Wine support

I've recently ditched Windows and have been playing some of my games in Wine, some work, some don't.

It would be really nice if you guys offered some kind of minimal support for Wine, like maybe swapping the built-in browser for WebKit so that we can browse the store without having a complete Internet Explorer implementation, and possibly linking to winehq.org so people can check to see if a game will be supported before buying it.

I'm not sure about the current state of Darwine, but it's only getting better as time goes along. In a year or so I'm guessing that most games will work in Wine without any tinkering. I'm not asking you to do loads of testing on Linux and Macs or provide any assurances that games will work, just the bare minimum by keeping us in mind and acknowledging that Wine is a viable alternative to Windows.

Also, my main system is Linux now and I don't see this changing in the future.. I won't buy any future games that aren't working in Wine, but as a hacker I may make the effort to help support the existing ones I own.

[Master_Odin]

Would love to see this implemented even though I'm more of a CrossOver user than a WINE user.

[Numerous]

/signed.
Definitely, it would mean that the mac would be a somewhat viable gaming platform. It would be more of an issue of getting WINE to support all the games, seeig as how there are so many of them, and Valve can't control all of them.

[Master_Odin]

Originally Posted by Numerous

/signed.
Definitely, it would mean that the mac would be a somewhat viable gaming platform. It would be more of an issue of getting WINE to support all the games, seeig as how there are so many of them, and Valve can't control all of them.

While the games themselves would have to be either:
a) supported by the developers themselves (unlikely)
b) the current volunteer community (what's already going on),

VALVe, could though make it better for their system to work better natively on Linux by changing such things as their browser system to use WebKit and be (like I said) Linux compatible instead of forcing for tedious work-arounds.

[L.o.D.]

There are a reason why this won't happen anytime soon.
1: Steam is strictly a windows platform. Until linux etc catches up to windows in the operating system market, there won't be a steam that supports it.
And because of that, you won't see support at this time.

Originally Posted by L.o.D.

There are a reason why this won't happen anytime soon.
1: Steam is strictly a windows platform. Until linux etc catches up to windows in the operating system market, there won't be a steam that supports it.
And because of that, you won't see support at this time.

I can play all source engine games at almost the same efficiency as in windows. the problem is that steam takes up all of my first processor constantly. when it's a matter of doing a relatively small code change in exchange for supporting EVERY OTHER X86 OS (at least when playing l4d/hl2/gmod/css/etc...) I think it's worth there while to simply do the code changes. hell simply making it wine compatible would be good enough, you can use almost all the same code just switch out your weird esoteric libraries.

the only thing keeping me from playing most steam games in linux is steams poor compatibility.

for anybody who's interested there's a petition here and you can vote for wine to support it better here

[Puggsy]

really? LOL

If you want to do gaming.. use a gaming platform.
You're trying to cross breeds, and it doesn't really work.

You might as well substitute a baseballbat with a tennis racket.

Originally Posted by Puggsy

really? LOL

If you want to do gaming.. use a gaming platform.
You're trying to cross breeds, and it doesn't really work.

You might as well substitute a baseballbat with a tennis racket.

you mean like a console? your a pc gamer and you complaining that somebody else want's to use odd software. you might as well say "use ati? just get an nvidia card, it will solve your problem" or "use an emulator? just get an nes" if you going to try to eliminate choice you might as well just get a console.

it does evidently work as seen here, wine actually gets better speed with some types of rendering, that will only improve.

[amnesiasoft]

Last I checked, Wine doesn't reimplement Trident, it just hammers Gecko into its place.

Originally Posted by amnesiasoft

Last I checked, Wine doesn't reimplement Trident, it just hammers Gecko into its place.

that's, uhh, true... steam is good at webdev though so all it's pages follow web standards pretty well. it really doesn't matter what rendering engine it uses. I'm not sure why using firefox's rendering engine instead of microsofts is bad...

[amnesiasoft]

WEll, the original post was saying something about "using webkit instead" so he didn't need a full internet explorer implementation, which really, doesn't make any sense since I was apparently right.

ahh I see, the only problems I'm having with it is high cpu usage but I heard some people were having problems with store and community pages.

Just played HL2 to completion again in Wine 1.1.29, works perfectly.
Portal: seems to work too, a bit slow though. I didn't play it all the way through.
TF2: Crashes on game start.

If the other HL2 games work, then the Orange Box could still be a viable purchase for Linux users. I'll test them soon.

Other games:
Multiwinia: Works a charm, didn't play a network game though.
Project Snowblind: Need to turn off DoF and put a registry hack in to fix the mouse cursor to the screen centre, don't move the mouse when starting the game or it will crash. Other than all this, it is playable.
Blue shift: hangs while starting server, could be due to firewall settings.
GTA1: Ugly crash
Uplink, Darwinia: Fail to start

[srg_13]

Originally Posted by binlargin

Just played HL2 to completion again in Wine 1.1.29, works perfectly.
Portal: seems to work too, a bit slow though. I didn't play it all the way through.
TF2: Crashes on game start.

I've had the same experience here - played through HL2 and most of Portal, but TF2 is really slow...

Originally Posted by srg_13

I've had the same experience here - played through HL2 and most of Portal, but TF2 is really slow...

I've seen people saying they get a 100% speed boost by disabling shaders and using DirectX 8 on the command line, but I don't even get that far, the game crashes with some sound error at startup.

Originally Posted by amnesiasoft

WEll, the original post was saying something about "using webkit instead" so he didn't need a full internet explorer implementation, which really, doesn't make any sense since I was apparently right.

HTML rendering isn't the issue, it's that Steam uses some IE specific things. You can't scroll, navigate or search let alone buy anything from the store, these are prerequisites for new users who don't have games in their account. If Steam used a non-Windows specific browser we wouldn't have the problem of needing a full implementation of the IE ActiveX control.

Originally Posted by Pugsy

You might as well substitute a baseballbat with a tennis racket.

I see you trollan, I'm biting. I use a computer, I won't go back to a speak-n-spell just because it can play more games.