Wine 1.3.19 Improves Direct3D 9 Support

[yaji]

Alien Swarm and FEAR Combat stopped working. Mouse still warps. Thanks wine team, that sure IS an improvement.

[Bitiquinho]

If someone doesn't want crashes/regressions in a new release, he/she must use stable releases.....

[vertex2]

What's up with all the hating? Thanks to Wine I am able to play FUCKING PORTAL 2 on linux the day it's released. The only thing I need to do to play this unbelievably complex piece of software on my linux PC is to install a package that's only a few megabytes large. Isn't that a goddamn miracle? The task that Wine is trying to achieve is so unbelievably ambitious that the fact that they are at least partially succeeding deserves deep respect.

[NSLW]

It may be just me, but I see all these announcements that wine made improvements and bugs were fixed, and everytime I try it it's all the same old shit. What actual new games/programs now run perfectly that didn't before, if any at all? That's what I'd call an improvement, not something like "We fixed more MSXML stuff for the millionth time but everything using it is still broken".

PS: I may be a bit biased in my hate towards Wine because I dislike that it decides to create a bunch of context menu entries that I don't want and decides to associate notepad.exe with text files although I don't want that, and even after removing it, the chaos that it created in my desktop gets left behind. And on top of all that the programs that I wanted to run with it don't work.

To better understand what improvement means by their definition you should look at this link:

http://wiki.winehq.org/TodoList

As you can see there are goals and sometimes peoples associated with them. What you can see more is that this goals aren't application oriented but feature oriented. Now you may think that features they implement are useless because they don't make your application run better.

[schmidtbag]

Windows is a complicated operating system. To write the whole OS natively (including all the dependencies), you're talking upwards of 25 million lines of code, maybe more if you throw in all the backwards compat stuff.

No wonder wine has problems. If Microsoft needs that many million SLOCs to implement it natively, how many lines do you think wine will need to implement it in emulation by calling POSIX stuff in the background?

Wine *does* work for some applications, but to truly discover what apps a particular release enables, you have to test it.

yes that is true, but the majority of those codes have absolutely nothing to do with running a binary executable. the fact that wine can run as much as it does while being a fraction of the size of windows is amazing, but theres clearly something huge they're missing that is causing extravagant failures:
when you look at it in this way, windows 98 cannot run all windows xp, visa, or 7 programs. this is due to just simply missing code and features that future programs need. windows xp cannot run certain programs from windows 95, because it can't run 16 bit programs and the OS was heavily revised in comparison.
BUT, wine has compatibility for programs from windows 3.1 to windows 7, yet there are huge gaps of functionality problems. this isn't just simply missing or changed libraries, i feel there are entire pieces of things missing altogether, and the wine developers are coming up with alternatives. one of these things is directx. when you try to substitute an ENTIRE product that has been revised for literally over a decade, it is almost futile if you are to ever expect to compete.

wine has the ability to be a perfect windows alternative but they have GOT to stop re-writing everything. if theres legal problems, just simply don't include it, but give compatibilty.

[kokoko3k]

LOL. You have that, too?? I always thought having wine+notepad opening for txt files must be a freak accident on my system...

rm ~/.local/share/applications/wine-extension-*.desktop

...and then kbuildsyscoca4 (kde4) or just logout/login solves that.

[allquixotic]

Windows is a complicated operating system. To write the whole OS natively (including all the dependencies), you're talking upwards of 25 million lines of code, maybe more if you throw in all the backwards compat stuff.

No wonder wine has problems. If Microsoft needs that many million SLOCs to implement it natively, how many lines do you think wine will need to implement it in emulation by calling POSIX stuff in the background?

Wine *does* work for some applications, but to truly discover what apps a particular release enables, you have to test it.

[Shining Arcanine]

It may be just me, but I see all these announcements that wine made improvements and bugs were fixed, and everytime I try it it's all the same old shit. What actual new games/programs now run perfectly that didn't before, if any at all? That's what I'd call an improvement, not something like "We fixed more MSXML stuff for the millionth time but everything using it is still broken".

PS: I may be a bit biased in my hate towards Wine because I dislike that it decides to create a bunch of context menu entries that I don't want and decides to associate notepad.exe with text files although I don't want that, and even after removing it, the chaos that it created in my desktop gets left behind. And on top of all that the programs that I wanted to run with it don't work.

I guess it is a case of something like 50 net fixes being done, with something like 1 million more to do.

[not.sure]

.. I dislike that it decides to create a bunch of context menu entries that I don't want and decides to associate notepad.exe with text files although I don't want that,

LOL. You have that, too?? I always thought having wine+notepad opening for txt files must be a freak accident on my system...

[schmidtbag]

It may be just me, but I see all these announcements that wine made improvements and bugs were fixed, and everytime I try it it's all the same old shit. What actual new games/programs now run perfectly that didn't before, if any at all? That's what I'd call an improvement, not something like "We fixed more MSXML stuff for the millionth time but everything using it is still broken".

PS: I may be a bit biased in my hate towards Wine because I dislike that it decides to create a bunch of context menu entries that I don't want and decides to associate notepad.exe with text files although I don't want that, and even after removing it, the chaos that it created in my desktop gets left behind. And on top of all that the programs that I wanted to run with it don't work.

i see what you mean. i personally haven't used wine in maybe 2 years. i really wish they would stop working on direct3d and their fake directx and get the REAL thing working. if they continue creating a fake, open source renderer, they will ALWAYS be behind forever. if the real stuff works then that takes a heap of work off their hands, and helps narrow down probable causes of issues.

virtualization is great when it comes to non-3d software, but that isn't sufficient for everyone. i'd like to virtualize windows and run my games that way but virtual video drivers suck. i could virtualize linux but i prefer a dedicated machine and a reliable host.