Mandriva to play Windows games

[spinynorman]

Mandriva will include in its 2007 release, Transgaming's Cedega engine to play mainstream Windows gaming titles out of the box.

 

Mandriva hopes the inclusion of Cedega in the install package will help push Linux as a desktop to the very market that usually wouldn't give it a second look - the gamers.

 

To tempt users of the possibilities, a copy of FlatOut, a racing and smash-em-up game, will also be bundled for use with the included Cedega engine.

 

The ‘gaming-enabled’ edition is scheduled to launch on October 2nd.

 

Information from www.apcstart.com - via Texstar.

[tyme]

So they revived the gaming edition, eh? I remember when they had it before, when it was WineX. That was a couple years ago...I think it came with The Sims, too.

[SoulSe]

Yup, I remember Mandrake gaming edition with WineX.... 3 I think it was.

 

Cedega gets better all the time, but it still isn't good enough to make serious gamers use Linux over Windows. For the average users with a couple of games though, this might be a clincher for using Linux.

[JonEberger]

so it'd definitely make me take a second look. i'm typically not impressed enough (at first) with any distro to change to it. but the inclusion of cedega is an interesting addition for sure.

[jagwah]

It's great to see that they are trying to cater to the gamer, however as a 'serious' gamer myself, (that's all I use the computer for, well music creation as well) I don't think it's going to bring in the masses, sure it may be a bit of cream on top for the casual gaming person, but I don't think that many, if any, will see it as a real 'selling point'. The game selection is limited, yes growing all the time, it requires additional resourses on top of what the game requires, adding that extra layer of complexity and resourse usage. As it is now, native Linux games run slower than the Windows counterpart, this is going on my personal experience, I have yet to see a native Linux game actually faster. example,

 

Quake4 - Windows - 61.05FPS -- Linux - 53FPS

Doom3 - Windows - 72.9FPS -- Linux -63FPS

Done with the standard timedemo's for each game

 

Then for Linux, you could subtract a few more FPS for the Cedega overhead. 10FPS mightn't seem much, and for games like Quake3, which run in the hundreds of FPS on todays PC's, it's not. But for more recent games it becomes more of an issue, you want all the FPS you can get. (Quake4 and Doom3 are fixed at 60FPS in game) The issue becomes even more important for online gaming, where you need a constant high frame rate, you want all the FPS you can get.

 

Then there is another side of gaming which is becoming more and more important, moding the game, whether it be making maps/levels, or total conversions, this stuff is hugely popular, heaps of games now, especially in the First Person Shooter genre, allow the user either through inbuilt or 3rd party apps to make levels and mods for the game. Some consider it to be suicide almost to have no moding support today. Some games which would have otherwise sold better, had a larger community, and longer life span, have died because of the lack of it.

 

Even games which run natively in Linux, eg, Quake4 and Doom3, fail in this area, at least where Linux is concerned. Although it is possible to make maps for Doom3 and Quake4 via the use of GTKRadiant (3rd party editor, the inbuilt Doom3 editor is win32 only) you miss out on the use of sub editors such as the gui editor etc, however with Quake4, even though you can technically create levels with GTKRadiant, it is useless, because there is no way to compile the map, and therefore be able to actually use it in game, plus it suffers even worse than Doom3 does, as it has even more sub editors available than Doom3, which are of course, unavailable to the no-win32 user.

 

I got the impression from either reading an article, or watching a recent video, that after ET Quake Wars, there may not necessarily be Linux support for id software games, and as they have been a great supporter in the past, this will be another blow to Linux gaming. I can't remember exactly where I read/watched it, but it was an official thing. John Carmack has also said that the new game that id is working on, will also support DirectX, and not be OpenGL only, as id games have been in the past. He also said that there are no longer any outstanding reasons 'NOT' to use DirectX, perhaps the writing is on the wall. But there is good news, (if you like Unreal) Epic has said that UT2007 and its Editing tools, will support both Mac and Linux. We'll see

 

Sometimes I think, I'm a gamer, my games are fully functional, and run faster under Windows, therefore I must have a Windows install. Why even bother having Linux? But here I am ...

Edited September 29, 2006 by jagwah

[Darkelve]

Sometimes I think, I'm a gamer, my games are fully functional, and run faster under Windows, therefore I must have a Windows install. Why even bother having Linux? But here I am ...

 

For me Linux is getting to the point where it's actually much easier to do something I want to do in Linux compared to Windows...

 

File management... KDE/Konqueror beats the crap out of Windows Explorer.

 

I created a 'fake' newspaper for my girfriend in Scribus, I recorded a song for her and encoded it as mp3 with Audacity&Lame. No program in Windows beats Amarok. It can even import&export to my iPod Nano. I've been retagging my entire music collection with Kid3. I watch my videos with Mplayer (both Windows and Linux). Evolution gets all my web-based e-mail (Pop3 - although I prefer using the webbased interfaces e.g. gmail).

 

I don't need to install drivers when connecting my digital camera and downloading pictures with Digikam.

 

In Windows, it asks me for the WinXP CD, but I have to walk pretty far to fetch it, so I don't bother and just boot up in Linux to download them. And the retouching features of the latest Digikam version are superb (Red Eye Reduction, Unsharp Mask, Color Correction, ...).

 

And I use Windows... for games. Although I did get Dreamfall running under Wine.