Les questions portent sur la société en elle-même, sur Wine, et surtout sur la licence utilisée par WineX, ainsi que sur des points techniques. On apprend également que TransGaming compte porter des jeux Windows sous Linux.
Aller plus loin
- L'interview sur GSD (3 clics)
- La news précédente (2 clics)
- TransGaming (4 clics)
- WineHQ (3 clics)
- MandrakeSoft (2 clics)
# S'il vous plait
Posté par kadreg . Évalué à -2.
[^] # Re: S'il vous plait
Posté par Christophe Fergeau . Évalué à 5.
Transgaming Interview
Julien Laffray sat down with Gavriel State, CEO of Transgaming, to chat about their product - WineX.
Sunday October 21, 2001 | SheepCow
<http://www.gamespydaily.com/screenshots/january01/tran/tran_big.jpg(...)
Click to enlarge
Current state of Gaming on Linux
Linux is a pretty good OS but it is still a young one, and not very mature on some points. Gaming is one of those points along the desktop. Of course, you can play several open source or free games which exist, but none of them has yet reached commercial quality, even some are getting pretty close to that goal (Tux Racer; Parsec) as they are gaining maturity. The other was to buy commercials game that were converted from Windows to Linux: companies like Loki and Tribsoft have specialized in those conversions. Unfortunately, those games were released a long time after the Windows version because of the time needed to do a full conversion. Usually, people would go and buy the Windows version.
Wine & WineX
However, a third possibility exists and it involved a piece of software called Wine . Wine (a recursive acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator) goal is to be able to run Windows programs under Linux by providing a Windows Layer to those applications. A certain number of games were able to work it like Half Life, but configuration was difficult, and getting the game to work was not an easy task, if it was working at all.
Besides, supporting games in Wine was not the priority of the development team; that's why Transgaming was created. They are working on WineX which is an implementation of DirectX under Linux using Wine.
WineX will allow current Windows game to work under Linux without modification. However, not every games are currently working, but game support should go increase rapidly as code is advancing.
The other side of that technology is to facilitate the port of Windows game to Linux using WineX. The major difference with what Loki is doing is that it doesn't require as much change to the code as you would need if you were completely porting the game. For example, Loki had to change the 3D api from Direct3D to OpenGL when porting Tribes 2. It took several months to do that. In comparison, the porting time to The Sims is just 8 weeks which is relatively short.
Transgaming
One of the specificity of Transgaming is also they envisioned their products. Code source is released with an aladdin free license, which allow free use of the code (it is hosted on sourceforge), but which prevents commercial use of it. Furthermore, they are launching a subscription based service, which will permit to obtain binaries for your distribution, access to technical support, and finally, to let you vote on which game, optimization should take place. However, the code will be released under the friendlier Wine license when the number of subscriber reach a certain number. This method called the Street performer protocol is touted by Transgaming as a way to take control over the development of the product, and a way to make money while leaving access to everybody to the work.
Currently, the following games are known to work with WineX: Sacrifice, American McGee's Alice, Baldur's Gate II.
While Winex will be used to play Windows game, Transgaming intends to work also on porting games to the Linux platform using the WineX library. In that optic, a partnership with MandrakeSoft and Electronic arts has been formed to create a Mandrake Linux Gaming edition which has The Sims included. The Sims , Electronic Arts' top seller has been converted to Linux using WineX, but also it went further the simple conversion : no less than 14 languages are present, music files are using Ogg Vorbis, the open source equivalent of MP3, and integration with different Web browser like Mozilla and Konqueror allows a seamless integration into the Linux environment.
This Linux Mandrake Gaming edition will be sold at $69.99 and will include 3 month subscriptions to Transgaming subscription service. As Winex has been especially optimized for NVidia drivers, this release should be pretty fast on NVidia video cards on Linux.
We can also trust Mandrake to create a nice installation process that will be smooth and easy. Most of the problems inherent to Wine installation and configuration will be probably gone using this specially tailored Linux distribution.
Conclusion
Overall, this is a good thing to Linux as more games are going to be playable. Currently, a good number of people are keeping a dual boot configuration because of games. As the products evolve, it will become a totally viable alternative to Windows in terms of gaming. It is arriving at an interesting time : Windows XP release with its new activation process. One of the controversy on Transgaming was that people were afraid that would kill the port of Windows game through game company like Loki. However, since Transgaming is using WineX as a library to port games natively, that point of view is not accurate anymore. Transgaming's adventure is worth looking at.
As soon as the Linux Mandrake Gaming edition has arrived, you will find a test of that distribution here.
Interview with Gavriel State, founder and CEO of Transgaming Technologies
Q: Your company Transgaming is introducing a new technology that will allow to run Windows designed games on Linux. Could you tell us more about it?
A: The downloadable WineX product that we're launching today allows Linux users to begin running their Windows games directly out of the box on their Linux systems. Once WineX is installed, users can purchase certain Windows games, take the CDs, install the product, and run it on Linux.
TransGaming's WineX is available via our new subscription services website. This site gives users a high bandwidth connection from which to download the software, access to regular updates, technical assistance with certain âofficially supported games, and finally, the right to vote to tell us which games or features our Engineering team should work on next. We feel it's very important for customers to understand how important they are in the process of creating the software. Democracy is a powerful force - we think that it can work to great effect in the community of our users.
Initially, TransGaming WineX will be able to run about half a dozen games well out of the box. These include hit titles such as Sacrifice, American McGee's Alice, Baldur's Gate II, and others. As time goes on, more and more games will run - and our compatibility level should grow exponentially, as work done on one game enables other games to run as well.
Q: Could you explain a little more specifically how it works?
A: TransGaming WineX is a derivative of the Wine project. It consists of two major components:
1) An alternative implementation of the core Win32 API used by all versions of Microsoft's operating systems from Windows 95 on up; and
2) A program loader that knows how to take EXEs and DLLs, load them into memory, and prepare the environment that they expect to see as they run.
TransGaming WineX adds specific functionality to several areas. First and foremost is an implementation of many of the DirectX APIs, including Direct3D - the core graphics system most Windows games use for hardware accelerated 3D. In addition to graphics and multimedia, there are many other subsystems that play a key role in smoothly running games out of the box - for example, the ability to run installers based on the popular InstallShield system. In order to get InstallShield working properly, we actually had to create a full implementation of Microsoft's DCOM in order to allow the different InstallShield pieces to communicate with one another.
Q: Many people consider Wine as an emulator (Note : Wine is a recursive acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator) and therefore think it is slow, buggy and unreliable. In reality, what can we expect ?
A: Traditionally, emulators are products that provide hardware level simulation of another physical CPU and/or associated graphics and sound hardware. Wine is by no means an emulator in this sense.
Wine can be more properly thought of as an alternate implementation of Windows, layered on top of the Linux kernel and other associated components. Wine is no more a Windows emulator than Linux is a UNIX emulator. In the past, some people had poor experiences with Wine. For the most part the problem has been one of configuration. Wine is a complicated system, and it allows you to do some pretty crazy things if you want to - specifically, letting you create a hybrid of Microsoft's Windows components intermixed with Wine. Our packaging of Wine solves this problem very simply: we allow each account on a Linux system to have its own virtual Windows C:\ drive, which is completely devoid of any 3rd party software until you run the installer program for your software. We do not running programs from a physical Windows partition, because that simply opens the door for unending problems.
Q: How is your product going to be distributed ? Are you going to use the license displayed on the website to get paid ?
A: The source code for our product is freely available on SourceForge under the Aladdin Free public License. This is a license originally created for the GhostScript project that restricts commercial redistribution of the code, but allows end users to see and play with it. TransGaming will be providing binary packages only to users who are subscribed to our support and voting service. Others may provide binary packages non commercially, but they will not be official releases, and we will not be providing any support for them.
Once we have reached our subscriber goals, we will be releasing the WineX code under the much more liberal Wine license, and we will continue releasing code that way if our subscription numbers meet our targets. Thus, by subscribing, our users not only get the features and services they want to see right now, but they also help to establish the commercial viability of the Street Performer Protocol, which will have profound implications for the future of the entire information economy.
The Street Performer Protocol is a fascinating new economic idea for dealing with the central dilemma of information goods: treat them as an ongoing performance work, rather than an out-and-out product. Stephen King has experimented with it recently with an on-line novel. We feel that the Linux community is a perfect market to start with in the software world.
Q: Are you going yourself (as a company) to port some Windows games ?
A: Absolutely. In addition to the new TransGaming service and support website, the other key things that we are announcing today are new partnerships with Electronic Arts, and with MandrakeSoft.
From Electronic Arts we have licensed one of the most popular games of the last 2 years - one that is still topping the charts today - Maxis' hit "The Sims".
With MandrakeSoft, we are collaborating to create the new âMandrake Linux Gaming Edition, which includes Mandrake Linux 8.1, The Sims for Linux, and a three month subscription to TransGaming's support services website.
We have brought The Sims to Linux in record time - just 8 weeks since we signed the license agreement. In those weeks, we have been tweaking and optimizing like mad, and have produced a totally polished Linux version of the product. We have implemented several Linux specific features, including the use of Ogg Vorbis as the music format of choice, web integration with popular Linux browsers such as Konqueror and Mozilla, and the ability to select between 14 available languages when installing or reconfiguring the game. Linux users span the entire globe, so localization features are especially important to us.
And once again, we've gotten this done in just 8 weeks. TransGaming has an extraordinarily talented engineering team working on this product, and I am incredibly proud to have been involved in leading their efforts.
Q: A lot of controversial has arisen since you announced your idea several months ago. Many fear that will hinder or worse stop development of Linux native games like Loki is doing. What do you think about it ?
A: I absolutely disagree. As you can see from the above, we ourselves are now also in the business of creating Linux optimized games which include Linux only features. For TransGaming, WineX is a tool that allows us to deliver licensed game far more quickly and efficiently then ever before. It also gives us the opportunity to provide Linux users with the ability to run games when a publisher is unwilling to license any Linux version of a game.
We've said it before, and I will say it again: we will not encourage our users to vote for games that other publishers have ported or are already porting.
One of the core strengths of the Linux community is diversity. We think that there is room in the market for a number of different approaches to the problem of bringing more games to the platform.
Q: I suppose that WineX will be using DRI with Mesa. How easy was it to convert D3D API calls into OPEN GL ones ?
A: It was quite difficult, but as I said above, TransGaming has a truly amazing engineering team. Without a doubt, they are the smartest people I have ever worked with in my career.
We actually had core Direct3D to OpenGL code up and running more than 10 months ago. That has taken the most time has been applying a clean new architecture that has allowed us to implement earlier incarnations of the Direct3D APIs, including version 6, which is used in several popular games, including The Sims.
We have also spent a fair bit of time tweaking our work for the popular NVidia GeForce based graphics cards. We actually provide fully accelerated Direct3D-style hardware transformation and lighting on NVidia cards, through the use of OpenGL extensions such as NV_Vertex_Array_Range2. Our driver even provides vertex buffer renaming, which allows programs to write data to the same geometry buffer over and over, rendering each time - but without waiting for the hardware to be done rendering even the first pass of geometry.
Thanks very much!
Related Links
<http://www.gamespydaily.com/images/dot_gray.gif>(...)
[^] # Re: S'il vous plait
Posté par kadreg . Évalué à -2.
[^] # Re: S'il vous plait
Posté par Anonyme . Évalué à -2.
[^] # Re: S'il vous plait
Posté par kadreg . Évalué à -1.
Mais je peux finalement les lire via un anomyser. Très bizarre, d'autant plus que ce proxy ne pose problème avec aucun site, et n'a pas de regles de filtrage.
# J'aime ces gens :)
Posté par Anonyme . Évalué à 10.
Je crois que c'est clair, c'est un vrai port de The Sims qui va sortir. Avec du Ogg Vorbis en prime, et tout et tout.
Je crois que je commence à aimer TransGaming :)
Et pis vu le temps incoryable qu'ils ont mis à porter The Sims, on va peut-être voir arriver des jeux assez rapidement, et des jeux bien faits en plus (enfin, ne nous réjouissons pas trop vite, peut-être que le port de The Sims ne sera pas à la hauteur des attentes...)
En tout cas, on peut pas dire qu'ils font pas des efforts :)
[^] # Re: J'aime ces gens :)
Posté par kadreg . Évalué à 5.
Ou peut etre que the sims a été très simple à porter, parcequ'il n'y a aucun truc spécial dans les manips graphiques/sonores dedans.
[^] # Re: J'aime ces gens :)
Posté par Netsabes . Évalué à 10.
- Star Trek: Away Team
- Operation Flashpoint
L'explication est selon Transfert que ça revient beaucoup moins cher (ils avancent le chiffre de 18 000 francs par titre pour avoir le droit d'utiliser le format MP3 dans un jeu, ce qui n'est pas donné, même s'il faut relativiser par rapport aux énormes chiffres que brassent les géants du jeu).
A noter aussi que Serious Sam 2 utilisera lui aussi le format Ogg Vorbis (cf le site officiel des développeurs : http://www.croteam.com/(...) ). Ils mettent d'ailleurs en avant le côté "patent-free" (pour les citer).
[^] # Re: J'aime ces gens :)
Posté par Anonyme . Évalué à 9.
http://www.mp3licensing.com(...)
et
http://www.transnationale.org/fiches/-1686450519.htm(...)
ça donne pas envie d'utiliser le mp3
[^] # Re: J'aime ces gens :)
Posté par LAurent ROUX . Évalué à -4.
[^] # Re: J'aime ces gens :)
Posté par imr . Évalué à 5.
Les sims étaient réputés pour marcher avec certaines versions de leur lib à condition de cracker le jeu sous dows d'abord. A cause de la protection Cd. Transgaming ayant licensié cette technologie ....
Les jeux récents qui marchaient: Sacrifice et American McGee Alice.
[^] # Re: J'aime ces gens :)
Posté par Julien Portalier . Évalué à 3.
A lire les posts, j'ai l'impression que personne ne connait, alors que c'est bien connu, enfin je trouve, bref, libwine c rien d'autre qu'une interface qui permet de recompiler + facilement un soft, seulement, on passe par pleins de libs intermédiaires.... Bref, je pense pas que ce soit vraiment super.
C + lent, c - bien, c + rapide qu'avec wine, mais c du natif camouflé, bref, un portage de porc. Je voudrais pas m'avancer, mais en gros, pourquoi feraient-il un vrai port (comme Loki le fait lui au moins), plutôt que d'utiliser leur lib ?! De toute façon de nos jours tout le monde à un athlon 1Ghz, au moins... vous avez moins ? bah... tant pis, achetez du nouveau matos...
Moi ça va plutôt être, je vais aller acheter un jeu chez Loki ! Mais c vrai que s'ils pouvaient avoir le port d'un bon gros jeu type Fallout ou Planescape Torment (pas du jdr portemonstretrésor à la baldur's gate kwa) ou un bon alone in the dark... et pas que du FPS...
# Du nouveau
Posté par jojolapin . Évalué à 2.
Le problème semble être la technologie employée:si j'ai bien compris, winex transforme les appels directx en appels opengl. Je suppose que sous windows, les drivers doivent supporter les appels directx directement, non ? Si c'est le cas, quel sera l'impact sur les performances sous linux ? Si cela signifie qu'il faut qu'on attende que nvidia and co implémentent directx en natif dans les drivers linux pour avoir de bonnes perfs, c'est plutôt un mauvais point, car MS ne laissera jamais se faire une telle chose...
[^] # Re: Du nouveau
Posté par Thomas RIBO . Évalué à 0.
De toute façon, NVidia ne pourra pas proposer d'implémentation de DirectX. A l'extreme limite, ils pourront proposer un driver D3D pour Linux, mais je ne vois pas trop l'intéret : DirectX n'existe pas sous Linux, donc... :-(
# Linux est mort...
Posté par Anonyme . Évalué à -2.
Fini les portage, que de l'emulation. Finit OpenGL, Fini SDL. Tout en Direct 3D.
Dans un an faudra tout recommencer.
Vers quel OS doit on se tourner maintenant ?
[^] # Re: Linux est mort...
Posté par Anonyme . Évalué à -1.
Ce n'est pas pour rien qu'il n'y a pas mal de news BSD ces dernier temps, Fabien prépare la reconversion!
Je suis un lâche je poste en anonyme, mais c'est un coup à se retrouver à -50 ;)
# En dehors de tout débat ...
Posté par imr . Évalué à 3.
EA est une société que je déteste pour leur façon de faire du bizzness, mais pour les sims je dois avouer qu'ils ont fait trés fort.
Merci mossieur mandrake et transgaming de la part d'une petite fille.
[^] # Re: En dehors de tout débat ...
Posté par Thomas RIBO . Évalué à 3.
Il parait que ce jeu se vend mieux que tous les autres, surtout aux EU. Comme quoi, seuls les bons sont piratés, les mauvais jeux ne sont meme pas crakés... =)
[^] # Re: En dehors de tout débat ...
Posté par imr . Évalué à 3.
Quake3 elle aime pas du tout par contre, pas à cause de la violence, à cause de la laideur des personnages.
[^] # Re:
Posté par Anonyme . Évalué à 4.
> cause de la violence, à cause de la laideur des
> personnages.
amusant ^^
"Cela m'a pris du temps de trouver les models adequats (il a fallut que je modele moi-meme GrosNounours), mais je suis fier que mon gamin ait été elevé dès son plus jeune age au FPS. Cette emotion que j'ai ressentie lorsqu'il a reussit son premier instaGib au rail gun, sera toujours dans ma memoire.
Et maintenant il nettoie une arène à l'electro-gant sans même se faire toucher, quel talent !"
k`
-1
# Et pour les Non Mandrakeux ?
Posté par Anonyme . Évalué à 1.
[^] # Re:la liste actuelle
Posté par imr . Évalué à 5.
va sur leur site, fais download puis sources tu auras les liens.
la liste actuelle des jeux pour lesquels ils ont infos ou votes:
http://www.transgaming.com/dosearch.php?keywords=&search=Search(...)
ils disent que baldur's gate II marche parfaitement, il est de la famille à ... ???
[^] # Re: Re:la liste actuelle
Posté par Julien Portalier . Évalué à 4.
# Et Loki ?
Posté par Gaël . Évalué à 1.
Le truc, c'est que la majorité des types qui utilisent Linux aime le free software, parceque même si libre != gratuit, libre==pas cher quand même; plutôt que parcequ'ils approuvent les implications économico-idéologique du logiciel libre.
Ou même s'ils les approuvent, le coté pas cher leur plait aussi beaucoup.
Tandis que ceux qui ont du pognon à claquer dans des jeux vidéos, en général, ils ont moins ces problèmes.
Moi, par exemple, je joue pas, ou plutôt je ne joue plusà des jeux vidéos depuis au moins 3 ans. Peut-être que Morrowind, quand il sortira et que j'aurais assez d'argent pour me prendre une machine pour faire tourner cette grosse bête me fera revenir aux jeux, mais en attendant...
Pourquoi des jeux ? Quand j'ai du temps à perdre, j'ai Internet, sinon y'a la programmation et la saisie de donnée. Pour tout ça, Linux est largement suffisant, et même bien mieux que Windows, alors...
D'ailleurs, c'est p't'être pour ça que Loki est malade ?
# Fully hardware accelerated ....
Posté par Anonyme . Évalué à 0.
Ayant testé wineX il y a 2 semaines, je peux dire que Starcraft se bloque au menu, et Half-Life à l'install. Aucune trace donc du moindre triangle hypra-méga-multi-texturé.
J'aimerais bien savoir si pour leur partenariat avec Mandrake, ils fourniront une liste des jeux qui fonctionnent d'ici 2 semaines.
Suivre le flux des commentaires
Note : les commentaires appartiennent à celles et ceux qui les ont postés. Nous n’en sommes pas responsables.