Re: Wine in Humble Indie Bundle

[Dan Kegel]

On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 5:16 PM, Jerome Leclanche  wrote:
> This comes up in one form or the other very often, though, doesn't it?
> Company x releases software y with a Wine wrapper advertising "native linux
> support" and users get upset. Personally, I'm glad they're thinking about
> Linux and I think Wine fills a great role as a "transitional" step between
> Windows and Linux, but I don't think it's any good to encourage using Wine
> over making the game more portable. Besides, doesn't HIB have some rule
> about requiring all games to support Linux natively?

See  http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ufxcg/were_humble_indie_bundle_v_creat...
The guys who put together the indie bundle said
-- snip --
The LIMBO Linux build was created by CodeWeavers who basically take a
custom version of Wine and tune the game to make sure it runs
flawlessly. This is our first experiment with CodeWeavers and we are
watching carefully.
If there are any bugs with the game, I don't want people to think "oh
well, it uses Wine" -- these ought to be sent to CodeWeavers who
should do their best to fix them.
...
We typically help organize porting for the games in the bundle, and
it's usually the toughest part! But we're rabid about trying to
provide the best experience possible, and native ports usually do
that.
But in the case of LIMBO, our porting friends said there was some
audio middleware that's not easily supported on Linux, we decided to
see if we could experiment with another solution that could provide a
rock-solid Linux gaming experience. CodeWeavers took it on—they do
highly customized Linux wrappers to optimize specific pieces of
software—and the prototypes worked incredibly well. They spent a lot
of time tweaking and optimizing, and it passed their QA and our QA
(and seemed to perform more consistently than even some of the native
ports we've seen).
But we get that software is hard, and so we'll try to keep an eye out
for any showstoppers. Hit up [e-mail] with any issues
and we'll make sure CodeWeavers hears about any LIMBO bugs that need
fixing.
-- snip --

So, no, they don't require games to be native, they just require them
to run well.

Regardless of whether a game is native, Java, or Wine,
it's going to run into some problems post-release,
and good game publishers will respond with fixes.
- Dan