Lots of regressions in games in last few versions

[Reece Dunn]

2008/5/11 Tom Wickline <twickline at gmail.com>:
> Well its not only Games, if you install office 2007 NOTHING works with RC-1!
> You have to revert back to 0.9.59 for it to work the best it ever did, then
> it's all down hill from each release forward ......As it looks Wine
> 1.0 will be a huge POS......

That's unfair.

To start with, the CodeWeavers team has been working on getting Office
2007 working, but that work is still *in progress*.

What would be bad is if older versions of Office stopped working, as
they have been working for a long time, and are part of CodeWeavers
core business model.

Also, Photoshop CS1 and CS2 were made to work on Wine. going further
back, there was the latest ITunes (current reports on the AppDB are
rating it Gold or Bronze, so it appears to still be functional with
recent Wine versions).

The problem is that as Wine gets closer to Windows, implementing more
functionality, applications running on it are going to start to try
and do new things (e.g. if they QueryInterface for an interface that
Wine adds stubs for, the application is going to start calling that
interface). Don't forget that as it stands, Wine is not (yet!) a
complete Windows clone.

Newer versions of applications tend to be more demanding on their API
requirements, needing .NET or GDIPlus, or some other MS API that is
not fully implemented by Wine. And the more recent a game is, the
higher the DirectX version it needs, and the more they push the
graphics card drivers.

Note also with the games that IIRC, bugs in graphics card drivers are
not being worked around, so some of the crashes may be due to driver
bugs. On Vista, I have had a bad experience with the NVidia drivers,
so that is not limited to Linux/Wine. As well as this, there are still
various fixmes that may (or may not) contribute to some of the game
crashes. DirectX is a complicated API which games can often abuse (I
remember Stephan mention that some games have DirectX bugs in them),
and the fact that games run *at all* is an incredible feat; Kudos to
the wined3d developers.

So while Wine is not perfect (it is definitely a work in progress) it
has a good set of features and is long overdue for a 1.0 release.

There is a balance between keeping code stable and improving it. This
is especially true when reworking code to better support new
functionality. I suspect that the improved DIB engine work will have a
few regressions, but that work still needs to be done for performance
reasons.

If something is not working for you, file a bug. That is the only way
to get the bugs fixed. Especially if something has regressed. Now is
the time to be testing and filing bug reports.

And to some extend, I agree with Vitality: every bug (unless there is
a really good reason not to) should have an associated regression test
so that it will not reappear in the future, but reverting any patch
going that far back is too drastic and may be reverting a patch (or
patches) that fix another bug.

- Reece