Hello,

In the past weeks we have been working hard on getting CrossOver 7.0 out the door and help on the Wine 1.0 release. Now that both are released, we are are continuing our work on CrossOver Games.

Today we have released a new unsupported build, and we are heading towards a new supported build.

In the next days we plan to fix the HTML and Guild Wars bugs remaining in the unsupported build, and then start a beta test for a new supported build. This new build will not have support for new games, but it will have some bugfixes and code based on Wine 1.0 and potentially run unsupported applications better.

Once this is done, we will turn our effort towards supporting more applications. So if you have not done so already, please vote for your games in our application database, since your votes and advocate activities are our main guidelines when deciding for new applications. We are considering Lord of the Rings Online since there is a lot of activity on this game and our .NET work is going forward. The currently top voted unsupported game is City of Heroes, so we want to look into this as well. Beyond that I want to take a new look at new high end games like Call of Duty 4, Age of Conan and dxlevel 95 support in Half Life 2 based games to get a new idea about the current state of the Mac graphics drivers. I cannot promise at this point that we will get all this going, but that is certainly the direction we are going to go.

Have fun,
Stefan

Hello All,

Now that we've shipped CrossOver Games I want to outline our short term future plans for the next weeks and months:

One of the central ideas of CrossOver Games are quick updates. Since testing and making sure that all supported applications run takes a while, we want to release unsupported 'bleeding edge' builds regularly for those who want to try the latest and greatest code. During the crossover games beta phase Wine already moved forward a bit. I am currently working on stabilizing those improvements, once the supported games run properly again I plan to release such an unsupported build. The improvements include

* Performance improvements for Guild Wars and other games, especially on MacOS. I've written that during the beta testing of CrossOver games, but I considered it too unstable for adding it into the late betas.

* Bump mapping support for older radeon cards(radeon 8500 to 9200). This is a side effect of some architectural improvements I have made to provide a few potential Google Summer of Code Projects for Wine.

* Dynamic pixel format selection, some work done by Roderick Colenbrander(Thanks!). This can improve performance and it is required for Antialiasing support. Antialiasing is not fully supported yet, but the major obstacle is removed.

* Some improvements of our texture format support reporting, thanks to Roderick again. This is some work towards better support for floating point textures as needed for new games like Call of Duty 4, Crysis or Bioshock. This still needs to be polished a bit, many games like Half Life 2 do not like it yet.

* Some bug fixing

I hope that the build is ready within the next month, but I cannot promise it for sure if unexpected problems occur. I will keep you updated on the progress!

Thank you for helping us improve Wine, and have fun playing!

Cheers,
Stefan