Today while browsing around the CodeWeavers site I came across the 2008
CrossOver roadmap that was posted by Jeremy White the CEO of CodeWeavers. About three paragraphs into the roadmap Jeremy reveals that they plan to release a gaming product in the next couple weeks, called CrossOver Games.
In the next few weeks we are going to launch a new product called 'CrossOver Games'. CrossOver Games is an entry level product that lets you play a broad range of games, particularly games with a lot of replayability such as MMOs like World of Warcraft and the range of games from Valve (e.g. Team Fortress 2, CSS, and so on). CrossOver Games will be available for free to any of our CrossOver Mac or Linux Professional customers. The idea is that we will rev CrossOver Games more quickly than regular CrossOver, so as to better take advantage of all of the great work being done on Wine with respect to games. The regular CrossOver will continue on a more stable and reliable pace. We're doing this in part to try to generate some buzz and interest; we feel like Rodney Dangerfield when it comes to games - we'd like to earn some respect. We feel strongly that CrossOver will be the finest way to run games on a Linux or Mac system, and we want to shout that from the rooftops!
WoW! it looks as if the folks at TransGaming are in for a little competition for Linux and Mac gamers. And the best thing is if your a current CrossOVer customer you get a free copy of
CrossOver Games!
Jeremy also talks about the upcoming release of CrossOver 7 and what changes are in store for it's release.
Beyond the Games launch, we also have a lot of major improvements in store. We plan to launch CrossOver 7 for both Mac and Linux some time in April. The highlights of CrossOver 7 include support for Office 2007, as well as support for Photoshop CS/CS2 (and hopefully CS3) along with all versions of Dreamweaver, and a few other Adobe applications (thanks, Dan!). Of course, we have a lot of fixes our customers have requested. Office 2003, notably Outlook, should be much improved. Quicken 2007/8 should be able to connect properly with banks. There will be fixes across the board in other applications, notably Internet Explorer 6.
Later on into the year we can expect to see .NET applications working in Wine and the implementation a DIB Engine! Whoo Hoo....
After CrossOver 7, we will turn our focus to several major areas where Wine is lacking. First and foremost is going to be better support for .NET based applications. We are hoping that will allow us to properly support modern versions of Quickbooks. We also hope to support modern versions of iTunes, and we're going to keep fighting to add support for things like the NetFlix player (if only so I can run them on my MythTV system). We'll also be implementing a DIB Engine - a tool we need to use to eliminate some performance bottlenecks in certain applications. This should help performance in Quicken, Visio, and Powerpoint for sure, and a range of other applications as well.
Essentially, our goal is to finish all of the basic building blocks that Wine needs. We hope to mark that event by releasing Wine 1.0. Of course, there will still be a lot of work to be done from there, but our hope is that increasingly applications will 'just work'.
I for one can't wait until Wine has a working DIB engine.
