John Carmack Pushes Wine For Linux Gaming

[shmerl]

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.

It means what it means - fixing bugs and making it better. He's calling on it - let him contribute. Whether you think it's wrong or not wrong, Wine enables using many Windows only games for Linux and improving it always helps. Fixing and improving Wine is not synonymous with using Wine as a primary tool instead of creating Linux ports for a game in development. If he calls for the later - I don't agree. If he calls for the former - that is welcome. And for developers who are too entrenched in Windows only mode, checking that their games at least work well with Wine is also a good thing. It's better then just saying "we don't support Linux so forget it".

[log0]

Oh, Mr Carmack should stick with the consoles I guess.

Porting a game to linux... Why not write it portable in the first place? There are enough libs out there to deal with the OS bits, duh.

PS: Loved the comment by one of the Unity guys, inviting Carmack to try Unity, lol.

[staalmannen]

BTW have there been any Windows vs Wine vs native Linux Phoronix benchmarks performed?

I know that there are some windows-vs-linux benchmarks, but it would be interesting to see what the performance hit actually would be and in what areas (does the Wine tests run significantly worse than the native Linux ones?)

[artivision]

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

D3D is a shader compiler, openGL the same, CG the same. It compiles programs(shaders) to a form that a computer(GPU) can understand. Its useful because there are many different computers and you cant write code just for one. The target and optimized libraries that are required to target a specific hardware are inside a GPU driver (the same is true for OpenGL compilers). The bad thing is that wile with a new CPU they give as those libraries(BDver for example) for GCC, for a GPU they don't give the analogous MESA parts. That is happening because they don't want MESA to grow, because then other companies will come and break their monopoly (software is half the GPU). Those two evil companies (ATI_AMD and NVIDIA) instead of using only OpenGL, they co develop with Microsoft DirectX, the closed all games under Windows and they are privileged by this deal (to be the only ones for long time). Also they did attack open pc closing games under consoles, that's another crime and not for money (the profits are better if you sell more cards and more expensive cards for pc). Now as for Wine the situation is simple: Except from the compilers there is also the rasterizer inside a GPU driver. Even if we can run D3D libraries on Wine we don't have the D3D rasterizer with the Linux GPU drivers, so we need to translate and loss FPS. Some times with an Nvidia card only we can set this translation off (GLSL=disabled), that uses the old and not efficient compiler and gains some FPS. In order to solve those problems Wine started an llvm_hlsl_shader_compiler, that uses the efficient llvm to compile HLSL very close to GLSL efficiently so the translation becomes very fast. When they succeed we will no longer need D3D libraries ether.

[0xBADCODE]

Running game under wine is not an achievement of company who made this game. Therefore they're not really worthy getting any bucks from Linux users IMHO. It's a FAIL dear Carmack. It's not port at all, it's a cheap hack to run windows game. It can't be called "Linux support" anyhow. Fortunately it looks like Carmack got some serious competitors who got it right.

[blackiwid]

Lol, so Rage was the first Title without a linux-binary, so what title got worst press in was most hated since id software makes software? Right Rage.

Yes you can say that this is only a correlation but no direct cause for that. But think about it, the title they released before Wolfenstein (ok they only co-produced it but still) did sell better and got better critics even the engine was extremly old.

So they saw what happens if you target with a game pc and console totaly comercial disaster, but now they focus on how less money they made with linux. at least the less income from the linux-version did not hurt their windows-pc sales like the broken shit they released because they wanted it to run on pc and konsoles...

so go further id soft is dead in my eyes, lets see how valve teaches id soft how companies that know what they do can make money with linux. I will not idealis here valve they are a company and they bring drm to linux, but at least they dont wine because they are to bad to make money with linux, that linux or the users of linux or something else but their self are guilty when they dont make money.

Back to rage, yes it was shurly not the main reason why rage did flop so hard because of the missing linux support, but it was always a good advertisment for id soft for many hardcore people that they support linux. So it could have made a difference...

[Kano]

Rage is an opengl game, wine does not change opengl calls so it runs very fast when the gfx driver is correctly working. Well fglrx has problems...

[Tiger_Coder]

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.

Yah, and Limbo run just fine without any sound problem with their binary driver right? Also last time I check you can't bye it for Linux from their website. Also they are the moron who don't port their steam version to linux steam. All they did was to bring it to Humble Bundle quickly using wine so they don't have to port it to linux. Now that bundle is finished, so is their linux effort. Never support this kind of morons.

[smitty3268]

Yah, and Limbo run just fine without any sound problem with their binary driver right? Also last time I check you can't bye it for Linux from their website. Also they are the moron who don't port their steam version to linux steam. All they did was to bring it to Humble Bundle quickly using wine so they don't have to port it to linux. Now that bundle is finished, so is their linux effort. Never support this kind of morons.

Well, i think it ran just as well as most of the Humble Bundle games. That's more an indictment of the level of work being put into those bundles, than of WINE itself.

[x616e]

This guys response does not sound at all like any rational computer scientist.
How would anyone expect someone to pay full price for a sub standard version?
Sure if they reduced the price to 10% whatever, but paying the same as people with full native ports when the company has done nothing and just leeches off WINE.

I smell shenanigans, looks like Carmacks twitter account was also part of the sale and is now in the hands of zenimax lawyers and bean counters.