June Development Status and Voting Report
The weather is warming up and summer is almost upon us. Right on the heels of the nice weather comes the video game industry's yearly summer drought. Each year around this time, the number of new releases is at its lowest as everyone prepares for a major push in the fall. TransGaming has taken advantage of this year's lull to continue work on some of Cedega's core components. Read on for the full details.
Technology Progress
Our primary focus this past month has been on continuing to improve overall 3D performance for titles that use shader model 2.0 and higher. With many new games requiring 2.0 shaders as a minimum requirement, we want to ensure that Cedega provides the best performance possible. Our team has been working on a number of methods to reduce loading times, provide smoother game play, and increase frame rates to the blistering speeds that gamers expect. While these improvements are not yet ready for release, we are pleased with the initial results that we've been seeing.
Part of what makes Cedega easy to use is its support for a wide range of copy protection schemes. We don't think gamers should be required to search disreputable sites looking for cracks that may or may not work, may or may not be legal and could even cause harm to your system. To that end, we have been hard at work on support for the latest version of Sony's SecuROM copy protection. This work is now almost complete, but there are a few final kinks which need to be worked out before it can be released. SecuROM 7 is used by many recent games, including Neverwinter Nights, Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, and Supreme Commander, and will need to be working before these games can reach a supported rating.
We have also been working on some improvements in a wide variety of other areas. These include: elimination of a potential stability issue in our DirectInput implementation and added support for some additional device query mechanisms. We also made a number improvements to our DirectSound layer in order to add better support for device detection and enumeration. There have also been some winsock improvements, better use of anisotropic filtering, and a number of additional libraries added. All of these updates will be available in an upcoming Cedega release.
May also saw the release of Cedega 6.0.1, a small patch-fix release to provide continuing support for World of Warcraft after the 2.1 patch. This resolved the "hang on exit" problems that had been widely reported. Since Blizzard fixed this issue on their side the very next day after our release, we immediately began to work on Cedega 6.0.2 in the hope that vendors of other online titles would follow suit.
Part of reaching that vast untapped Linux gaming audience is just being able to communicate, and as such we encourage everyone with the ability to aid us in doing so. Thanks to M. Miranda, G. Herrera and Y. van Oers for providing Italian, Spanish and Dutch translations for Cedega. We are still in need of a number of updated translations for Cedega 6.0 and 6.0.2. If you would like to help with this process, or maybe even create a completely new translation for your favorite language, please visit http://www.cedega.com/i18n/ for directions. It doesn't take very long and gives you something to talk about at your local LUG. Be sure to include your contact information with your translations, so we can give you credit!
Games
Neverwinter Nights 2™: TransGaming has done some preliminary investigation into this title. As mentioned above, we are currently working on improving both our graphics and copy protection technology in ways that will benefit this title.
Steam™: As some of you will have noticed, Steam will no longer be supported on Windows 98 by Valve. Cedega 6.0.2 resolves the correctness issues with fonts that were seen in the Source-based games seen when running in Windows 2000 or XP compatibility modes.
Command and Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars™: C&C 3 is getting closer to being supported in Cedega. As mentioned above, we are working on copy protection support for this title. We have also fixed a number of issues for this title, including the hot keys and voice chat functionality, and are continuing to work on a number of other issues.
Supreme Commander™: TransGaming is continuing to work on technology that will directly benefit this title through both improved graphics technology and copy protection support.
Voting
The voting results for May are in. Read on to find out what games and technology were top ranked by our subscribers this month.
The Positive Ranking Game Polls were:
- Neverwinter Nights 2
- Steam
- Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
- Ventrilo
The Top 5 Technology Polls were:
- MSI: Windows Installer Support
- Make the Cedega Scheduler Multi CPU aware
- Improve 3D Performance
- Support Older Games
- Add Wine builds from WineHQ for Cedega