AntiAliasing for Source Based games

Hi everyone,

I'm exceptionally new to posting messages on mailing lists (ie its my first time) so please forgive me in advance if I've done something wrong!

My question for the wine developers is, why is Anti Aliasing not supported for Source based games?

I play Day of Defeat Source everyday, and many wine gamers play steam based source engine games such as DoDs and Counterstrike Source, and its nearly at windows xp level fps wise, but the main nuisance for us is that there is no AA!

AA greatly improves the look of games, and it seems that there is an emphasis on making the games look nice by adding functionality such as shaders and glsl, so in this respect, a basic feature of games such as AA should be considered to be made.

Also Team Fortress Two is coming out fairly shortly and AA would be a nice feature to implement for when it comes out :)

I would consider learning C etc myself to try and get this functionality (I learned Java as part of my degree) up and running, but sadly I probably don't have the skills to contribute.

Anyways, keep up the excellent work wine developers, you guys do a tremendous job, but please consider adding this one feature, as it would mean a lot to myself and many many others who play steam based source games etc using wine on Linux!

Take care!

[Wojciech 'arab' Arabczyk]

Hi,
> I would consider learning C etc myself to try and get this functionality (I
> learned Java as part of my degree) up and running, but sadly I probably
> don't have the skills to contribute.

AA under linux is not app-dependant afaik. It's driver dependant, so you'll 
have to setup your graphics card driver to turn on AA for OpenGL based progs,
prior to running the game under WINE.

Worked for me, should work for you.

[Roderick Colenbrander]

> Hi,
> > I would consider learning C etc myself to try and get this functionality
>
> (I
> > learned Java as part of my degree) up and running, but sadly I probably
> > don't have the skills to contribute.
>
> AA under linux is not app-dependant afaik. It's driver dependant, so
> you'll 
> have to setup your graphics card driver to turn on AA for OpenGL based
> progs,
> prior to running the game under WINE.

OpenGL offers AA itself using the multisample extension. The level of AA is a property of the pixelformat in use for opengl. Due to various reason the number of pixelformats is limited and for that reason games running on Wine don't show AA. This is the case for both OpenGL and Direct3D.

Roderick

[Stefan Dösinger]

Am Freitag, 28. September 2007 07:20:19 schrieb 
[e-mail]:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm exceptionally new to posting messages on mailing lists (ie its my first
> time) so please forgive me in advance if I've done something wrong!

I found nothing to complain :-)
> My question for the wine developers is, why is Anti Aliasing not supported
> for Source based games?

As Roderick mentioned AA is a property of the Pixel Format. Due to deeply 
rooted reasons Wine at startup. It has to choose one before the application 
can say what it wants, and later on it cannot be changed. Wine first tries a 
format with all features(except AA) enabled, and then uses less complex 
formats until it finds one that is supported. To support setting AA from 
games we'd have to be able to change the format. This is major work in wine's 
x11 driver, this problem exists since many years.

However, there is an easy way to get FSAA support: The driver can override the 
AA setting requested by the game. If you have an nvidia card, you can 
configure that in nvidia-settings, on  Antialiasing settings page. This way 
you get FSAA, but you cannot enable / disable it from the game.