Furthermore, given the cost, users will want 100% of the application's functionality to work, not 95%, and making them work to that degree requires a *lot* of work.

Fwiw, CrossOver isn't called "CrossOver Office" since about 7 years. It has support for lots of games these days, and CodeWeavers employs 4 people working on games(including myself).

[scionicspectre]

Ah yes, that is true that Crossover Office is clearly not a gaming product. I suppose the WINE community (especially the Top 25 voted apps for compatibility) gave me a different impression. After all, MS Office 2010 works now, if memory serves me correctly.

[Hamish Wilson]

Of course, the primary use of WINE will probably always be videogames, so it's useless to hope they'll focus on corporate apps.

While I do not doubt that the userbase's primary use of WINE may be for games, I was under the impression CodeWeaver's primary focus was actually on corporate apps and that most of the upstream contribtions to WINE from independant contributors were from other companies wishing to run said apps.

[scionicspectre]

You know, this is all wonderful and great, but I really wish they could just get Adobe CS, 3ds Max, and those CAD programs working so more people could use Linux to work quickly without a VM like VMWare Player. Of course, the primary use of WINE will probably always be videogames, so it's useless to hope they'll focus on corporate apps.

I do long for the day when open source creative tools are accepted into work environments, as is currently happening with Blender, but it seems like it's a long way off- perhaps decades. Maybe those guys will port their apps to Linux in the coming years if Valve really helps us with popularizing it on production-grade machines. Gaming PCs are usually well above the minimum requirements for creative tools.

[e8hffff]

Seems like they are listening to complaints.