DirectPlay

[Michael Müller]

Hello Alistair,

I am watching your DirectPlay patches for some time and I am very happy
that you haven't yet given up implementing it. Most of the Wine
developers do not really care much about DirectPlay since there is an
easy workaround and no modern game makes use of it.

Just today I wrote a fix for a multiplayer lobby client for Age of
Empires 2 which also makes use of DP (
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29384 ). Although using the
Windows 98 dlls works, I think it is important for ordinary wine users
that it works out of the box. Sometimes Wine is not really that user
friendly and I think it is important to enhance these parts to improve
the image of wine. Not everybody is searching through the AppDB or
bugtracker, instead most people give up if it does not work out of the box.

For this reason I am contributing to a project called wine-compholio (
https://github.com/compholio/wine-compholio ) which collects correct
patches that did not get upstream because AJ did not like them for some
reason (although they were correct) or they didn't get any attention and
dropped out of the queue. The idea is to use this project as staging
tree and to improve these patches till wine accepts them. We also add
our own patches there before we send them upstream so that other people
can review and test them. This makes fixes/patches faster available to
users as for example Fedora applies all our patches to their wine build.
Moreover often developers review your patches before you send them to
Wine devel. This makes it easier to get patches upstream since the
chance that they contain a critical errors is much lower. If you think
this might also help your patches, you can find us in #pipelight /
#wine-compholio on FreeNode.

However, I just wanted to say thank you that you are still working on DP.

Regards,
Michael Müller