Greetings all and Happy New Year!

It’s a new year and I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce myself to the Cedega community as the new inhabitant of The Den. My name is Blair “Skeletor” Yakimovich and I am an Associate Producer here at TransGaming Inc.. Throughout the years, I’ve been involved in several Cedega-related ventures, and this week, I’m taking a bigger step into the Cedega community to head up several of the Service’s production-related duties. Among these is the opportunity to get more involved in the Linux community, which I look forward to immensely. Throughout the coming weeks, I plan to spend increasingly more time in the forums, responding to member posts and communicating user ideas and suggestions to our development team. I will be interfacing with our beta team as well to improve the Cedega experience for all subscribers. Lastly, since I now have the keys to The Den, I’ll do my best to keep updates posted more frequently.

In other news, a lot is going on at TransGaming which can have some big benefits to the Linux community.

In late September, we formally announced our GameTree.tv initiative to enable games on Intel’s next generation consumer electronics (CE) platform ( http://gametree.tv ). Intel’s new CE chipset is being adopted by many consumer device manufactures for products such as Blu-Ray players, set-top boxes, and TVs. The Intel CE software platform is built entirely on Linux, and TransGaming is leveraging the core technology from Cedega to power the GameTree.tv Gaming Platform for the digital home.

We are seeing significant interest in this new digital home platform from game developers and publishers, as well as many others in the consumer electronics industry. As we work on this Linux-based initiative, we believe that there will be significant benefits to the wider Linux gaming community. We are extremely excited to see this new level of interest in Linux from the global game development and publishing communities.

Speaking of development, are you a developer? Are you working on a unique and addictive game? If so, check out our GameTree.tv Content Developer Program ( http://developer.gametree.tv ). This program provides access to all SDK releases, offering content creators a development environment for the creation or adaption of games on the GameTree.tv Gaming Platform. The GameTree.tv Content Developer Program provides you another way to get your content out to the masses.

As I said, a lot is going on. Keep your eyes on Cedega.com for more updates in the near future. Until then, I’ll be unpacking my bags and settling in. See you soon!

In Service,
Skeletor

Last week was the Fifth Annual EVE Fanfest, the party at the top of the world. As the partner that bring EVE Online to Mac and Linux, TransGaming was invited to join a thousand players, staff, press and hangers on to join in the fun. I was lucky enough to attend this years festivities that included some excellent sessions, round tables, announcements and of course the type of party that only Icelanders could throw.

EVE players were shown the future of EVE with the announcement of the next expansion, True Exploration, scheduled for March 2008 that will include for the first time Tech 3 such as modular ships that will let players customize their vessels. Unexplored space, unstable wormholes and epic mission arcs will let players experience the universe like they never have before. The Walking in Stations demo gave everyone a sneak peek at an unscheduled expansion previously known as Ambulation. A total game changer for EVE Online W.I.S. will provide players with the ability to get out of their ships and, as the title suggest, walk in stations. More than just walking is in the works. Players will be able to rent out shops, bars, offices and other areas to provide a true social simulation within EVE. With mini-games, shops and even dancing slaves Walking in Stations will provide everyone something new to do within EVE.

Perhaps the most exciting news for Linux and Mac gamers alike is that the Premium content is now up and running in-house (those at the round table even got a brief sneak preview). While not yet ready for public release internal QA is underway and players can expect a Beta soon. The premium content was originally planned for Q1 2008 but was delayed when a number of issues, mostly related around performance, were discovered. CCP and TransGaming have been working together to identify a number of areas where improvements could be made on both sides of the fence. For example CCP was able to reduce draw calls in many cases, in one such case from over 250 draw calls down to 8. We are continuing to work on EVE Premium until it passes the exacting standards of both CCP and TransGaming.

After all the great sessions and announcements it was time to enjoy party. In the land of ice and snow the crowd rocked out to CCP’s in house band ROXOR and danced the night away. When asked if it was a good time all I can say is that these guys really know how to throw a party.

You can try out EVE Online with a free 14-day trial.

This month marks a milestone both for Cedega and myself. With the release of Cedega 6.1 we are seeing the evolution of Cedega to a complete Gaming Service that is so much more than it was. For myself, this month also marks my 7th year with TransGaming, Cedega and Linux gaming. From my start as QA and Support technician to Product Manager I have been witness to the growth of Cedega from an interesting technology to a full-blown Linux gaming solution and service.

In those seven years there have been many ups and downs, both personally and professionally, but one thing hasn’t changed, I remain committed to Linux gaming. Over the years many have expressed their views to me on Linux, gaming, the Open Source movement and the industry as a whole. I have heard every opinion and forecast, from the death of Linux to its preeminence in the desktop market. I have seen the rise and fall of many Linux distributions and gaming franchises. Through all the hard times I have kept my belief that Linux is a strong Desktop platform and will continue to surge and gain market share. While I see a number of steep cliffs to climb I have no doubt that Linux and the Linux community will remain strong, vibrant and growing for many years to come. My personal mission remains the same as it was years ago; ensuring that Cedega not only keeps pace with the evolution of Linux and gaming, but to make Cedega an integral part of that evolution.

With that in mind I call on the Linux community tell me how can I make the Cedega Gaming Service even better? We all want to see more games available to Linux and performance improvements but what else can Cedega do to make Linux gaming not just possible but preferable.

Send your comments, thoughts and suggestions to theden@cedega.com and tell me what your ultimate Linux gaming experience would be.

So far in Cedega 6.1 we have added support for some of the hottest windows titles out there; Neverwinter Nights 2, Call of Duty 4, Spore Creature Creator, Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, Team Fortress 2, Portal and even gotten Shader Model 3.0 and HDR support working in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Some of these titles do still have a few issues but are in the most part playable out of the box. Most notably Neverwinter Nights 2 has some graphical corruption on all cards and some significant graphical corruption on NVIDIA 6XXX and 7XXX series of cards. We don’t have a fix for this issue yet but as soon we do we will make a new beta release available or post a work around in the forums. We have also had reports from our Beta Team that NVWN2 is working very well on ATI cards when specific options are selected. Check out the Neverwinter Nights 2 on ATI thread in the Cedega 6.1 Beta forum for more details.

Some games we thought we had working but still have some items that keep them from earning the supported rating. For example Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword and Sins of a Solar Empire. However, we do have work arounds for some of the key issues. One of the biggest problems getting Beyond the Sword working in Cedega is getting it installed in the first place. There is a work around that can get this going. The installer fails with an error message that the patch cannot be installed. This is actually not true. We believe that a call back to the game installer from the patch installer is failing and giving this erroneous message. In the background the patch is actually installing. If you open a terminal and do “ps ax |grep -i Civ4 ” you will see processes are running in the background, this is the patch. There is an easy work around for this issue. Before installing the Beyond the Sword expansion do an update from within the game. This will update the game to the necessary versions for BTS, once finished you can go ahead and install the expansion. If you have Warlords installed you will probably have to do an update both for the original game and for Warlords.

We have also had reports of instability issues in Civilization IV with Beyond the Sword. We are investigating these reports but are having great difficulty reproducing the problems internally. We are asking Cedega Gaming Service Members who are experiencing these issues to please report your experiences in the Civilization IV Beyond the Sword thread in the Cedega 6.1 Beta Forum. Please be sure to post the details from Cedega: Tools -> System/Hardware Information. The more we can learn about this issue the faster we will be able to solve it.

Sins of a Solar Empire is also working very well in Cedega once you get past a few issues. Some testers have had problems clicking the next button in the SoaSE installer. Running this in a window should allow you to complete the installation of the game. Once in the game there are a few minor issues including text size and some slowdowns. These issues will be looked at as time allows.

Certain members of our Beta Team have access to the World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King beta and have already started to test against Cedega 6.1 and log issues. We are happy to say that once it is installed the game is working well with certain settings. The installer is definitely an issue at this point requiring you to scroll through the EULA for the Agree button to become active. Currently there is no way to activate the Agree button making it impossible to install at this time. However, using a copy over from an installation under Windows (Wine also experiences the same Agree button issue) does work and Lich King beta members can play to their hearts content. Beta Team members have promised to post the details of their experiences in the Cedega 6.1 Beta forum. Thanks goes to our Beta team for all of their hard work.

As many of you may have already noticed we are currently in the midst of a number of updates to Cedega.com. We have started the process that will see a total overhaul of Member services over the coming months. The first step have been to amalgamate the entire site under a single look and feel and a single login. One of the most important facets of the current updates is moving Cedega.com to a new server and distribution that can handle greater load in preparation for the upcoming changes.

Once the server migration has been completed we will be rolling out new features and updates throughout the summer, into the fall and beyond. The key sections we will be focusing on over the next few months are the forums, the games database and the voting section. Each month we will be announcing additional details of our plans in The Grape Vine. Check the voting page for more information on our plans for updates there.

We are very excited about some of the planned changes. Keep coming back to Cedega.com to experience the changes first hand.