http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5955
------- Additional Comments From stefandoesinger@gmx.at 2007-28-03 17:34 ------- First of all: You are right regarding the wine documentation. It is in a pretty bad shape and is really outdated. Patches are welcome of course :-) . A first step would be a patch to improve the ERR messages in ddraw, d3d8 and d3d9 to suggest checking opengl.
I do not buy the newbie argument. All recent Linux distros do ship a working opengl library by default. The only real exception is Gentoo, and I do not consider Gentoo a newbie distro. Furthermore I don't think that running a game over a remote link like the reporter did is something newbies do regularly. Also I recommend you to read the Gentoo documentation, especially the thing about "eselect opengl". The old system argument isn't really valid either. For one part see below. And even if its because of opengl beeing needed for some reason, there is no hardware out there which runs current beginner's distros but does not have at least a basic 3d accelerator. (Yes, you can run things like Gentoo on old hardware, I myself have an up to date Gentoo system on my old 120 mhz notebook. But that isn't something people new to Linux will do either)
Regarding the slowness: Is it really because of opengl? I suspect it is because of the asynchronous surface updates(bug 5526). There used to be a hack in the old ddraw implementation for that, but Alexandre didn't accept it back as is. For properly synchronizing such surface updates the whole DirectX code has to be synchronized - or at least before I see a point in trying to send the patch again. Volunteers welcome.
I won't stop anyone from implementing lazy linking against libGL.so. Its just that I personally won't do that anytime soon because there are other things to do which I consider higher priority.