Posts Tagged ‘windows games’

In other Sim news…

Transgaming has released a new version of WineX. WineX allows you to run x86 windows games and programs on x86 Linux. It includes allmost full directx support (up to 7 including direct3d). What’s this got to do with The Sims you ask? Transgaming has their own, apparently optimized version, of The Sims that they bundle with this package that runs under WineX. Apparantely the commerical Windows version doesn’t. The cost of the gaming edition is $69 US which includes their Linux (Mandrake) distribution, installer and a copy of The Sims. I guess they’ll be supporting the expansion packs as time goes on. A little sad though since it means that if you want to run The Sims under Linux you have to buy their version (and perhaps their future versions of other Windows games). I’m not sure what optimizations they make or how they make them or what involvement Maxis had in all this. The concept of WineX was to allow you to run Windows programs under Linux so it would open up more software (including games) to people wanting to run that operating system. So if you go down this route, you’re stuck buying your “Windows” games from them (since they’re somewhat changed from the off the shelf Windows versions) and thus if you decide to go back to Windows as an operating system, you have a game that might not work with it. A little odd if you ask me. Anyways, one step closer to removing that mulit-boot that I have to do everytime I want to run Linux.

As a follow-up to yesterdays discussion and news about The Sims on Linux, I got an email from Gavriel State, TransGaming’s CEO and CTO. TransGaming provides a distribution of Linux to the masses that contains a modified version of some Open Source software called Wine (they call their solution WineX). Wine allows you to run Windows applications under Linux, much like you run Windows apps under VirtualPC on the Mac. TransGaming (a Canadian company) is providing this package to people that don’t want to get all techy with Linux and just install something with the click of a button as it were. From the website:



WineX includes a new implementation of the Microsoft DirectX® multimedia APIs, including Direct3D – the core graphics system most Windows games use for hardware accelerated 3D. This allows many Windows games to run straight out of the box, and in many cases without a significant performance penalty. We are able to achieve this by mapping hardware-accelerated DirectX calls to equivalent calls to Linux native APIs such as OpenGL, which are similarly accelerated.

The email he sent me asked a few details about my involvement with Maxis and The Sims and explained how they were packaging up The Sims with their latest release:



…Finally, as far as our use of Wine to port the game goes, we’ve structured things so that as far as the end user is concerned, they don’t even know that Wine is there. When they buy the Mandrake Linux gaming edition, they simply choose to install The Sims, and they get a nice icon on their desktop to launch the game. Couldn’t be simpler.

Personally I wouldn’t call it a port. You’re still running over another layer of emulation but sounds pretty good to me if you’re looking for an alternative to Windows but still want to play The Sims. You can get some more info about The Sims running on Linux here, which includes some screenshots of it running on their distribution using Mandrake. I’m not sure if Maxis will support a setup like this though so caveat emptor.

First I want to talk about CDX and the new license we’re embracing. Recently in New York they held the first ever Open Source conference. While Open Source in most peoples mind means Linux, it’s funny to see that for 2 solid weeks CDX, a Windows only product, is in the top 10 ranking out of over 500 Open Source projects. Open Source is for everyone and we all know the benefits. We will continue to provide that kind of service with CDX in providing you with the best possible development tools for writing Windows games.

Recently we’ve begun the move to make CDX a more robust and organized project. We’ll be releasing the ‘official’ 2.4 this week on the website and starting down the course to 3.0 available for early next year to coincide with the release of the new CDX book. This calls for some changes in the architecture, a rewrite of some portions of the library and unfortunately breaking some current apps. While we on the CDX team are going to try our best to maintain backward compatibility, in some cases this will be impossible to follow while moving forward with the library. So some compromises must be made.

Our development efforts will, as always, be available on a regular basis from CVS and the site so you’ll never be in the dark. Some things just might not work from one day to the next. This is why it will be vital for us to keep on top of the bugs via the bug tracker at SourceForge and for you to report anything not listed.

I thank you for your patience and we’re hoping the new year will bring some great new adventures with CDX.

-Bil