Archived from groups: alt.games.everquest (
More info?)
Hagen Sienhold wrote:
> Meldur <Meldur@t-online.de> wrote:
>
>>On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 11:16:50 GMT, 42 <nospam@nospam.com> wrote:
>
>
>>>A while back I heard that Transgaming's Cedega software supports running
>>>EQ under linux. As a bit of a linux fan, I've kept tabs on this...after
>>>all one of the reasons I keep windows on my primary PCs instead of going
>>>pure Linux & OSX is for the games.
>>>
>>>Not surprisingly EQ2, according to reports, doesn't run playably in this
>>>configuration. What -is- surprising is that WoW *does*, and apparently
>>>runs quite well.
>>>
>>>And, while EQ2 is, by most accounts the graphically superior title, that
>>>doesn't account for all... many of the years graphics blockbusters are
>>>also supported... e.g. Doom3, and Half-Life2.
>>>
>>>Coupled with Blizzards simultaneous and proper support of the OSX,
>>>something SOE only did late and half-assed with EQ1, and so far haven't
>>>even attempted with EQ2... it really makes we wonder just what SOE has
>>>done with (to?) their code.
>
>
>>Did you really expect something else from SOE?
>>I wonder when they will wake up,now they have for the 1st time a
>>real competetor,probably it will be too late.
>
>
> Oh come on. It's not always SoE's fault. I doubt WoW utilizes DX9. So
> unless Transgaming programs a dx9 emulation layer EQ2 simply won't work.
> Since it is running some of the newer games they even might have a dx9
> port. But probably it isn't the full dx9 implementation. Add to this
> that they have to rely on OpenGL to actually perform the gfx operations
> the performance is lower than what you would get under windows.
>
> Apparently this is a non issue with WoW but EQ2 would be a chore to play
> under Linux I guess.
>
>
> Hagen
It's interesting to me to find this discussion here tonight. Some time
ago, maybe about a year ago now, I ran Linux for a full year without
Windows on my machine at all. I was a Transgaming subscriber for that
entire time too and found I could enjoy many games I liked (though not
all) in Linux. Cedega does in fact provide translation from DX9 calls to
their OpenGL equivalents, although I do know at this time how complete
the implementation is. I do know though that work on this had already
begun more than a year ago, so my presumption would be that a great deal
of the DX9 API is covered with Cedega at this point. Sometimes the
issues with games running with WineX in the past and Cedega now are not
actually DirectX related, such as with copy protection schemes on CDs
and DVDs, Windows system calls, etc. So a lot of times individual games
require some work to get running even if the DX9 support they call for
is in place. I have no idea what the issues are with running EQII in
Linux with Cedega are but having noticed its popularity in the
Transgaming games database among paying subscribers, my guess is they
are working now to address them and will have the game running in the
future.
Transgaming has come a long way in the past year with MMORPG support. I
notice that now the following titles are all working in Linux with Cedega:
EverQuest
Dark Age of Camelot
World of Warcraft
Star Wars Galaxies
Anarchy Online
I think there may be one or two more such as Ultima Online that work as
well. Actually, EverQuest II is the only major MMORPG they do not having
working in Linux at this time as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, I
don't think Planetside works with Cedega either. It would not surprise
me to see them support Guildwars when it ships as I think that is going
to be a popular title with subscribers, who through their monthly votes,
have a great deal of influence over what gets priority in the ongoing
development of Cedega.
In my own case, I was particularly pleased to note that a good number of
other games I own also work now in Linux including Morrowind and both of
its expansions, NWN (which I think has a Linux client now anyway),
Battlefield 1942, Call of Duty, and a good number of other shooters I'd
like to get around to one of these days.
Unreal Tournament 2003 had an excellent Linux client right in the retail
box. I never got the next one so I don't know if they did a Linux client
for that or not. Doom 3 also has a native Linux client now too as I
understand it, although I think Cedega supports it too. Quake III for
those still playing it has had a Linux client for years and its funny to
see that many people still play that game. As noted above, the new Half
Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source work with Cedega as well.
In my experience, with adequate system memory (I had a gig when I was
running Linux) the games I ran worked as well as they did in Windows as
far as performance went. I never went so far as to bother with measuring
frame rates, etc. But at least in general terms, I never found
performance to be a problem playing games with Cedega. I'm sure that the
conversion of DX9 calls to OpenGL calls must add some overhead but my
sense is that on modern systems it doesn't add enough to be an issue
most of the time at least. I do think that with today's games you
probably would not want to run with less than a gig of memory minumum to
play games in Linux and for the likes of WoW and especially EQ2 if and
when it works, you'd probably want at least 1.5 gigs if not 2 gigs of RAM.
In any case, if I do Linux again for my desktop I will leave a sizeable
windows partition with XP on it for gaming. Cedega is a good thing that
provides a lot of convenience in not having to leave Linux and boot
winders to play many games but it does not work with everything and
never has. So it's best to have a windows install with dual booting
setup for those times when you want to play something Cedega does not
support. In particular, for any MMORPG user this is really a must in my
opinion because it is always possible that a game patch can break Cedega
support of the game somehow, rendering it unplayable until they get
around to fixing it. And that could sometimes take days or even weeks.
I've just recently done some homework to evaluate what's happening with
the Linux desktop from a home users perspective in the year I've been
away and it appears to me that it's continuing to evolve nicely. I
started out with RedHat when I ran Linux, soon switched to SuSE and
ultimately wound up settling on Mandrake Linux on my home system. The
reasons for that progression are not really worth recounting except
perhaps to say that I was looking for the most polished desktop I could
get then for home that worked best with Transgaming's WineX for my gaming.
Today it seems to me like Xandros 3 Deluxe may just be the best option
for a home user moving from Windows. If not the best option, it
certainly is a very good one with its inclusion of Codeweavers
Crossover-Office for people who still need Word, Excel, etc. and would
like all the windows browser plugins for multimedia that they are used
to, to work in Linux. Xandros has more than that going for it with an
excellent installation process, Debian GNU Linux base and therefore
excellent package updating and installation capability, a very nice GUI
for system management tasks and their own File Manager which is
something like Windows Explorer in the way it works and can burn CDs as
well. However, unlike many Linux distributions this one will cost you to
purchase as you may already know. At around 80 bucks US it looks like a
good deal to me but on the other hand you could still get Mandrake
(although without Crossover-Office) for free. I'm not sure if SUSE is
free now that Novell owns them. I think the Personal Edition or whatever
they have named that may be. RedHat's Fedora is free but I wouldn't
recommend it to a gamer as they have historically done patches to the
Linux Kernel that were problematic for WineX, although I should say I do
not know if that remains a problem today.
Personally, now that I have left software development to return to
nursing I do not need MS Office compatability. So for me, OpenOffice or
perhaps StarOffice (if it adds any significant value over OpenOffice)
would be fine for my word processing and spreadsheet needs, which are
pretty simple. As for Internet software, the best browser and email (in
my humble opinion) are available for Linux now and those would be
Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird. I use them in Windows now and would
certainly stay with them in Linux. ICQ, AIM and Yahoo chat I think are
all covered with Kopete that is a part of the Linux KDE desktop, which I
personally prefer over it's chief competitor, Gnome. Those are the most
important applications for me and Linux has all that covered with decent
software now. There's a lot more I could go on about but if you've been
following or have used Linux, I'm sure you are probably already well
aware of them.
I am thinking very seriously about going back to Linux now that the
desktop has had more than a year to mature further since I last lived in
it. I liked it then but felt too many applications were in varying
stages of beta (or worse) for everyday use, at least to satisfy me.
While the underlying operating system never crashed once in a full year
of use, running 24/7, at that time application crashes were common and
annoying, at least with the stuff I was using. Also, back then I needed
Word compatability and it simply was not there yet in OpenOffice. My
documents with tables always came through mangled and that for me was a
real problem. I don't know how it is now but as I mentioned before, that
no longer matters to me personally. I probably should have sprung for
Crossover-Office back then and just run Word in Linux but with the other
problems I had seen, and the lack of support for some newer games I
wanted to play at the time in WineX, I just decided to go back to
Windows XP and wait for Linux to further mature. Well, actually for the
Linux desktop software and applications to further mature I should say.
But a lot has changed since then and so I am very tempted to try it
again. Without getting into the reasons for it, and the ensuing
flamewar, I'll just tell you that I personally hate Microsoft's
management and I greatly prefer to use competing products when I can.
I think if I decide to do this, I will go with either SUSE 9.2 (first
choice if it can be downloaded for free) or Mandrake 10.1. Both of them
can resize my NTFS partition on the first hard disk in my system to make
room for themselves, while allowing me to keep winders and both of them
will setup dual booting for me automatically and painlessly. I'm too
cheap to pay for Xandros when I don't know until I live in it again if I
will be completely satisfied or not. I would subscribe to Transgaming's
Cedega again too of course so I can play EverQuest, Anarchy Online and
other games without rebooting. I think I'll skip StarOffice and just use
the open source version of it, OpenOffice and see if that's good enough.
If after several months of use I think I am going to stay in Linux this
time around, I'll think again then about how satisfied I am with
whichever distro I am using versus what Xandros has to offer. If I don't
move to Xandros, I probably will buy Codeweavers Crossover-Office
because of the excellent Quicktime support if offers in Linux and also
because it now supports iTunes. And if for whatever reasons I am not
happy with OpenOffice it would be nice to be able run Word and Excel in
Linux. Although, I'd look to StarOffice first before taking that route.
You know though, if money wasn't a problem for me I wouldn't even bother
with Linux for my home system. I'd buy a nice Apple Macintosh computer
and use that for my everyday computing as well as whatever games I like
that are supported on it. There you have the rock solid core of FreeBSD
5 with the elegant desktop of OS X and a good variety of nice
applications to use for your everyday work and play at home. Then I'd
network a windows xp pro gaming box to it and use that system as nothing
more than a glorifed Xbox to run my PC games. I have for many years felt
that an Apple system versus a PC was something like the difference
between driving a Chevy and a Cadillac.
I don't know why Gates and the crew in Redmond don't just replace the
windows core in the next release with Linux or BSD and graft the windows
desktop onto that as Apple did with OS X. It would not be the first time
that Apple led and they followed. UNIX and its variants have stood the
test of time in terms of reliability and security whereas Windows does
not share a similar history up to this day. Of course, for all we know
perhaps they are going to do that and have not made any disclosure yet.
I do not recall noticing any discussion anywhere of Microsoft's next
operating system release or what they have planned for it. But then I
don't follow this stuff as closely as I used to so maybe there is some
news out there I am not aware of.
Anyway, if I do take the plunge I will let you guys know exactly how it
goes in terms of gaming, particularly as it applies to EverQuest.
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