April Development Status & Voting Report
April 11, 2007This month we bring you Cedega 6.0, with a feature list so thick it nearly gave our marketing department carpal tunnel syndrome from typing it all. Highlights include many long-awaited poll items like Shader Model 2.0 support, an FBO rewrite, and audio enhancements like support for ALSA Dmix with mmap. We've addressed a number of issues with newer distributions in the UI, and added support for Battlefield 2142, Need for Speed: Carbon, Madden NFL 07, and out-of-the-box support of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Head on over to Cedega.com to see all of the cool new features, and grab your copy today. Then, while you're waiting for it to download, head back here to read up on what your Cedega development team was up to this month.
Technology Progress
The run up to a Cedega release generally involves a lot of housekeeping, and this month was no exception. Given the number of improvements that are in Cedega 6.0, there were a lot of loose ends that needed to be tied up in terms of how we present new features, as well as last minute polish to be added before getting it all out the door.
In the graphics department, we took some time to address some issues related to speed of video playback. Pirates and a number of other titles have movies that, due to a recent reorganization of some of our exception handling code, were running slower than usual. This has been fixed, and further speed optimizations have been added for movies using similar playback mechanisms. We also had a lot of tiny bug-fixes aimed at tidying up new features and fixing small issues with various games. Games benefiting from such changes include Dungeon Siege with a rendering fix, Oblivion and World of Warcraft on ATI cards, Pirates with GLSL, and Battlefield 2142 with performance. As well, we finally worked around some issues that were preventing GLSL from working at all on ATI cards, allowing us to simultaneously support GLSL for both of the major video card vendors in Cedega 6.0.
In file handling code, we've made a few changes to how the temporary directory is handled, which fixed some issues with the Battlefield 2142 updates. Our module loading code has also been beefed up to fix another problem in the same game. A potential issue in our optical drive code was fixed, and our D-Bus integration has also been improved; we now integrate cleanly with the final 1.0.0 version of D-Bus. This is a stabilization point for that API, so hopefully less ongoing maintenance in this area will be necessary.
More generally, we've fixed a memory leak problem related to our new allocator, added support for the blending functions that Steam uses in its UI that were previously causing black bars around buttons, fixed a number of window ordering issues that were causing problems in Steam and Starcraft, worked around an issue in the most recent patches of a couple of Blizzard titles related to I/O handling, and added a preliminary implementation of the winhttp DLL. With the exception of the last item, all of these fixes are present and shipping in Cedega 6.0.
On the GUI side of things, we've added a test for 32-bit compatibility libraries, added toggles for a bunch of our new features, and fixed a number of minor issues that have popped up in testing. We've also made a ton of updates to our Games Disc Database (GDDB), specifying which features work best for each supported game. This knowledge was gleaned through painstaking research on the part of our beta and internal testing teams, and we encourage you to make full use of it.
On the WineHQ front, we have incorporated a number of fixes to the LGPLed preloader component, and we have recently submitted a number of our own changes to the riched20 and iphlpapi DLLs back to the WineHQ community. Our continuing thanks goes out to the WineHQ developers and our other contributers for all of your hard work and effort!
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. With the release of Cedega 6.0, there is a need for many of our translations to be updated. If you would like to help with that process, or maybe even create a completely new translation for your favorite language, please visit http://transgaming.org/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 continued investigating NWN2. We have fixed one of the patcher issues, but there continue to be a number of other installer and patcher issues. As well, the version of copy protection used by this game is not currently supported by Cedega.
Elder Scrolls® IV: Oblivion™: This game is running quite nicely now in Cedega 6.0 on NVIDIA cards. The only graphics option not working at this point is HDR. ATI users should expect a lot of missing graphics. The expansion for this game has a version of copy protection which is not currently supported by Cedega.
Steam™: Steam continues to work in Cedega 6.0. We are working on tracking down some remaining focus and window ordering issues, although the latter should be less of an issue with this release.
Civilization® IV: This game continues to work with Cedega 6.0. The 1.52 patch (or later) is highly recommended. This game should now work quite well on both ATI and NVIDIA video cards, when using the provided GDDB settings.
Command and Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars™: We continue to look at a number of installer and copy protection issues related to this game.
Voting
The voting results for March are in. Read on to find out whose supporters were stuffing the ballot boxes this month!
The Top 5 Game Polls were:
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Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
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Neverwinter Nights 2
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Steam
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Civilization IV
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Supreme Commander
The Top 5 Technology Polls were:
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Pixel Shader 2.0 Support
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DirectX 9
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Make the Cedega Scheduler Multi CPU aware
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Improved ALSA Support
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Improve 3D Performance