Wine 1.7.50 for Mac OSX and Linux has been Released

The Wine development release 1.7.50 is now available.
What's new in this release:

• New version of the Gecko engine based on Firefox 40.
• First steps of the Direct3D 11 implementation.
• Better font matching in DirectWrite.
• Support for OpenMP on ARM platforms.
• Various bug fixes.

The source is available now. Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

Bugs fixed in 1.7.50 (total 39):

  12454  iriver Plus 3 fails to start due to missing msvcirt.dll ?sh_read@filebuf@@2HB export
  23650  PowerPoint 2007 insensitive to changes in screen resolution
  25225  MPLAB IDE v8.60 toolbars getting reorganised every time when the window minimized and restored
  26688  Multiple games crashes on unimplemented function vcomp.dll.omp_init_lock (Risen, Hearts of Iron III demo)
  28444  zenilib 0.4.1.0 applications: crash when attempting to use d3dx9 for rendering
  29081  Drag and Drop: Duplicate entries in winamp playlist window
  29468  not able to click anything on Star Wars Republic Commando launcher
  30397  Multiple applications need support for NtSetInformationFile class FileDispositionInformation (Cygwin installer, Stylizer 5.x Visual CSS editor, Spoon Studio 2011 (ex Xenocode) application sandboxing scheme)
  30399  Multiple games and applications need support for 'NtSetInformationFile' class 'FileRenameInformation' (Spoon Studio 2011 based Stylizer 5.x, Boost.Interprocess based Tera Online, MSYS2 installer)
  31856  TextPad full screen view toggle broken
  31895  The main character is not rendered in Synaesthete
  32531  Microsoft Internet Explorer 10 crashes on unimplemented function KERNEL32.dll.CreateThreadpoolWork (Vista+ API)
  32671  PhotoLine 32 v18.x crashes on startup (missing error handling on creation of multi-profile color transform)
  33430  Santander bank security module crashes during StormFish installation
  36163  valgrind shows an unitialized variable in programs/cmd/tests/batch.c
  36457  Hearts of Iron III Demo and Europa Universalis:Rome crash with unimplemented function vcomp.dll._vcomp_enter_critsect
  37225  QQ 6.3: QQApp.exe Crashes after login
  37478  cmd doesn't handle "else if" correctly in all cases
  38153  Don't work Radmin viewer 3.5
  38224  AcceptEx detaches the socket from its IO completion port
  38343  Unimplemented function mfplat.dll.MFGetPluginControl
  38435  Xfire 2.0 crashes on unimplemented function fltlib.dll.FilterLoad
  38611  Samsung Smart View 2.0 (.NET 4.x WPF app): text does not render (IDWriteGlyphRunAnalysis is not implemented)
  38698  wineconsole: Altering line InsertMode with the Insert key should not be permanent
  38755  Unable to run "Twitch Bandwidth Test": calling to unimplemented function IPHLPAPI.DLL.SetPerTcpConnectionEStats
  38955  Visual Studio Code installer crashes on startup (parsing of overly long string-format security descriptor causes stack corruption)
  38967  Lotus Approach from Lotus Smartsuite 9.8 crashes on startup (OLE compound document files v3 may contain junk in high part of size)
  38976  Hospital Tycoon crashes after the intro videos with built-in d3dx9_36
  38977  Tabs are rendered as a rectangle in license text of Quake III Arena demo installer
  38988  .NET applications using System.Decimal to float conversion may return wrong results ('VarR4FromDec' divisor integer overflow)
  39028  Built-in iexplore crashes when opening forum/blog entries on hup.hu (crash in get_frame_by_name("yterr")
  39031  Schein demo needs vcomp110.dll._vcomp_master_begin
  39040  Office 2010 applications enter installation configuration steps then exit
  39058  Schein demo needs vcomp110.dll._vcomp_flush
  39096  Nvidia Physx uninstaller completely removes PATH registry key from 'HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment'
  39099  Wine's msiexec crashes when invoking Nvidia Physx maintenance tool via 'wine uninstaller -> Modify...'
  39104  [win16] installing application cause "Not Enough Disk Space" MessageBox
  39117  Cross-compilation: Error in zconf.h included from zlib.h included from http.c
  39118  Office 2013 installer fails to start

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World of Warships on Mac OS X with CodeWeavers CrossOver

It's no longer a secret that we've been doing work for Wargaming, Inc., the makers of the hugely popular World of Tanks, World of Warplanes, and the forthcoming World of Warships (which is currently in open beta). We're doing the Mac port of World of Warships, and we've gotten to the point where it's in good enough shape that it needs some serious testing. And who better to do some serious testing than a naval historian who's written a book on the Battle of Midway, and who is an adjunct lecturer for the U.S. Naval War College, and given talks at Pearl Harbor, the National WWII Museum, the Nimitz Museum, and blah blah blah? Yeah, ummm, I guess that'd be me.

Splash screen for World of Warships, running on my Mac. Late-war Nagato-class battleship, so pretty...

So, first things first: from a purely technical standpoint, our Mac port is going to be great. I've played the game extensively on Windows and on my Macbook Pro, and there's no perceptible difference in game play. None. If anything, with my Mac's SSD drive, it plays better on the Mac than at home on Windows. No graphical glitches, no performance issues, nothing. It works very, very well. When my ship sinks on my Mac, it sinks exactly the way it ought to on Windows: broken, capsizing, and in flames. And that's not just hype.

Me, sinking: broken, capsizing and in flames... but at least I killed the pesky destroyer that killed me...

So is the game fun? Yeah, sadly, it really is. And I say "sadly," because, believe me, I need a good game to chew up my time like I need a hole in the head. (I am, after all, working on my next book.) But Wargaming has done a really good job injecting a sense of realism while tempering it with game balance as well. This is, after all, a game, and it's meant to be fun. Having done play-testing on some "hyper-realistic" games (including 360 Pacific's horrifically bad Gulf War simulation "Patriot"), I can tell you that games are supposed to be fun, first and foremost. "Realism" is nice, but "fun" is nicer. And this is a great mix of both.

So, for instance, if you're a hardcore Imperial Japanese Navy fan (which I most certainly am), you'll see a mixture of the perennial favs (battleship Fuso, heavy cruiser Mogami, and of course the mighty Yamato) mixed in with a bunch of never-built oddities. And you might be tempted to say, "The cruiser Zao? The carrier Hakuryu? What the hell were those?!?" Really, what those are, are conveniently vague placeholders that give Wargaming the wiggle-room it needs to make sure that things are reasonably well-balanced between tiers of warships.

Come to me, my prey... just a little bit closer...

The equipment, likewise, "feels" realistic, even though it kinda isn't. So, yeah, if you're playing a battleship, you'll notice that your main armament has a much flatter trajectory at medium range than, say, a cruiser's armament (which is fair enough). But then again, if you take a look at the range of Yamato's main guns, 26.6km, you'll see that that's about 60% of their real-life maximum. All the weapon ranges are downscaled in this way. Likewise, ship speeds (and certainly acceleration) are all scaled up, so that players feel like they have mobility around the battlefield. In real life naval gunnery, encounters often felt as if they were being waged in slow motion, although some of the encounters in places like the Solomons could be comparatively fast-moving and short range. However, even a real-life brawl like the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, which was very fast to develop, and about the nearest thing to a knife-fight we got into in the Solomons, lasted for nearly 45 minutes. World of Warships encounters are all brawls of this type, but they typically take about 15-20 minutes apiece. That's a nice chunk of time: long enough to be interesting, but not so long that your wife will yell at you for being an hour late to dinner.

There's a lot more terrain on World of Warships ocean than there was in most real-world naval encounters as well. Most of the games I've played seem to be fought over the remains of some ancient, sunken volcanic calderas. (I had no idea that that many ancient sunken volcanic calderas even existed in the world.) In the game, you routinely use small islands to shield your maneuvers, or to sneak up on your opponent, or to get the hell out of the way before that enemy battleship over there unloads on you. That's "fun," but it ain't very realistic. In fact, no naval officer in his/her right mind would be willing to drive a ship into any of these horribly constricted maps festooned with toothy rocks and volcanic peaks. But then again, such maps are fun as hell, and it's a hoot to drive your Kuma-class T4 cruiser through there like a Porsche taking the curves on Hwy 1. What's not to like?

Notice the terrain all around me? Yeah, there's a lot of that.

I also appreciated the fairly realistic tradeoffs being made between the various nationalities that reflected their "feel." So, you like torpedoes and speedy warships? Then go with the Japanese all the way, but don't expect to have super great survivability. You're into gunnery and protection? U.S. Navy, baby, but you have to get used to the fact that your plodding South Carolina is going to take a lot longer to get into the fight than my zippy little Kuma.

This brings up another point: the individual types of ships also feel and play differently. And this is good, too. So, for instance, with a battleship, you really have to think ahead to what you're going to be doing a minute or two from now, because your ship is slow, your turrets are very slow to train to new bearings, and your reload time is slow as well. So, you have to look down the road and think to yourself, "Yeah, he's going to be around there, and I need to be facing this way in order to unleash a broadside, but, oh, wait, there's going to be that island in my way, so I'd better adjust my course now." This is why I primarily play cruisers, not battleships. "Yep, everything's goin' great... mhmmm... my 6" guns are nibbling that guy to death… oh crap, torpedoes! Turn around NOW and run like hell!!!"

Anyway, the game is a hoot. I'll be playing more of it, and can't wait to see it released. If you're a naval history fan, whether you're running Mac or Linux, I think you'll really enjoy it. And if you see "JonnyKaigun" out on the servers, you know who he is now...

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winetricks 20150810 was released today for Mac OSX and Linux

WineTricks 20150810 was released today for use with Wine from WineHQ and runs on Apple Mac OSX and Linux operating systems, the change log and download links are provided below.

 WineTricks Change log - August 10, 2015

• version bump - 20150810
• dxdiag: Use native DirectMusic DLLs and gm.dls
• Many bug fixes

WineTricks Downloads :

Source code (zip)
Source code (tar.gz)

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