July 18, 2009 at 13:19Win-games under Linux: myth or reality?
The topic was written under the influence of many statements (including in the habrasociety) that there are almost no games under Linux, so the latter is not a desktop system that can compete with Windows. This argument is used, paired with another - “for your Linux there is no software necessary for the work” - as the last line of defense, when talking about “convenience”, “ease of development” or “security” is useless. Any housewife will easily master Ubuntu, especially if you train her on this system, and not retrain from Windows. Yes, and viruses for this OS so far have to be collected manually, with the reading of the manual. And here someone comes forward, declaring something like this: “But the housewife has children who want to drive them into toys, and there aren’t any of them on your red-eyed one! Ha ha ha (here is the laugh of a cinematic villain). ”
Important clarification. I am not a Linux evangelist, I am not promoting this OS or any of its distributions, nor do I care about the popularity of the Wine project. I just spent a long time reviewing Linux games, running a parallel Windows only if absolutely necessary. So I know what I'm talking about. And yes, Linux is considered on the example of Ubuntu, for everyone else, something can change slightly.
In fact, games specifically for Linux exist. Most are free. Some even try to compete with their commercial counterparts. But they can rarely be compared in quality of execution with commercial ones, and therefore most often we either have a ported version (World of Goo, for example), or launch from a non-emulator Wine. And what do you want if it’s just unprofitable for developers to adapt their games for another OS? They are already pressed by a double development: consoles + PC. I have to spin.
But all is not so bad. Let's try to understand in practice. I will not give a large number of games as an example, for this there is winehq , everything that is marked with “platinum” or “gold” can be safely put and used. But I will describe possible options for the development of events after installation.
For starters - the actual installation process. We put Wine from the repositories (if not already installed). We start the configurator from the menu or winecfg from the console. We configure, if necessary, or immediately click ok. Run the installer of the game, as usual. All. Further, with each game, you will need to repeat only the last paragraph. Difficult?
An important point: never run wine and Windows software from under superuser / via sudo. It is fraught with unpredictable consequences.
The second important point: if something was set incorrectly, it’s stupid, buggy, or you even managed to run some kind of Windows virus (yes, it happens ...) - do not be afraid to rub the entire home folder of the vine. The next launch of the configurator will create it again.
Well, the third: check if there is a Linux version for the game you want to install? Save a lot of time and effort.
After this, three options are possible. So, the first one: the game is marked with the highest mark on winehq, and accordingly there should be no problems during its installation and during the game. As a rule, they are not there. The main jamb that you may encounter in this case is a problem with access rights. Some folders may turn out to be read-only or accessible only to the superuser, and if the game needs them not only for reading, it will crash with an error or behave strangely. Such a problem definitely exists in Ubuntu 9.04, it appears completely randomly. It is treated by manual installation of rights.
Second: this is a game labeled with "gold" or "silver." There are possible nuances. For example, you may need to enable or disable hardware sound acceleration in the settings of the vine. Or you will need to force switch to OpenGL mode. All these problems, as well as their solutions, are described in the comments on the game on the same appdb. As a rule, games run anyway, but without following the recommendations, incidents like stuttering sound or broken graphics happen. Seldom. But do happen. And OpenGL is an almost guaranteed inoperative hardware cursor, which is also an unpleasant little thing.
Third: - a rating lower than “silver”. Everything already happens here, the standard Linux story begins, which I will try to portray in faces:
(forum)
(hysterical cry of a beginner) - Ahhh, nothing works for me, help !!!
(malicious voice of guru-1) - But everything works for me. CHYADNT?
(malicious voice of guru-2) - Boy, and with what parameters did you collect the core?
(newbie) - Chigo?
(guru-2) - Ah, everything is clear ... * meaningful silence *
(voice from the audience) - Yes, he doesn’t even know what the core is, what are you doing with it?
(noble knight) - Dear, you should make * recommendation-1 * and * recommendation-2 *, as well as read the manuals.
(voice from the audience) - Yes, he doesn’t even know what manuals are!
(already-not-newbie) - Oh, thanks, everything worked out!
(beginner-2) - But nothing works for me, the tips did not help ...
(all in chorus) - Argh! ..
Simply put, either everything will work right away, or not right away, or it won’t work at all. Games that use DX10 without fail, as well as something else, are likely to be immediately swept away. It is easier to immediately reboot into Windows than to suffer from them. But generally worth reading the forums, suddenly your problem has already been solved?
In addition to the interaction of games with Wine, hardware can also cause trouble. For example, ATI / AMD graphics cards. With them, everything is still difficult, although not for everyone. As always, there are people who have no problems even with the most capricious iron.
Some controllers (joysticks, gamepads, steering wheels, Zboard keyboards) are unable to interact normally with Linux, some instances do not work correctly, others do not work at all. No drivers. Thanks a lot to the manufacturers.
External sound, especially in the format of usb / firewire boxes, can also cause problems.
And finally, in case of glitches, it is worth checking the installed software. In extremely rare cases, something may conflict. As an example, Pulseaudio in Ubuntu causes a very unpleasant effect of "torn" and "stuttering" sound. Well, the driver on the video still needs to be installed, otherwise there were cases ...
Finally, a few examples from my own experience. Selected almost by accident.
Stalker, S: Clear Sky . Everything is working fine. Nothing more to add.
World of warcraft. "Platinum" in appdb, works without problems, sometimes faster than in Windows. Sometimes it’s slower, it’s not necessary at times, but the increase and decrease in performance are within 5-10 fps (as far as I can tell). Ping is stably lower. Of the bugs, I can only recall two: the lack of a hardware cursor in OpenGL mode and the ping timeout that does not always work (the player does not always throw out the login screen in the event of a disconnection - it leaves it in the “frozen” world).
Starcraft: Brood War . It works fine, although for some reason it got silver in appdb. I haven’t noticed a single problem.
Diablo 2 . When you exit the game, it throws an error plate, but there are no real problems.
Red alert 3and addition. There would be no problems if not for the lack of water. I mean, the wine engine refuses to render water as such. As a result, you can observe funny incidents like amphibious tanks floating through the air. Perhaps this is corrected by some kind of setting.
Painkiller Overdose . Earned without problems, nothing had to be edited.
Warhammer 40k Dawn of War , all additions to it and Dawn of War 2 . They start up, work, fps is slightly lower than on a similar configuration under Windows.
Freelancer . Works. The hardware cursor does not work, which in free flight mode can cause a number of problems. FLMM is working. DS did not check.
TES: Oblivion . Everything works without problems.
Half-Life / HL2 / TF2etc. Works. Cedega generally claims support for this entire “iskaropka” farm, but why do we need a paid product when there is free and / dev / hands?
Heroes of Might and Magic 3, HoMM 5 , add-ons to them. Oddly enough - they work. What else is needed for happiness?
But Settlers , starting from the second version and ending with the fifth, I did not start. It's a pity.
Configuration on which everything was tested: Athlon64 3500 + / 2gb / Asus M2N-X / GeForce 8500 GT 256mb. OS - Ubuntu 8.10 -> Ubuntu 9.04. Wine is always the latest stable version.
In general, Linux housewife children will not have special problems, and they will not be bored. In an extreme case, you will need to tinker with the settings and read the forums ... I don’t think this is such a big problem. Those who had Spectrum or their analogues in their childhood will understand. After all, modern children are not forced to write games on their own in order to play them, right?
Important clarification. I am not a Linux evangelist, I am not promoting this OS or any of its distributions, nor do I care about the popularity of the Wine project. I just spent a long time reviewing Linux games, running a parallel Windows only if absolutely necessary. So I know what I'm talking about. And yes, Linux is considered on the example of Ubuntu, for everyone else, something can change slightly.
In fact, games specifically for Linux exist. Most are free. Some even try to compete with their commercial counterparts. But they can rarely be compared in quality of execution with commercial ones, and therefore most often we either have a ported version (World of Goo, for example), or launch from a non-emulator Wine. And what do you want if it’s just unprofitable for developers to adapt their games for another OS? They are already pressed by a double development: consoles + PC. I have to spin.
But all is not so bad. Let's try to understand in practice. I will not give a large number of games as an example, for this there is winehq , everything that is marked with “platinum” or “gold” can be safely put and used. But I will describe possible options for the development of events after installation.
For starters - the actual installation process. We put Wine from the repositories (if not already installed). We start the configurator from the menu or winecfg from the console. We configure, if necessary, or immediately click ok. Run the installer of the game, as usual. All. Further, with each game, you will need to repeat only the last paragraph. Difficult?
An important point: never run wine and Windows software from under superuser / via sudo. It is fraught with unpredictable consequences.
The second important point: if something was set incorrectly, it’s stupid, buggy, or you even managed to run some kind of Windows virus (yes, it happens ...) - do not be afraid to rub the entire home folder of the vine. The next launch of the configurator will create it again.
Well, the third: check if there is a Linux version for the game you want to install? Save a lot of time and effort.
After this, three options are possible. So, the first one: the game is marked with the highest mark on winehq, and accordingly there should be no problems during its installation and during the game. As a rule, they are not there. The main jamb that you may encounter in this case is a problem with access rights. Some folders may turn out to be read-only or accessible only to the superuser, and if the game needs them not only for reading, it will crash with an error or behave strangely. Such a problem definitely exists in Ubuntu 9.04, it appears completely randomly. It is treated by manual installation of rights.
Second: this is a game labeled with "gold" or "silver." There are possible nuances. For example, you may need to enable or disable hardware sound acceleration in the settings of the vine. Or you will need to force switch to OpenGL mode. All these problems, as well as their solutions, are described in the comments on the game on the same appdb. As a rule, games run anyway, but without following the recommendations, incidents like stuttering sound or broken graphics happen. Seldom. But do happen. And OpenGL is an almost guaranteed inoperative hardware cursor, which is also an unpleasant little thing.
Third: - a rating lower than “silver”. Everything already happens here, the standard Linux story begins, which I will try to portray in faces:
(forum)
(hysterical cry of a beginner) - Ahhh, nothing works for me, help !!!
(malicious voice of guru-1) - But everything works for me. CHYADNT?
(malicious voice of guru-2) - Boy, and with what parameters did you collect the core?
(newbie) - Chigo?
(guru-2) - Ah, everything is clear ... * meaningful silence *
(voice from the audience) - Yes, he doesn’t even know what the core is, what are you doing with it?
(noble knight) - Dear, you should make * recommendation-1 * and * recommendation-2 *, as well as read the manuals.
(voice from the audience) - Yes, he doesn’t even know what manuals are!
(already-not-newbie) - Oh, thanks, everything worked out!
(beginner-2) - But nothing works for me, the tips did not help ...
(all in chorus) - Argh! ..
Simply put, either everything will work right away, or not right away, or it won’t work at all. Games that use DX10 without fail, as well as something else, are likely to be immediately swept away. It is easier to immediately reboot into Windows than to suffer from them. But generally worth reading the forums, suddenly your problem has already been solved?
In addition to the interaction of games with Wine, hardware can also cause trouble. For example, ATI / AMD graphics cards. With them, everything is still difficult, although not for everyone. As always, there are people who have no problems even with the most capricious iron.
Some controllers (joysticks, gamepads, steering wheels, Zboard keyboards) are unable to interact normally with Linux, some instances do not work correctly, others do not work at all. No drivers. Thanks a lot to the manufacturers.
External sound, especially in the format of usb / firewire boxes, can also cause problems.
And finally, in case of glitches, it is worth checking the installed software. In extremely rare cases, something may conflict. As an example, Pulseaudio in Ubuntu causes a very unpleasant effect of "torn" and "stuttering" sound. Well, the driver on the video still needs to be installed, otherwise there were cases ...
Finally, a few examples from my own experience. Selected almost by accident.
Stalker, S: Clear Sky . Everything is working fine. Nothing more to add.
World of warcraft. "Platinum" in appdb, works without problems, sometimes faster than in Windows. Sometimes it’s slower, it’s not necessary at times, but the increase and decrease in performance are within 5-10 fps (as far as I can tell). Ping is stably lower. Of the bugs, I can only recall two: the lack of a hardware cursor in OpenGL mode and the ping timeout that does not always work (the player does not always throw out the login screen in the event of a disconnection - it leaves it in the “frozen” world).
Starcraft: Brood War . It works fine, although for some reason it got silver in appdb. I haven’t noticed a single problem.
Diablo 2 . When you exit the game, it throws an error plate, but there are no real problems.
Red alert 3and addition. There would be no problems if not for the lack of water. I mean, the wine engine refuses to render water as such. As a result, you can observe funny incidents like amphibious tanks floating through the air. Perhaps this is corrected by some kind of setting.
Painkiller Overdose . Earned without problems, nothing had to be edited.
Warhammer 40k Dawn of War , all additions to it and Dawn of War 2 . They start up, work, fps is slightly lower than on a similar configuration under Windows.
Freelancer . Works. The hardware cursor does not work, which in free flight mode can cause a number of problems. FLMM is working. DS did not check.
TES: Oblivion . Everything works without problems.
Half-Life / HL2 / TF2etc. Works. Cedega generally claims support for this entire “iskaropka” farm, but why do we need a paid product when there is free and / dev / hands?
Heroes of Might and Magic 3, HoMM 5 , add-ons to them. Oddly enough - they work. What else is needed for happiness?
But Settlers , starting from the second version and ending with the fifth, I did not start. It's a pity.
Configuration on which everything was tested: Athlon64 3500 + / 2gb / Asus M2N-X / GeForce 8500 GT 256mb. OS - Ubuntu 8.10 -> Ubuntu 9.04. Wine is always the latest stable version.
In general, Linux housewife children will not have special problems, and they will not be bored. In an extreme case, you will need to tinker with the settings and read the forums ... I don’t think this is such a big problem. Those who had Spectrum or their analogues in their childhood will understand. After all, modern children are not forced to write games on their own in order to play them, right?