Windows beats Linux for gaming

[dean1969]

I am a diehard Linux fan and I would love to make Linux my one-and-only operating system, but I'm also a multiplayer gaming fan and that's why I have to keep Microsoft on my system. When will some of the great games such as Novalogic's Blackhawk Down be available for Linux? Someone please help me kick the Microsoft habit. Has anyone had success running this game using Wine?

[CoffeeMan]

That right now is a bottleneck for desktop linux. I am not too much of a gamer, so Linux is perfect for me.
For you, wine is system that includes rundll32, which won't run you'r 3D games, what you might want to check out is Transgaming's Cedega, it costs a little bit of money, but there are forums and support along with a subscription. What Cedega is, is an implementation of wine with DirectX emulation. This is capable of running windows games. Transgaming has packages available in rpm, deb, and tgz. There is a graphical application called point2play, which needs Cedega to be installed, but it is really useful, it will scan your hardware, and some other things that will make it a painless process installing and playing games.
And (GNU) Linux really is the way to go, I read an article today in the EETimes newspaper that Linux had fewer bugs per line of code than any know proprietary Operationg System. That is something to think about.

[CoffeeMan]

Sorry, I forgot to attatch the link
http://www.transgaming.com/products_linux.php

[Icarus]

Cedega is great for those Windows games that happen to work with it (check out the game database (http://transgaming.org/gamesdb/) to see if it's good enough for you

As for what games are available under Linux?
Here's a few... (http://www.icculus.org/lgfaq/gamelist.php) (319 currently ;))
Check the Linux Gaming Links sticky I have in the Games forum (http://www.justlinux.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=31) (and let me know if any links are broken, I need to make sure that's updated ;))

[pezplaya]

I'm going to have to agree with dean1969. Linux is awesome, I use it everday and will never go back to windows. Yes there is cedega, but the windows games do not run as smooth as in windows; your fps is lower and there are bugs. (btw i am a transgaming subscriber)

They do have native linux games like ut2004, doom3, and more (Icarus gave a link), but as of now i think if you do have some non-native linux games its better to keep a tiny windows partition off to the side so you can play those games... at least i think so. I know people will disagree with me.

I was at a lan party today and one of my friends spent hours just trying to get the original cs working on his gentoo stage 1 with cedega. I was going to use my gentoo system, but I had windows on my other partition so I used that instead. It was a time to game and have fun, not configure.

[blobaugh]

If you are a hardcore gamer than maybe you should keep a windows partition around. Linux is great for everything else. I'm not much of a gamer, but I bet if linux did have better game support I would probably game more often.

[servo888]

Originally posted by pezplaya
I'm going to have to agree with dean1969. Linux is awesome, I use it everday and will never go back to windows. Yes there is cedega, but the windows games do not run as smooth as in windows; your fps is lower and there are bugs. (btw i am a transgaming subscriber)

They do have native linux games like ut2004, doom3, and more (Icarus gave a link), but as of now i think if you do have some non-native linux games its better to keep a tiny windows partition off to the side so you can play those games... at least i think so. I know people will disagree with me.

I was at a lan party today and one of my friends spent hours just trying to get the original cs working on his gentoo stage 1 with cedega. I was going to use my gentoo system, but I had windows on my other partition so I used that instead. It was a time to game and have fun, not configure.

Yes I was at that same lanparty today... Infact I was the one getting my games to work =-(. But that's because I didn't debug ahead of time. I had a big problem with cedega not running halflife - that was because of a problem in fluxbox - for some reason it didn't load up the menu. And I had major problems in ut2004 because of a problem (which was fixed in the later patch - but since we played on the old patch I couldn't sort it out) to getting a connection failure after joining.

All of these problems were huge - and very anoying. Though in the end I fixed most of them. Now is linux ready for the gaming world? Well if somebody doesn't sort of out bugs and fix problems it will never be ready for the gaming world. But once it becomes a lot more stable and user friendly then it will over take windows when it comes to gaming. Currently if your writting a new game (not based on closed sourced DirectX) such as doom, or unreal, you can very easily port the games over to linux. Well not 'very' easily but many standard libraries such as opengl do exist on both platforms.

Right now, I will not play games that don't run on linux... I'm not a big gamer in general - but the more presure we create on the game companies the better the support will become. So take a chance, screw that windows parition, and install a raw linux :-)

[eskiled]

Not to beat down your thread or anything, but hasn't this topic been beaten to death already? All we ever hear about linux is "oh my god its so hard, why cant it be more user friendly" and "man the gaming on linux sucks, thats why i have to keep windows." Yeah we know, it seams to me we get a post about it just about every week. Might it be wiser of linux users to complain to the big companys who make games, instead of forum members who can't do anything about it? Shouldn't we spend this time in which we have written about how much linux gaming sucks to our fellow users, and use it to write to the major companies. If as many people wrote to the companies as they bellyache on forums, then maybe gaming in linux wouldnt suck so much.


Sorry if im being an ***, it just kind of annoys me.

eskiled




Ps. Again im not trying to be mean, just stating my opinion.

/me hopes i didn't just troll

[dean1969]

The First Ammendment gives us the right to speak/write about any subject that we choose. Luck for you it also gives us the right to protest when we don't agree with what has been said. With that I'll close this by saying God Bless America and God Bless Linux. Have a nice day.

[Icarus]

I think servo888 touched on part of the problem, INSTALL THE PATCHES! :p

Patches aren't put out to make the games look like people care, they are made to fix problems Personally I've run every patch level of UT2004 on Gentoo with Fluxbox and never had a single problem because of my config. The patches fixed problems that everyone else had that I may or may not have seen

As for CS...what was the problem? The only time CS has given me troubles is when Steam does some update and something breaks...but in cases like this Transgaming is VERY quick at putting out a patch.
And for Cedega being slower, it's not terribly if at all. Half-Life runs great and I forget that it wasn't even suppose to run on Linux! There are many games that don't run or do run poor, no illusion there as it's true. But CS runs great.

Dead Horse

[wrender]

I find linux is better in all aspects, except for...

web developing software
digital video editing
gaming
photo editing


I hope in the future more of these companies will develop for linux, i guess we'll just have to wait and see how the market goes.

[janne_oksanen]

Because of the reasons mentioned above I bought myself a gaming console for my gaming needs. Don't have to worry about new games not running or messing around with wine. In Linux I play whatever is native and free (as in beer will do for me) like AA or ET. That's plenty to get my fix every day ;)

[eskiled]

Originally posted by dean1969
The First Ammendment gives us the right to speak/write about any subject that we choose. Luck for you it also gives us the right to protest when we don't agree with what has been said. With that I'll close this by saying God Bless America and God Bless Linux. Have a nice day.

Okay, way to state the obvious there dean...I didn't say he couldn't, I said perhaps its wiser to complain to the people who can do something about it. And by the way this is an international forum, so really, the first ammendment doesn't apply to everyone, nor does everyone even know what it is.


(another worthless post for today lol),
eskiled

[dean1969]

Thanks for your input and comments. I wasn't scalding you, I was just having a few beers and surfing the forum. Have a nice day.

[eskiled]

Sorry, holidays always put me in a frantic mood.


Merry christmas everyone,
eskiled

[blobaugh]

I totally agree with eskiled. the topic has been beaten to death. maybe we should create yet another main thread. [Linux Gaming vs Windows Gaming]. heh

And eskiled beat me to it that this is not a USA forum so the rights are not necessarily applicable here