Mostly we code...sometimes we write. Every once in a while, we podcast.

How the fun and Games started

Today we shipped CrossOver Games. I am very excited by this change; I have enjoyed computer games all of my life, and I like the idea that we can help others enjoy their new computers fully.

I'm also tickled by the story of how CrossOver Games came to be, and thought I would share it with you all.

We have long focused on productivity applications. Now, last year we did officially add support for games, and we made a few hires so that we could more directly support all of the great work being done in Wine on games. But, truthfully, our core focus has been on productivity applications such as Microsoft Office and Quicken.

So go back to last fall and early this winter. We're hard at work on the back breaking work of fixing Office 2007, Outlook, and recent Adobe products. We're grinding along, making slow progress. And all this time we keep noticing the most amazing progress on games. Stefan, along with the volunteers on the Wine project, is just raging in a cage; a day hardly goes by without another game running, or the framerate of a game rising, or a long standing game defect fixed.

And our Advocates start to notice; our Office support in our nightly builds isn't all that great, but boy is the game support coming along nicely.

And someone asks me: when are you going to ship all of this great work on games?

Well, I've sworn we won't ship CrossOver 7.0 until Office 2007 runs.

And, what's more, we really can't have CrossOver 7 be affected by games; after all, we need plenty of time to test and make sure it is stable and robust. At the pace and speed they are moving, before we finished a first QA run, they'd have a bunch more games fixes ready to ship.

In fact, Stefan and those game guys are going so nuts, they really should be on their own release cycle...

Light bulb


Doh!


So I'm happy to say that CrossOver Games came into existence strictly because of the brilliant work of a bunch of talented developers. You could argue that they forced my hand (forced, yes, it was torture for me to test Civ IV, torture, I tell you! 😊 ).

So, thank you to Roderick Colenbrander, Christian Costa, Alexander Dorofeyev, Stefan Dösinger, Jason Edmeades, Jason Green, Ivan Gyurdiev, Maarten Lankhorst, Vitaliy Margolen, Marcus Meissner, Oliver Stieber, Lionel Ulmer, Henri Verbeet and many others.

I am deeply grateful for all of their hard work, and I hope that we can help many people to enjoy the fruit of their labors, even if that enjoyment comes in the form of blowing each other to smithereens...

Cheers,

Jeremy

The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Ah yes, the pain of testing games for a living! I envy you big time! 😀

So this Crossover Games doesn't effect any previous Crossover for Mac? i.e. if I do not play games, there is no need for me to install it. It won't magically update my existing app?

Unfortunately I am condemned to using productivity apps ... sigh ... :)

cxgames does not affect regular crossover, but that doesn't mean it will refuse to run any non-games app. If you have a supported productivity app it may profit from our update of the underlying wine version

Congratulations! AND a big thank you for thinking of us gamers.

I am curious to see if I will be able to run Strategic Command 2 on it. I do not expect for it to run but no harm in trying.

For those customers such as myself who purchased our CrossOver Office for Linux license specifically for playing games (World of Warcraft in my case) is there an upgrade process that will allow us to use our existing 'bottles' created with CrossOver Office with CrossOver Games?

The reason I ask: I really do not want to go through the multi-hour World of Warcraft installation process!

Congrats, and thanks for a great product.

-jason

In theory you should be able to copy the bottle from ~/.cxoffice to ~/.cxgames, or archive the bottle in cxoffice and unarchive it in cxgames. However, if something doesn't work please reinstall the game using cxgames before contacting support.

Stefan- Your theory can now be considered a 'working theory'. This is what I did:

> cp -R ~/.cxoffice/win2000 ~/.cxgames

Then KMenu -> Crossover Games -> Configure. Selected the 'win2000' bottle and pressed 'configured'. Did not change anything, just verified the settings looked reasonable.

I then edited my WoW.exe desktop shortcut, replacing all path elements containing '.cxoffice' with '.cxgames'. Next, I launched World of Warcraft using the modified desktop shortcut.

Here is the really amazing part: the Wow launcher app then notified me that the WoW v2.4 patch had been released. It properly launched the Blizzard downloader, downladed the 2.4 patch, and installed it. It then proceeded to launch WoW correctly.

Beautiful! Thanks again for such a great product.

Cool!

An extra hint: If you want to run it in cxoffice and cxgames you can ln -s it as well to save disk space. Just make sure not to run the application simultaneously in both, that could cause pain

It's not working on my mac. When I try to create a new bottle and under bottle management I push the PLUS button it does nothing... if I try to push the MINUS button, the application ask me the permission to delete an inexistant win2000 bottle; here's a picture:

image

I'm sorry but in that picture the GUI is written in Italian... a rough translation of what's written inside the messagebox could be:

"If you choose to delete this bottle, all the application contained in this bottle will be deleted too. Are you really sure you want to delete it?"

But actually there are no bottles installed. I have also tried to uninstall Crossover and delete all the support files under "Application Support", and then reinstall it. But I'm still having this issue.

Francesco,

Please report that one using our support services; the blog isn't really
the right place for this conversation (Stefan is just so helpful he can't
restrain himself 😊 )

This link should help:
http://www.codeweavers.com/support/
and worst case, shoot an email to info -at- codeweavers.com.

Cheers,

Jeremy

Thanks, I'll do it :)

is there a noticable diif in performance if Wow in CXgames over office?

We did not actively work on improving WoW performance, but due to the generally updated Wine in cxgames you might see better performance.

Is there any way for us to participate? Recommend games for evaluation or whats kind of working? I remember getting Dues Ex to run in CX Mac pretty fast but it had Windowing bugs and such, it'd be nice to report this.

The other thing is, is the list of supported games going to stay relatively static or be updated more rapidly? Right now as a Mac user at least (can't speak for Linux because they get even less ports than Mac does) there's probably only one real strong game on the supported list and that is Half-Life 2... and last time I ran that on my MBP 8600GT it wasn't wholly satisfying and in fact quite slow.

I'm greatly excited by this product, and am glad its not following the subscription method of WineX/Cedega, I just would like more information about how games become supported and evaluated.

Looking at the OS/X version of Crossover Office and Crossover Games, I can't see a straightforward OS/X equivalent to the above. Any suggestions?

In finder, open /Users/<Your User Name>/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/

In there, you will see a win2000 directory. You can copy that to the /CrossOver Games/Bottles/ directory in the same /Application Support/ Dir.

I don’t want to sound like a whiner, but I really feel like you guys tend to leave the Standard users out of the process (sometimes). I just renewed by Standard subscription a few days ago. Today, Crossover Games comes out and I find I get NO discount for this. Instead, if I had spent a few more dollars, I could have upgraded to Pro and got Crossover Games for free. Instead, I will have to pony up $55 to get the same benefit. I do not think this is fair. Help! I have been (and will remain) a long-time support of Codeweavers. I have used it since the early crossover plugin came out. The only thing I use Crossover for is to run Half-life, which keeps me from having to boot into Vista just to play a game. Believe it or not, Crossover works better for me than Cedega, and I think the Games edition is a great idea. Again, I don't mean to whine, but I bet I am not the only Standard user that feels a little left out. Cheers!

Update: I noticed I could pay another $39.95 to buy the games edition as opposed to the above $55 to upgrade to the pro, but I think the point I was trying to make is still the same. Still not whining :}

That last post I read was about pro users getting games for FREE?!?!?! I just paid up subscription renewal like 10min ago...how do I get games???

Just download the demo, and unlock it. You can also get the demo from the My Downloads page under your account info page. Once in the demo, it will as you to register, just follow the directions in the GUI, it's easy.

What I'd like to see besides Office 2007 working is support for the standard applications consumers use like Taxcut. I'd like to be able to install Ubuntu for customers where I work as a PC tech and then use VirtualBox /w raw disk support to give customers access the Vista partition on new computers. I've only worked two days and I've had customers repeatedly complain about Vista or ask for alternatives. I have sold OpenOffice (probably shouldn't be doing that as it competes with sales of ms office that we sell) several times now and Ubuntu twice (although the one person who dropped off the system got talked out of it and the other hasn't dropped it off yet). It would go a long way knowing that all this works for them. Right now I think the biggest issue for me selling Linux is other incompetent tech support people telling my customers that Linux works for that it doesn't have good support or is for techy users. It isn't. I've seen enough non-technical users use it without incident to know better. The average sales techs just fear what they don't know since they don't really know anything about the tech world besides what they read on the side of a box. I had customer who used Office 2007, Taxcut, and had dialup although was looking at going with satellite internet access soon. The only other application she needed was SPSS. It just so happen that this has native Linux support and for the most part probably could have gotten away with Linux. I didn't mention the lack of Taxcut support (VirtualBox would have solved the problem though since the system came with Linux). I also now know which system to sell for users wanting Linux. Found out the system is being sold with Linux by a major manufacturer even though the store doesn't sell it with Linux.

Bravo on CrossOver Games! Great product release. Did you know your Time Limited Demo is flawed, and can be pushed to 7676 days?! Might want to check the math thats being done! ([Date in 2029] + 7 Days) - [Today] = 7676 days. Any more and the trial bugs for no days. Just thought I would share! If you need anymore info feel free to contact me.

Thanks for the kind words, and the heads up. If you wanted to drop Andrew Bogott a line,
andrew at codeweavers dot com, I think he'd appreciate the further details.
The main hope for the trial version is that it encourages people to do the right thing;
if someone is so desperate to avoid supporting us that they'll hack our demo, then we probably
wouldn't get their money anyways. Of course, it would be better if they put that effort
into improving Wine 😉

Cheers,

Jeremy

1 to 21 of 21

CodeWeavers or its third-party tools process personal data (e.g. browsing data or IP addresses) and use cookies or other identifiers, which are necessary for its functioning and required to achieve the purposes illustrated in our Privacy Policy. You accept the use of cookies or other identifiers by clicking the Acknowledge button.
Please Wait...
eyJjb3VudHJ5IjoiVVMiLCJsYW5nIjoiZW4iLCJjYXJ0IjowLCJ0enMiOi01LCJjZG4iOiJodHRwczpcL1wvbWVkaWEuY29kZXdlYXZlcnMuY29tXC9wdWJcL2Nyb3Nzb3Zlclwvd2Vic2l0ZSIsImNkbnRzIjoxNzA4NjEzODE4LCJjc3JmX3Rva2VuIjoidmRRQzlIQmZKRkhVYnRhWCIsImdkcHIiOjB9