world of warcraft players, LISTEN UP

[hotballz87]

i know there are alot of wow players here, and i BET all of you would absolutely LOVE to have wow as a linux native game.

i have recently discovered an ever-growing foeum post on the wow forums, trying this exact thing, so please support it.

even people that dont play wow, this would be a huge impact on the linux gaming community, the largest MMO ever having a linux client,

please support, and sign
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=102817571&sid=1&pageNo=1

[LokeTheDog]

Come on, to actually remake the game to fit linux natively would most likely be a huge effort. At the same time, the game works almost flawlessly through wine. So whats the point? I'd much rather see that games that DON'T run at all on linux would get this kind of attention. Like, "hey, I can run WoW and EVE on linux, how come I can't run your game?"

Make realistic requests, thats my suggestion.

[Sammi]

Blizzard actually had a running Linux WoW client, when WoW was in BETA, but they decided against releasing it, and it hasn't been seen anywhere since. They don't see Linux as a viable platform business vise, and that's their choice to make, so they stopped development on the Linux client.

That's that, now get over it.

WoW runs perfectly in Wine. At least as well as it would, run if it was run natively, because all problems with running WoW in Wine, come from crappy driver support from graphics card manufacturors, not from bad Wine code.

[Yashiro]

Linux isn't a viable platform but OSX is? :)

[Sammi]

Linux isn't a viable platform but OSX is? :)
The most generous estimation would put Linux on a 2% market-share, while OS X is on 7 or 8%. Big difference. Most likely Linux is below 1%, and that one percent is fragmented into hundreds of different distros.

[Yashiro]

Yes, I am aware of the numbers.

What I jokingly meant was if you ARE willing to support something like OSX with gaming software, it's not such a huge leap to release a Linux client too.

[tweakedenigma]

My preference would be for the Blizzard to do exactly what the Folks at EVE Online did and just work with the folks at Transgaming. Very little cost involved works great and we get to play too.

Also I think we would be better served tossing in behind Transgaming seeing as they would have a record of the number of people that Buy their software and it shows that Linux Gamers are willing to spend some money.

[Sammi]

My preference would be for the Blizzard to do exactly what the Folks at EVE Online did and just work with the folks at Transgaming.
I'd prefer it if they worked with Codeweavers (http://www.codeweavers.com/).

They actually work on Wine, and use up-to-date Wine code in their Crossover product, as opposed to Transgaming, who use an old outdated Wine codebase.

Transgaming are nothing but some lazy snitches that took the Wine source code 5 years ago, slapped a simple GUI front end on top, and charged money for it. Cedega has become outdated. ATM both WoW and Eve-Online run much better on clean Wine, than in Cedega.

Read up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedega#Controversy

Some discussion on the topic here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=971939

[tweakedenigma]

I am aware of the controversy around Cedega and I would agree that codeweavers would be better. That being said though Transgaming has a deal with EVE Online and the game works well in Linux and they have a preexisting relationship with EA games and their focus being on games is also a factor.

[Dark9204]

I think they really should. In fact, I cant believe, or accept, that there are no Linux versions of games/software!

I mean just think about it! We have acceptable drivers(thanks Nvidia and ATI! :) ), our OS is faster than windows, and is more stable. The reason linux arent that big are because people don't know about it!

Now, wine is really great, and has come a long way. The fact that i can play and use my games/programs in linux is just great. A problem is maybe that games/software aren't always out of the box.

Buts thats NO excuse for NOT making linux versions!

Almost every game uses Direct X. Witch is Microsoft's 3D graphics language, which you aren't allowed to use unless you have windows. But wine converts Direct X calls into OpenGL ones and solves that.
But if the games engine understands both Direct X and OpenGL, this conversion is easy done(looked at wikipedia).

And about the number of distros. There are distro independent packages/scripts that solves that problem.
Or just make .debs/rpms for 3 the biggest distros.

Im not a WoW gamer, But i found this thread very interesting

[Vadi]

If you're interested in numbers, go check out the etqw OS poll. Linux is at 20% there. That is far beyond the claimed 1% marketshare.

What people are forgetting is that windows is commonly used in business and government, and that's not a place you do gaming at. You do that at home. And nobody gave stats for linux being installed at home ;)