John Carmack Pushes Wine For Linux Gaming

[johnc]

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

Yeah I agree with you. If it was something like Limbo where it was completely transparent and Linux was an official platform for the game, I'm in. But if it was along the lines of "Here's a Windows executable -- good luck boys!" (a la Rage), forget that.

[F i L]

Two words for you Carmack: Steam Box

If Valve wants to bring their distribution center to consoles (and other devices) they're going to need a solid OS with lots of support, and they're going to need to run their games natively. With Valve and Unity (and others) starting to push for Linux support, more games will be ported, and GPU driver vendors will have more incentive to support the platform more in-turn. Using Wine is perfectly fine. If it runs good, it runs good, but that's never going to be the case in all situations with Wine unless more support is given to the whole systems, so at that point it's better to just support thing more directly (natively).

Besides, porting to Linux isn't even hard to do. Even if you're engine is directly using Direct3D calls (which is big mistake in today's multi-platform environment), it's easy enough to wrap OpenGL calls up a neat little DirectX box as a drop-in replacement (same for the other APIs). With Steam on Linux and more major Game Engines gaining Linux support developers will starting see Linux as another real source of revenue.

[kokoko3k]

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

No CPU emulation, true, but converting Direct3d calls to Opengl requires Cpu work.

[johnc]

It is kind of interesting to see the almost completely divergent philosophies between Carmack and Gabe Newell.

Valve seems to be entirely resistant to Wine and even put out the effort to port over their older games like CS and HL. And Valve doesn't seem to view Linux as Just Another Platform but rather an important alternative to bring into the fold.

[mike4]

Doom 3 BFG runs perfectly native...silly that ID was to lazy to port it themselves! I've also Rage running fine in Wine but native is what we want.-

[liamdawe]

My thoughts on it as well: http://www.gamingonlinux.com/article...ne-gaming.1705 which comes from experience of actually using Wine to try to game.

[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!! 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...

[Goodolandy]

This Carmack fellow seems to have his head up his ass.

When it comes to technology, you can never accurately speculate how well something might do today based on the past. Technology advances quite quickly, just look at Linux and the video drivers. Around 3 years ago, I was unable to get Linux and my dual display ATI card to work properly. 1 year later everything worked and since then performance has continued to improve to where I don't use Windows anymore.

With regards to Wine, the only game that has ever worked for me with out much FPS loss is Sid Meiers Railroads. WoW has always been around 7fps and other games like L4D are completely unplayable. Lets also not forget how some companies, namely Blizzard, have banned players because they misinterrepted their playing through Wine as cheating.

[losinggeneration]

Clearly developers are going about this the wrong way. They should be writing for Linux and making Windows users use andLinux to run the games. Nobody would complain about that solution.

[tomato]

Improving Wine for Linux gaming seems like a better plan than lobbying individual game developers for native ports. Why the hate?

Hmm, where to begin? Maybe by asking the lead developer of OS/2 operating system from this small small software company called IBM?...

What? There's no lead developer of OS/2 operating system? Then maybe the lead for software compatibility with the Windows platform? He's not available too? Huh? There's no OS/2 development team at all?

Guess we won't be able to get a first hand reason why it's a Bad Idea.

There's hardly any compatibility between different Java virtual machines! Where the spec is open!