World Wine News

• Many Direct3D fixes and performance improvements.
• Several new features in the builtin cmd.exe
.
• Improvements to HTML help support
.

To try a more complex application, you'll need its installation file--the setup.exe (or equivalent) that puts everything in place. Feed that to Wine on the command line. For instance, I decided to try running 2nd Story Software's TaxAct Deluxe on Wine this year. (I've used TaxAct for years, figuring that since its interface is simpler--that is to say, comes with fewer multimedia bells and whistles--than TurboTax and TaxCut, it would play nice with Wine sooner than those alternatives. I've been let down every year ... until now.)

Here is a new patchset for testing which implements duplicating gl contexts for new threads in wined3d. Again, it does not implement any synchronisation measures (except ENTER_GL and glFinish), so running multithreaded games is still kinda a lottery.

This patchset also contains a patch for offscreen rendering, which may fix the problems introduced with TES: Oblivion before.

This is just a format-patch of my git tree, the first 3 patches are unrelated. One of them is a clone of Henri's already sent patch, and the other 2 patches were sent by me already.

• There are many improvments in some games like Tomb Raider Legends, GTA San Andreas, HalfLife Episode One and 3DMark 2005 or 2006
• Oblivion is still broken (same as with previous patchset)
• With your previous Thread patchset Rainbow Six Vegas can even run to the menu, but now it hangs while the loading menu.
• I can't find any other regressions :)

Tested with:

• 3DMark 2003
• 3DMark 2005
• 3DMark 2006
• Alpine Sky Racing 2007
• Battlefield 2142 Demo
• Call of Duty 2
• Flatout 2
• GTA San Andreas
• Half-Life 2 EO
• NFS: MW
• NFS: Carbon (can't run it before and after)
• All NVidia SDK Direct3D Demos
• Neverwinter Nights 2 (can't run it before and after)
• Polda 5 (czech game)
• Rayman 3
• Rayman Raving Rabbids (can't run it before and after)
• Rainbow Six: Vegas
• TES IV: Oblivion
• Titan Quest (still hangs in menu)
• Tomb Raider: Legend

Awesome job! Now several more games that didn't work have started working:

• Indiana Jones and emperor tomb
• Prince of Persia Sands of the Time
• Psychonauts

All of them were crashing after playing intro video(s). The only finicky game is Psychonauts. I had to force multi-threaded d3d and even then it sometimes crashes. Apparently it's the case of thread safety that we don't have yet.

In general it seems to be a good step forward allowing lots more games to work on Wine.

I have been working on some more stuff for the MSI OLE automation, and I now have a moderately comprehensive conformance test (1000 or so lines, tests each function implemented at least for basic functionality, tests things like return codes, if you set a property and then get it do you get what you set it to, etc.). A few small patches are needed to then make my OLE automation code (which is still hanging out in wine-patches, not in git yet) pass this test.

I am going to wait to send all these new patches to wine-patches until my other patches get reviewed/committed by Alexandre. However, I thought I would post them here for any comments. I am going to be _quite_ busy starting Monday for a month though, so I may likely not be able to make any serious modifications to them if people see large problems until April. However, if anyone has any comments about these or my patches already sitting in wine-patches, please do let me know.

As you may have noticed, I've been working on HtmlHelp lately. Currently it should generally work, but still there is a lot to do. HTML should be correctly displayed and content tab should work. I was thinking about making more use of it in Wine. I think winecfg could benefit from it. We could easily add context help to winecfg using HtmlHelp API. Even just integrating a part of Wine User's Guide would be a good start. The main problem is building chm file (that is the file format of HtmlHelp). Microsoft has a HtmlHelp compiler (hhc) for it. We'd need something similar in Wine. AFAIK there is no good open source replacement. HtmlHelp maker (hhc, see [1]) doesn't create internal files (parts of chm that describes stuff like index or default topic) and it's GPLed so it's useless for Wine (unless author would relicense it for us). I think it would be a good project for Google Summer of Code. The task would be to write a hhc replacement and add a help option to winecfg. hhc replacement (say whhc) would have to be a plain UNIX tool (it means a bit of code duplication with itss.dll, just like we do in widl) so we could use it during compilation. I think its difficulty is good for SoC. Compressing code may be integrated from some other project. The remaining parts are code of parser of files describing chm and a little winecfg hacking. What do you think?

Is there any chance that someone with the ability can create the fedora core 4 wine rpms for version 0.9.30?

Fedora Core 4 RPMs are still available in the openSUSE buildservice.

YUM base URL:

http://software.opensuse.org/download/Emulators:/Wine/Fedora_Core_4/