44 replies to this topic

[Smoke_Tetsu]

It's still a service they are providing though and it saves some people having to do it themselves and it's still the game after all. It's also not like they are charging full price for it.. it's just $10 or free if you had already purchased it, not $50. You get a pre-wrapped copy without having to pirate it.

And who knows.... They may do a fully native port later on. Also they are not selling the wrapper but the game inside the wrapper and support for said game. Now, wether or not using FOSS for such a thing is kosher that's another subject. But I remember reading doh123 saying she thinks it's OK to use wineskin in such a manner.

[Tacohead]

Smoke_Tetsu, on 07 April 2012 - 06:01 AM, said:

It's still a service they are providing though and it saves some people having to do it themselves and it's still the game after all. It's also not like they are charging full price for it.. it's just $10 or free if you had already purchased it, not $50. You get a pre-wrapped copy without having to pirate it.

Smoke_Tetsu, on 07 April 2012 - 06:01 AM, said:

Also they are not selling the wrapper but the game inside the wrapper and support for said game.

Exactly. Let's not forget there's a huge, critically acclaimed, award-winning RPG inside that wrapper. That's what you're paying for. Would I prefer the Feral way (properly ported Legends label title for $30)? Definitely; But as long as this works in a download and double-click and play way I'll take it. Ironically most people probably wouldn't know the difference between something like this and a Feral Legends title, except for the price, Both download, double-click and play. Most people would be none the wiser. Us geeks know better of coarse.

-PN

P.S. I'm with Janichsan on one thing though. I don't think any success this "port" might have will encourage proper ports. At least in this case.

[rampancy]

Janichsan, on 07 April 2012 - 05:47 AM, said:

More likely than not, buying this pseudo-port will do nothing than encouraging this kind of crap. "Hey, look! We only have to use some else's freeware Wine wrapper, slap it on our software and desperate Mac gamers still buy it. Minimal effort, maximum profit for us! Yay!" The Witcher 2 also runs well in Wine, so if anything, you will again only get the thinly disguised Windows version.

Which would hold true if this game ran poorly in WINE/Wineskin, but it doesn't, at least by the accounts here. Much of the FUD that broke out over early Cider-based WINE "ports" of Mac games were just as much due to the bugginess of the games themselves (e.g. X3, HoMM V) as they were the fact that WINE was still in the process of becoming a mature technology.

WINE though has progressed in leaps and bounds lately, and it's gotten to the point where I can get a game to run better though Wineskin or CrossOver than I can it's original native port.

[Wumpus]

Janichsan, on 07 April 2012 - 05:47 AM, said:

More likely than not, buying this pseudo-port will do nothing than encouraging this kind of crap. "Hey, look! We only have to use some else's freeware Wine wrapper, slap it on our software and desperate Mac gamers still buy it. Minimal effort, maximum profit for us! Yay!" The Witcher 2 also runs well in Wine, so if anything, you will again only get the thinly disguised Windows version.

Reading the comments on that link it doesn't look so hot. It has a Gold rating, but a number of bugs and performance issues are mentioned. TW2 is an extremely good looking game that isn't particularly well optimized. I'm surprised it would run well at all under wine.

That being said I'm supposed to interview one of the devs as to how/why they brought the witcher to the mac. Perhaps the issues or dissatisfaction with wine can be brought up and it would provide feedback. A long shot I know, but sometimes it works.

[Smoke_Tetsu]

rampancy, on 07 April 2012 - 09:41 AM, said:

Much of the FUD that broke out over early Cider-based WINE "ports" of Mac games were just as much due to the bugginess of the games themselves (e.g. X3, HoMM V) as they were the fact that WINE was still in the process of becoming a mature technology.

That's kind of a good point actually. If a game is buggy in windows WINE is certainly not going to make things better. Also it may expose bugs in a game that would normally get overlooked because believe it or not sometimes software relies upon bugs or quirks in windows that aren't replicated in WINE or something like that. For an average user it can be hard to tell the difference and it's easy to blame WINE.

Quote

WINE though has progressed in leaps and bounds lately, and it's gotten to the point where I can get a game to run better though Wineskin or CrossOver than I can it's original native port.

As with anything this depends on the game but yeah that sometimes can happen especially for older ports which have been allowed to slowly break over time on OS X due to not patching for the latest OS. Some of those games don't run well or at all. Like for example.. American McGee's Alice still hasn't been patched and one has to turn off GL Extensions for it to work which causes bugginess in the game.

On the other hand some games I can run through WINE very well like Wolfenstein (2009), Monolith's games, Clive Barker's Jericho but I have hardly any frame of reference for those because there aren't any native ports of said games to compare them to.

Anyway, last night I played The Witcher all night having upgraded the engine to 1.5 and I still get some crashes here and there which happen usually randomly during transitions to other parts of the level. Also I've had a few black screens entering dialog tree screens after a while. But I can still play for hours in between those happenings.

BTW, one thing that WINE has going for it is that it's not emulation. It doesn't do any CPU emulation or emulation of other chips or set of hardware. Running any of those games I mentioned earlier via actual emulation such as Xbox 360 emulation would probably require a Intel Core i10 Adamantium Bridge 10Ghz to run half as well as they do in WINE.

Like for example I have ran Rayman Origins in actual emulation playing the Wii version on my Mac via emulation and when I wrapped the Windows version in WINE it ran better.... there wasn't the same kind of slowdowns I got running it via actual (Wii) emulation and I can run it at higher resolution than I can run Wii games.

[doh123]

Smoke_Tetsu, on 06 April 2012 - 06:12 PM, said:

Anyway, I have wrapped a bunch of games but I don't consider myself a porter.... amateur or otherwise. Why? Well because I'm a non-coder and I did not touch a line of code and I can't code my way out of a wet paper bag. Most wrapping "amateurs" do consist of installing this and that software and tweaking settings. It's more like installing than porting... I call it wrapping. Presumably though the person or people in CD Project who wrapped this game did some tweaks to the source code of various things like DirectX or whatever to get any glitches out of the way though. The source code to WINE is freely available after all.

Some games are harder to port than others... porting used to be much harder, and doing Cider hacks still can get kinda difficult.  Using Wineskin for gold+ rated games though is usually very easy, and one reason i started Wineskin in the first place... to make it easy.  I guess this all comes down to how you define a porter.  I don't really see a hobby porter title on the same ranks of an actual programmer, since usually all you need to do is use other software, modify some config files and such.  Many porters would make better ports if they were programmers, since they could add in scripts or other programs that could fix issues or make things easier for others using their wrappers, but they usually don't because they just don't know how.

That said, if you have the drive to learn, it doesn't take much to learn some coding... just a little drive and time.

Smoke_Tetsu, on 07 April 2012 - 06:01 AM, said:

And who knows.... They may do a fully native port later on. Also they are not selling the wrapper but the game inside the wrapper and support for said game. Now, wether or not using FOSS for such a thing is kosher that's another subject. But I remember reading doh123 saying she thinks it's OK to use wineskin in such a manner.

The only thing that could be trouble with selling the game is that cabextract is in Wineskin.app and its GPL, not LGPL... but since they deleted out Wineskin.app then its no longer there.  The licenses used in everything in the wrapper allows for its use in commercially sold software.  Now if they made changes to some of the software, some of the licenses like LGPL require they make those code changes available to anyone who requests them... but as far as it seems, they didn't change any of the open source code.

I'm glad to see Wineskin being used for things like this myself... its one of the whole reasons I started Wineskin and why I made it LGPL instead of GPL.

[Smoke_Tetsu]

Well, even if a person did some tweaks to a WINE engine making a custom version and including scripts that might help with various things they are still doing it rather blindly not having access to the source code of the game itself (or the know how or aptitude to even understand it if they did). Also I guess difficult can be a relative term and doing cider hacks is relatively harder than using wineskin because typically they don't include handy dandy utilities like winetricks with it. Too bad wineskin can't include cider's WINE engines because it runs certain games on ATI hardware better than winehq's or crossover's engines such as UE3 engine games.

[doh123]

Smoke_Tetsu, on 08 April 2012 - 06:05 AM, said:

Too bad wineskin can't include cider's WINE engines because it runs certain games on ATI hardware better than winehq's or crossover's engines such as UE3 engine games.

I'd love too, but Cider is not open source.  People only have it from hacking apart other games that have been ported with it and using the same ones.. no one has source code.

I did try using Cedega source to make some Wineskin engines... but they leave out too much of their code to make anything usable... they only put the code in that they are required to under license and not enough for a complete working product.

[UmarOMC1]

Janichsan, on 07 April 2012 - 05:47 AM, said:

More likely than not, buying this pseudo-port will do nothing than encouraging this kind of crap. "Hey, look! We only have to use some else's freeware Wine wrapper, slap it on our software and desperate Mac gamers still buy it. Minimal effort, maximum profit for us! Yay!" The Witcher 2 also runs well in Wine, so if anything, you will again only get the thinly disguised Windows version.

I don't think this is a good attitude. How else are they going to gauge Mac sales? This might be the very approach some do take, but you think they won't take a look at the numbers? Do you think they won't be gauging feedback? Whose to say some developers won't use said data to take a more Blizzard-like approach for future titles not too heavily invested in the development pipeline?

It costs money to have someone put a game into a wrapper, even if its something that takes minimal effort for the well-practiced, but its better than; 1. not publishing for the Mac, most people don't know about WINE, can't figure it out or don't want to bother and 2. its better than investing in their Windows development by making your purchase add to the bottom line of the numbers they get back from sales, cutting into Mac development.

Is 1,000 a small number? If even 1,000 people whom purchased Wintel games to run via WINE purchased their Mac counterparts. The heaviest counterargument I have is the time-frame, but I'd rather never buy it than let them know I've got my paltry $50 for their no-Mac development outlook...

[Janichsan]

UmarOMC1, on 08 April 2012 - 03:42 PM, said:

How else are they going to gauge Mac sales?

As if no company before jumped directly into the Mac market with native ports of less successful or less known games. Did Topware  "gauge the Mac sales" with non-ports before releasing Two Worlds II as native Mac version? Did 1C do that before releasing the much older King's Bounty as a native port?

And don't you think that releasing a shoddy port does nothing but hurting future sales (except maybe to complete idiots with learning disabilities)? Even if they sell enough copies of The Witcher for Mac to provide future support, how many customers that got burnt do you think will ever buy a port from them again?

Quote

It costs money to have someone put a game into a wrapper, ...

Probably $600 for the cheapest Mac mini. Wineskin is freeware and judging from the comments here, they couldn't have spent a lot of time to create and test their wrapper.

[Smoke_Tetsu]

Janichsan, on 09 April 2012 - 07:27 AM, said:

And don't you think that releasing a shoddy port does nothing but hurting future sales (except maybe to complete idiots with learning disabilities)?

I'm sorry but with that you and this thread has jumped the shark.   Seriously, is it really necessary to go around insulting people because you don't agree with this wrapped version of the game?

[Janichsan]

Smoke_Tetsu, on 09 April 2012 - 09:21 AM, said:

Seriously, is it really necessary to go around insulting people because you don't agree with this wrapped version of the game?

The "complete idiots with learning disabilities" weren't targeted at you or anyone else here (or anyone just because they are in favour of wrappers). I apologise if you took it that way.

[Wumpus]

I'm having a terrible time with the port, but its not burning me over it. Probably because I'm a giant Witcher fan and I've already played it before on PC.

I am worried that Ted (who is going to review this for IMG) will encounter some issues that will prevent his review. I'm pretty sure he's not capable of tinkering around with WINE like a bunch of folks here have had to do. Or he could learn etc, but you shouldn't have to hack a game just to get it to run Its basically an instant disqualify from any critical point of view. "An amazing and Epic RPG - assuming it can launch or doesn't plague you with bugs and crashes" is what my review would say at the moment.

The PC version doesn't have this amount of trouble, so it is a bad mark for the port. One of my main problems (black screens) is a known issue over at winehq: http://bugs.winehq.o...ug.cgi?id=15904 and I managed to play for an hour last night, then it hard crashed and I lost my progress

*edit*

I just used the contact form at CD Projekts website to inform them of all my problems. Will be interesting to see what kind of response they have.

[Eric5h5]

I'm generally in favor of native ports because of issues like this, but occasionally non-native ports work.  For example, if someone hadn't said that Psychonauts was Cider, I would never have known--it doesn't have any of the kinda shoddy "Cider feel" that those ports usually have.  Also, the recent King's Bounty release is apparently native, but seems plagued with graphics glitches, yet the Windows version runs flawlessly in Crossover.

--Eric

[UmarOMC1]

I'd love a native, Feral Interactive-style port, too but I'm not going to cry about getting The Witcher released officially for Mac, albeit via WINE, for $10. That's the cost of 2 copies of Angry Birds on the Mac App Store... or about 14 1/3 cups of 70¢ coffee we could be sending to Feed The Children's coffers...

If anyone might feel guilty about having already invested in the PC version or downloaded a pirated version there's no reason to rain on everyone else's metaphorical parade. I've yet to have any problems with the game on my system, everything maxed @1680*1050.

[Sargiel]

Hmm for the price I can't complain. Getting it on Steam as a steamplay title means that if I really wanted to mess around with a more up to date version of wineskin I could - or I could just run it as 'ported'. Don't think this is really an issue and am happy to have picked up a classic RPG for £6.99 that I know will run just fine

[Tacohead]

UmarOMC1, on 09 April 2012 - 11:40 AM, said:

I'd love a native, Feral Interactive-style port, too but I'm not going to cry about getting The Witcher released officially for Mac, albeit via WINE, for $10. That's the cost of 2 copies of Angry Birds on the Mac App Store... or about 14 1/3 cups of 70¢ coffee we could be sending to Feed The Children's coffers...

If anyone might feel guilty about having already invested in the PC version or downloaded a pirated version there's no reason to rain on everyone else's metaphorical parade. I've yet to have any problems with the game on my system, everything maxed @1680*1050.

How do you get 1680*1050? That choice of resolution doesn't appear for me. The upper choices are 1920*1080 and 1400*1050.

-PN

[UmarOMC1]

Tacohead, on 09 April 2012 - 12:42 PM, said:

How do you get 1680*1050? That choice of resolution doesn't appear for me. The upper choices are 1920*1080 and 1400*1050.

-PN

It was preset at that resolution, the native resolution of my monitor.

[Tacohead]

UmarOMC1, on 11 April 2012 - 07:18 AM, said:

It was preset at that resolution, the native resolution of my monitor.

Ahh ok. I'm running it in a virtual desktop which would explain it. Thanks.

-PN

[Nox]

Runs extremely well for me (27 iMac, 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7, 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4850 512 MB). I think it's a fantastic-looking game with an intriguing story and style of play. Sure, a native port would be preferable, as a matter of principle. But it works, and for ten bucks, I really can't find it in me to complain.