John Carmack Pushes Wine For Linux Gaming

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Originally Posted by deanjo

It isn't even a case where MS would have to win in court. All they have to do is make it uncomfortable enough for the developers to drop off the project.

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Thankfully there's civilised world outside United Corporations of America.

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Originally Posted by bobwya

What a completely fail-tastic comment - from someone who should know what they are talking about!

I challenge Mr Carmack!! How to do you measure the popularity of your Linux ports - when you can't buy a Linux-only version of the games!! :confused::mad: It's a circular argument...

Wine will never replace native gaming...
1) It runs in user space - low FPS and frequent stuttering (read "pause") is unacceptable to any gamer
2) Instability - simply put games can crash Wine (my current experience with BMS, look at Crysis - needs a patch just to run)
2) To many modern games have sophisticated DRM/online checks that will never be fixed (e.g. Punkbuster, etc.)
3) Wine updates maybe a problem - but even more problematical can be updates to the games themselves!

Don't get me wrong I do my bit to support the Wine project... It's lovely to see games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. running on top of ARCH, etc. - but you need an order of magnitude faster system (i.e. at least 2 Nvidia GPU generations), than Windows 7 would need, just to run the games at the same FPS.

Has Mr Carmack actually spent any time using any FPS games on Wine?? Me thinks not...

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User space and low FPS, hmmm, nothing to do with it. If a game has native openGL then its fast, otherwise HLSL bytecode to GLSL translation cuts FPS to half. Still Wine's new llvm_shader_compiler will make it up, without the need for any Microsoft D3D libraries. For instabilities and random half a second freezes install a low latency kernel. No problems with updates Wine's or games. Even Ncsoft launcher, even Tera launcher works now with Wine_mono for 10+ Wine versions now, even if some bastards at WineDB say that doesn't work and they suggest Dotnet. As for various DRMs, yes that's the real problem, so drop DRMs.

The guy never expressed any appreciation towards GPL and Linux in particular. The only thing he is good at is coding for money, this is one of the primary reasons id stopped existing since Doom and after carrying undead spirit over to Quake for a few releases it apparently imploded altogether as Adrian, the last member of original id left. Carmack has acknowledged that he released all the engines only for other people to improve them and apparently the Wolfenstein iOS port is a proof of it. So don't get any false ideas, he is just one of many mercenary coders, and with only money as reasoning, it is nothing to wonder about he chooses easier paths to get money easier. Yeah, WINE. You probably expected a good comment from him, because you probably associate him with cutting edge thinking, but don't be surprised. I expected this actually to happen.

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Originally Posted by artivision

User space and low FPS, hmmm, nothing to do with it. If a game has native openGL then its fast, otherwise HLSL bytecode to GLSL translation cuts FPS to half. Still Wine's new llvm_shader_compiler will make it up, without the need for any Microsoft D3D libraries. For instabilities and random half a second freezes install a low latency kernel. No problems with updates Wine's or games. Even Ncsoft launcher, even Tera launcher works now with Wine_mono for 10+ Wine versions now, even if some bastards at WineDB say that doesn't work and they suggest Dotnet. As for various DRMs, yes that's the real problem, so drop DRMs.

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OpenGL is not expected as native at all. DirectX is expected - as lazy as it gets. Right, bring wrappers and emulators with half the performance as excuse, don't develop the local technology, just cut in a binary window. While this coming from you is usual state of things, that coming from a guy, who is talented and lives by challenges, is weird to say the least. Carmack failed.

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Originally Posted by totex71

wine takes up to much cpu power. if it runs native. it will run alot smoother than with wine.

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Read what you just wrote a few times and then, hopefully, you will start laughing and maybe facepalm yourself too. It will mean that you have been cured.

It will be great if they'd pour resources into it. There are many good games which don't work normally on Wine and have no native Linux ports. Example: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23863
So improving Wine is always welcome. But if they don't plan to contribute resources - there is no point in this "promotional talk".

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Originally Posted by shmerl

It will be great if they'd pour resources into it. There are many good games which don't work normally on Wine and have no native Linux ports. Example: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23863
So improving Wine is always welcome. But if they don't plan to contribute resources - there is no point in this "promotional talk".

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If "pouring resources" means original developers, than its incredibly wrong path.

Its like producing emergency tires instead of original tires. WINE is always meant as a solution to run things if native version is not available - exactly as an emergency tire. It is winapi clone, it is not a real thing.

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Originally Posted by artivision

U[..]Still Wine's new llvm_shader_compiler will make it up, without the need for any Microsoft D3D libraries.[..]

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What is llvm_shader_compiler? is that expected to improve d3d to gl performance?

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Originally Posted by Goodolandy

Lets also not forget how some companies, namely Blizzard, have banned players because they misinterrepted their playing through Wine as cheating.

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Actually this has yet to be proven. I play Diablo 3 only on my Ubuntu install with Crossover. No ban yet.

I just don't understand how he can suggest this, even if he's just interested in money. Actually selling something that uses wine, then you have to support that version as well. No trivial task. It's far from as simple as just saying "just buy the windows version, it should work under wine, we tested it".
In fact, I'm sure that a native port would be easier to support and I'm surprised that Carmack thinks differently.

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Carmack and others at id Software have expressed that it hasn't been too commercially viable bringing their games native to Linux. Now Carmack is promoting Wine for running Windows game binaries on Linux.

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Is he playing an idiot or something? Their ports were just nightmare compared to Windows releases. Furthermore, one could just patch Windows game to work on Linux and I bet most of the gamers chose this way. Thanks, but I won't ever buy game that uses wine, so no id for me.