John Carmack Pushes Wine For Linux Gaming

[schmidtbag]

I can see why he says this but he's acting like wine SHOULD be the only option. Wine is good for older but still desirable software that won't ever get ported. If linux only gets commercial content from wine, Linux will never gain traction and wine will remain unable to keep up. If things are ported directly, that becomes 1 less thing for wine devs to worry about.

Thanks to Valve, there seems to be a new commercial game released for Linux every other week, or at least being announced. Before steam it was more like once every half year. Bargaining for wine would help linux users run nearly anything they want but that's expecting wine will ever become a good enough replacement.

[nightmarex]

Wow, just wow. Yeah, if you're not going to bother porting it, make sure Wine handles it. If your going to do ports (as to Mac) just use open GL or a cross platform engine then a Linux port is trivial. If he is advocating never native port a game to Linux he needs to be quiet.

When android and Chrome OS take over I can't wait to see him to eat his words. Unbelievable coming from the head of ID. I just broke a copy of RTCW in disgust.

[johnc]

I probably wouldn't pay for software if it was wine-only. That's kind of silly.

[Micket]

That would need to be one hell of an improvement before it could replace native binaries. Legacy games, sure, but porting those is hardly what the majority is hoping for.

If a game is already using OpenGL, and they still think porting is to difficult, then i would very much like to know what part of their code which isn't cross-platform, and write a free library that covers this.
I bet its some trivial shit like WinAPI vs Posix, because that's pretty much the only thing I've ever had to deal with as a developer. It certainly isn't rocket science.


Edit: Hah, check out the tweet replies from the Unity developer .

[deanjo]

*sigh* Did it ever occur to him that if WINE gets to the point of being a real viable alternative for running windows programs that it will just line it up for MS's crosshairs. Remember the MS/Novell deal? WINE was specifically excluded from any type of patent protection.

(ii) Notwithstanding subsection (i) above, Wine, OpenXchange, StarOffice and OpenOffice are not subject to such subsection (i), however, the exclusion of such products from such subsection (i) is without implication as to (and shall not affect the determination of) whether such products (or any features or functionality thereof) are Clone Products.

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.

[Nevertime]

I probably wouldn't pay for software if it was wine-only. That's kind of silly.

Agreed. Why would I risk cash on something that wasn't properly supported in the hope I could play through start to finish.

It seems strange that his opinion on native linux ports switched the moment Linux gaming (and indeed cross platform gaming in general) seems to be taking off. Is he just sulking because he stopped being the sole big named game dev to push linux?

[staalmannen]

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

Running under wine _is_ basically running native. No CPU emulation or anything else. NT syscalls are caught by a userspace library, which probably is a bit slower. If you want the performance of running those syscalls in kernel space you should hope for the LUK* project to succeed (not heard much about them lately)


* http://www.longene.org/en/index.php

[ssam]

does the linux version of steam integrate with wine? (i know its possible to run the windows version of steam in wine).

games could be tagged as either having a native linux or port, or be known to work well in wine. steam could maybe take care of any per game tweaks needed to the wine configuration.

[talvik]

I probably wouldn't pay for software if it was wine-only. That's kind of silly.

If it is supported by the game company and comes with a embedded wine version, I'd pay.

[Krysto]

Well that's disappointing. He said being bought out won't change much how they operate, but it clearly does. In the past they've been pretty supportive of Linux, and now that's all gone, because all of the sudden they can just fly the "it doesn't make business sense" excuse in our face.