Re: [orca-list] Wine apps in Orca?

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

Hi Kyle,

On 6/26/12, Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com> wrote:
> In my opinion, which is
> probably shared by many people, Linux seriously needs more games in general,
> and more audio games specifically.

I do agree we need more accessible games for Linux. As an audio game
developer myself I'd be willing to do it if I could raise the funds to
make it worthwhile financially. As you probably are aware I've got two
commercial games in development for Windows, and I've paid out several
hundred for sounds and music. Quality sounds, music, and voice acting
doesn't come cheap, and unfortunately most software for Linux is based
on an open source license which usually means the developer has to
raise the funds for sounds, music, etc through some other way than
direct sales. That's not to say all software for Linux strictly
follows an open source model, but I don't know what kind of commercial
market is available here.

> The problem I am seeing is that many
> application developers feel that Wine is somehow a viable option, and
> therefore don't feel that an application needs to run natively on Linux. Of
> course, we know better than anyone that Wine is not at all viable, and that
> native Linux applications are highly preferable to Windows applications
> running under Wine, even if the end user is able to see the screen.

Some people might see it that way, but the other issue is that most
Windows developers use technologies not available for Linux.For
example, Jim Kitchen has written several free accessible games for the
blind, but they are all written in Visual Basic 6 use DirectX 8 for
sound and input, and SAPI 5 for speech. Since those technologies are
proprietary to Windows there is no way for him to just port them to
Linux without a complete rewrite from scratch in a language like
Python using Pygame for sound and input and PyTTS for speech
output.Since Jim Kitchen is unlikely to learn another programming
language and port them to Linux using open source APIs none of his
games will be available for Linux users  without using Wine. The games
from GMA, LWorks, and various other audio game developers have
precisely the same problem of having been written in the wrong
programming language and using proprietary APIs.

I'm pretty sure Entombed by Driftwood Entertainment could be ported to
Linux since it is writtin in C# .NET, but it would have to have a
major over hall to work. It is based on Microsoft's XNA framework, and
that would have to be removed and replaced with SDL .NET.  As for
speech output it uses Sapi, and I don't know of any .NET binding for
Speech-Dispatcher so one might have to be written. Bottom line, even a
game that is written in a language that could be ported to Linux it is
a pretty major undertaking to remove and replace proprietary game APIs
with open source ones if the game isn't properly designed for Linux
compatibility in the first place. Which is why so many software
developers just tell people to use Wine.

Cheers!