Wine in Humble Indie Bundle

[Dan Kegel]

I see the Humble Indie Bundle includes a game ported via wine,
http://zcint.co.uk/article/limbo-on-linux-incites-humble-bundle-petition

That's pretty cool, but not everyone agrees, and somebody has started
circulating an anti-wine petition.

So I put together a pro-wine petition:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/use-wine-as-needed-in-future-humble-indie...

How's that look?  If you agree with it, please sign and forward to your friends.

Thanks,
Dan

[Max TenEyck Woodbury]

On 06/03/2012 02:03 PM, Dan Kegel wrote:
> I see the Humble Indie Bundle includes a game ported via wine,
> http://zcint.co.uk/article/limbo-on-linux-incites-humble-bundle-petition
>
> That's pretty cool, but not everyone agrees, and somebody has started
> circulating an anti-wine petition.
>
> So I put together a pro-wine petition:
> http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/use-wine-as-needed-in-future-humble-indie...
>
> How's that look?  If you agree with it, please sign and forward to your friends.
>
> Thanks,
> Dan

Your petition is very carefully worded and on point, however...

the other petition does have a point about Wine not doing as well with
sound as it should.  Still, it does go too far in its opposition.

[Dan Kegel]

Berillions wrote:
> the other petition does have a point about Wine not doing as well with
> sound as it should.

Yes, there are some issues.

For the record, here are a couple links to people talking about their
problems with the game:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/144915/limbo-game-has-no-sound
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=142465
( from http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ufxcg/were_humble_indie_bundle_v_creat...
)

Several people are trying to run it without proper graphics drivers,
and seeing crashes like the following; maybe Wine should
blacklist graphics drivers that can't handle common games?

Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0xffffffff in 32-bit
code (0x7ca26b9b).
Backtrace:
=>0 0x7ca26b9b in swrast_dri.so (+0x195b9b) (0x00000000)
...
  23 0x7e52ff27 Direct3DCreate9+0x66() in d3d9 (0x0033fa1c)

[Jerome Leclanche]

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 12:36 AM, Dan Kegel  wrote:
> Berillions wrote:
> > the other petition does have a point about Wine not doing as well with
> > sound as it should.
>
> Yes, there are some issues.
>
> For the record, here are a couple links to people talking about their
> problems with the game:
> http://askubuntu.com/questions/144915/limbo-game-has-no-sound
> https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=142465
> ( from
> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ufxcg/were_humble_indie_bundle_v_creat...
> )
>
> Several people are trying to run it without proper graphics drivers,
> and seeing crashes like the following; maybe Wine should
> blacklist graphics drivers that can't handle common games?
>
> Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0xffffffff in 32-bit
> code (0x7ca26b9b).
> Backtrace:
> =>0 0x7ca26b9b in swrast_dri.so (+0x195b9b) (0x00000000)
> ...
>  23 0x7e52ff27 Direct3DCreate9+0x66() in d3d9 (0x0033fa1c)

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?

J. Leclanche

[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

[James Eder]

On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 6:16 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?
>
> J. Leclanche

More often than not it's the case that no amount of encouragement will
lead to a native port.  If it were a simple matter of encouragement, I
doubt there'd be a point in Wine.  Often it's the case that a company
produces software with the intent to do very little after release day.
 By very little I mean that it *might* get one or two patches after
release and then it's done.  The patches address usually a handful of
bugs.  It isn't continuation of development really.  Porting software
is generally a lot more involved than fixing a few bugs.  Porting is
more like a continuation of development that often involves nontrivial
effort.

For companies that take a "fire and forget" approach to software
development, Wine provides an option where there wouldn't be one
otherwise.  Of course everyone would love to see real maintenance and
continuation of development but a realist will point out that is not
what's happening.  Nor would it in many cases even if Wine didn't
exist.

Those that object to Wine being used to port software should ask the
real question:  Would the software be ported otherwise?  It is not
even clear that it still would have been ported.  For some, you might
only get a port if it's a trivial thing to do.

I'd like to point out that despite the increasing quality of Wine,
it's becoming increasingly likely that software is designed to be
portable and made available cross platform.  It's also becoming more
likely that a user can find high quality alternatives to platform
locked applications. If Wine's existence is in fact discouraging
native ports in a significant way then you would expect the trend to
be in the other direction.

The mere existence of edge cases where Wine may have discouraged a
native port does not negate the larger trend.  It seems a bit silly to
fuss over a small skirmish when the war is being won on a much larger,
more significant, turf.  The availability of high quality cross
platform development tools has done more to win the battle than Wine's
absence ever could hope to do.

Further the push for native ports is something that happens _after_
the application was developed using MS APIs and _after_ it was ported
via Wine. (Ironically, there'd be much less fuss if the developers
just kept it as a Windows only program.)  If the original developer
cared about being portable they would have used portable libraries
from the start.  As far as I can tell, there's no indication that Wine
was a part of the original development decision to use non portable
APIs.  There's only the fears of some that it might have or will
someday.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_a_mountain_out_of_a_molehill