CodeWeavers Experiments with Oculus Support for Mac and Linux

CodeWeavers CrossOver now has support for the Oculus Rift!

Well, our internal testing builds do, anyway. Here at CodeWeavers, we're excited about what virtual reality can bring to gaming and other computing applications. The Oculus Rift is currently the largest VR (Virtual Reality) headset available for purchase, so we've decided to integrate support for it into CrossOver.

Once we've released support in our public builds, playing Windows Oculus games with CrossOver on your Rift will be just as easy as with any native Mac OSX or Linux Oculus application. Integration between your Windows Oculus application and your hardware should be seamless. We've been "testing" ;) with a DK2 here in the office, and it's been an impressive experience.

Caveats? There's a couple. This is an experimental feature in CrossOver, and some games access the Rift hardware in a way that Wine doesn't yet support. We hope to have this repaired soon, but some particular applications may fail to detect the Rift hardware.

More worryingly, Oculus has decided to drop support for Linux and OSX. While our Oculus integration works for now, it does depend on your having a Linux or Mac OSX SDK, which is no longer supported by Oculus. Depending on changes to future Windows Oculus SDK versions, we could fail to support games built against those new SDKs.

But don't lose hope! It would be difficult, but we could build support for the Windows Oculus SDK in CrossOver. That's right: CrossOver could become the only way to use the Oculus Rift on Mac OSX and Linux. But this is all hypothetical. It depends on what Oculus decides to do for their Linux and Mac users.

If you've got a Rift and are interested in trying out our support, contact our Caron at caron@codeweavers.com and ask for a nightly build. If you want more information about our solution for Oculus, contact our sales team at sales@codeweavers.com. We'd love to have your support and feedback.

We're also interested in building support for other VR headsets. As soon as some other headsets come on the market, like Valve and HTC's Vive headset or Microsoft's HoloLens, we'll be thinking about adding support so you can have the freedom to use your Windows VR games and applications on Linux and OSX.

About Andrew Eikum
Andrew has been a Wine developer at CodeWeavers since 2009. He works on all parts of Wine, but specifically supports Wine's audio. He's also a developer on many of CodeWeavers's software ports.

 

About CodeWeavers
Founded in 1996 as a general software consultancy, CodeWeavers focuses on the development of Wine – the core technology found in all of its CrossOver products. The company's goal is to bring expanded market opportunities for Windows software developers by making it easier, faster and more painless to port Windows software to Mac OS and Linux. CodeWeavers is recognized as a leader in open-source Windows porting technology, and maintains development offices in Minnesota, the United Kingdom and elsewhere around the world. The company is privately held.

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GSoC 2015 WineHQ projects

This is from the WineHQ developers mailing list.

Matteo Bruni 

Hey all,

tomorrow the coding period of the Summer of Code begins and I though it might be a nice idea to let the community know about the projects we've got this year. Actually, I though it would be even better if the student themselves wrote a short summary of their own project for the mailing list.

So, with no authority backing me, I'm kindly asking that. No need to write anything too fancy, just a few lines explaining what are you going to work on over the summer and maybe what are the expected benefits for Wine.

Thank you!

Aaryaman Vasishta

Hello!

Thank you for inviting me to this opportunity! I will try my best to keep it short, though it might be a bit long for some. There's a TL;DR at the end, though. :)

A bit about myself. My name is Aaryaman Vasishta and I'm currently studying in my third year of Computer Engineering in Pune Institute of Computer Technology, India. My interests lie in game programming and computer graphics.

My project focuses on implementing the rendering backend for the D3DRM API [1].

D3DRM (Direct3D Retained Mode) is basically a scene graph API running on top of Direct3D's Immediate Mode API. You can say it's more like a rendering engine API which encapsulates Immediate Mode functionality in order to make it easier for programmers to develop 3D scenes using it, making it a possible competitor to OpenGL at the time.

At the moment wine's implementation of this API is mostly full of stubs, and there's quite a bit of work left before something can be drawn on the screen. My role here mainly focuses on implementing object Creation/Initialization functions for some of the main interfaces, mainly devices, textures and viewports, all of which are COM based. If time permits, I will also work on implementing some frequently used frames and lighting functions.

The API is quite old (it has been removed since DX 8 SDK, and the dll doesn't come included with vista onwards) but there are a few popular games that used it. Namely, Lego Rock Raiders and Steel Beasts, and applications as well, like FMS (Flying Model Simulator). So there is some merit in working on this. Implementing these functions will help accelerate further development of this API to get some long-awaited apps to run on wine (I can see quite a few threads on google of people trying to get FMS running, and a couple for LRR too, so there is some demand for it). As an added bonus, I also get to interact with wine's ddraw implementation for this one, which could potentially help ddraw's implementation via possible bug detection/fixes and implementing any ddraw functionality that d3drm requires.

TL;DR: I'm implementing a main chunk of a graphics API called Direct3D Retained Mode, which is based on Direct3D Immediate Mode. The API is mostly a stub in wine and this project should help get things going.

Thank you!

Aaryaman Vasishta

Zhenbo Li

 Hello!

I'm glad to working on Wine GSoC this year. My project's focus is IHMLTXMLHttpRequest. Many websites would use hacks to determine whether the browser was IE6.0 or IE 7+. As XMLHttpRequest object identifier was shipped in IE 7.0[0], the web developers would use ActiveX to access IXMLHttpRequest object. Wine IE implements some new features, so it is common that Wine IE is treated as a IE 7+ browser(like Firebug Lite[1])

Mozilla has implemented nsIXMLHttpRequest[2], and my approach is to call the wine-gecko functions from wine code. I can't tell how many applications' status on appdb will change from "garbage" to "silver/gold", but IMHO, implementing XMLHttpRequest is necessary to make wine IE more usable.

Thanks

 Iván Matellanes

 Hi all!

I'm looking forward to contributing to Wine.
My project consists on implementing part of the legacy Visual C++ iostream runtime, which was shipped with Visual Studio versions up to 6.0 and is currently a stub. I'll work on as many functions as time permits, and one of the key points is to reuse code from the modern Visual C++ runtime library that is already implemented.

Some old applications and games (like MS Reader and Tron 2.0) would benefit from this, as they would run with the built-in library. A quick search on Bugzilla for 'msvcirt' shows several bugs related to unimplemented functions.

Cheers,
Iván.

YongHao Hu

 Hi, all.

Sorry for the late reply. I am happy to join this discussion.

My project focuses on implementing all the functions from tr2 namespace, which was included in the header and being proposed for standardization. Though there are many methods to implement the functions like _File_size and _Equivalent etc, the hard part is finding the most appropriate one.

New applications like MSVC12[1] would benefit from this.

Thank you!

-----

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CodeWeavers CrossOver 14.1.3 has been released

I am delighted to announce that CodeWeavers has just released CrossOver 14.1.3 for both Mac OS X and Linux.  CrossOver 14.1.3 has important bug fixes for both Mac and Linux users.

Mac customers with active support entitlements will be upgraded to CrossOver 14.1.3 the next time they launch CrossOver.  Linux users can download the latest version from http://www.codeweavers.com/.

Change Log For CrossOver Mac and Linux :

14.1.3 CrossOver - May 18, 2015

• Mac OS X:
  • Fixed graphics problems with character models in the game Banished on certain Mac hardware.
• Linux:
  • Updated the version of the gnutls library we use for compatibility with newer Debian and Ubuntu distributions. This will fix connection issues in Diablo III as well as other possible problems.
 

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PlayOnLinux 5 : We want your opinion!

Edit: apparently there are some people that do not want to play the game and decided to flood the poll. Fair enough. The poll is now closed. Please comment instead.

Hi everybody!
As some of you have heard about it, we are seriously thinking about the future version of PlayOnLinux (a.k.a. PlayOnLinux 5.  The version 4 has a long history and the code contains stuff that makes it very hard to maintain. We really need to have a more stable version if we want to continue to give you the best. If we continue working on PlayOnLinux v4 we are assuming that:

• PlayOnLinux will no longer have new features
• PlayOnLinux may become completely broken one day

In this piece of news, I'm going to explain the option we prefer, why are we prefering it and also we are going to ask you if you agree or not.

Please read the whole article before complaining, trolling. It is a really important topic! Once you have read everything and you understand the problem, fell free to send comments and to vote. 

As many of you may have heard, we are seriously thinking about switching from Python to Java. I perfectly understand some concerns and to be honest, I was the first to criticize Java even few months ago.
However there are several reasons that let us think that Java is the right choice for us:

• Portability: We want PlayOnLinux to be accessible on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Mac, ... and why not, being prepared to run on ARM/Android devices later.
• Maintenability
  • Java do a lot of things to force developers to do things great
  • Java is statically typed. It is a lot easier to do simple task like refactoring, code-checking, ...
  • I have recently discovered the tools that exists Java to measure the code quality and the technical debt and to be honest, it is just impressive. You may have a look at this end of this news (SonarQube)
• Contributions
  • We've noticed that there were hardly any contribution for PlayOnLinux v4 and we target to make some really infrastructure and guidelines so that everyone contribute. (See "infrastructure" paragraph at the end of this news)

PlayOnLinux is a lot more complex than just a GUI for wine. It is mainly a set of tools allowing you to write very powerful scripts. That is why it is a little more complicated than just a GUI for wine.

Responses to the main concerns

I don't want to install Oracle JDK or any closed program on my computer

We are going to guarantee you that PlayOnLinux v5 is compatible with OpenJDK (GPLv2)

PlayOnLinux will become very slow because Java is very slow

I can ensure you that this is wrong.
Java is a lot faster than Python in general (http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/python.html). Moreover, the v4 branch has a lot of non optimal code. The tests we have already done with Java is showing us than what we have developed so fare behave a lot faster that PlayOnLinux 4. To be honest, there is only one drawback: the JVM takes a little more time to start than the python interpreter.

You should have used QT! That makes more sense.

You may be right, but I'm talking about the language here, not about the graphical interface. So far, we've started to work with OpenJFX:

• It is Open Source
• It is customisable with some CSS
• It supports GPU acceleration
• We could support different skins for PlayOnLinux or imagine a Steam-Like interface. Everything is possible!
• It is portable

Drawbacks

• It may not be fully integrated with your Desktop theme

However, the design of PlayOnLinux v5 perfectly allows to implement several user interface and let users chose the one they want. So it is perfectly possible to implement a QT interface with QTJambi for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_Jambi. (But it is not a priority. A command line interface is more important)

Java applications are ugly, not integrated to the system.

You may be talking about Swing. In our case, we are planning to use different interfaces that look a lot better.

Java is insecure, there are so many security patches

The reason for that is that Java also has a "sandbox" mod which is often used to allow browser to execute some Java code without the approval of the user. We do not want to run PlayOnLinux on your web browser, so that's fine if you disable your browser plugin.

Proposal of a new design

A image is better to start. We plan to replace bash script with python scripts.

• Python scripts will be directly run by Java (yes it is possible thanks to Jython!).
• We are going to get a small part of PlayOnLinux v4 code just for backward compatibility (after some cleanup of course)
• A lot of effort are going to be made to ensure the good quality of the code.

So you plan to run Wine inside Bash inside python inside Java :-O.

Of course not, that is where Jython comes. Jython is not using your system python at all! In fact it is a library that compile your python code into Java class on runtime. Basically, it means than it can just run your python script directly on the Java Virtual Machine without depending on Python. In fact, there will be less layer than there are today because the scripts will be able to execute Java codes directly without needing to create any sockets or other stuff like that.

Tasks that have already been done so far

Infrastructure

We have set up two tools:

• Jenkins (http://www.playonlinux.org:8080). This tool will periodically run unit tests to be sure that the code stays in a stable state
• SonarQube (http://www.playonlinux.org:9000). This tool will periodically scan the whole code to measure its quality. It is a really powerful tool that is giving us precious advice.
• GitHub (https://github.com/PlayOnLinux/POL-POM-5/)

Programing

We have developed the following component as a proof of concept. If you agree with us, we are going to continue on that way to be able to propose you the best version of PlayOnLinux in the next few months.

• PlayOnLinux core
  • Dependency injection
  • Unit test
• PlayOnLinux core script management (all keywords are not yet implemented though)
  • PlayOnLinux Python script compatibility
  • PlayOnLinux Legacy (v4) script compatiblity
  • Script exemples
• Install window (with remote downloading)
• Other important stuff
  • GPG Script signature check
  • Complete wine registry parser (it means that you are going to be able to browse the registry with a very few line of script)
  • Wine management: Create a prefix with a progressbar, ...
  • Filesystem management (Copy with progressbar, download with progressbar)

Conclusion

So far, I'm pretty confident that this version can perform a lot better than v4.

• The core we have is a lot faster
• The scripts are smoother
• We have a really clean code (for the moment at least)
• We have a really clean infrastructure
• Some external people have already shown interest in contributing to v5 code (by sending small patches)

However, I want to have your opinion about this choice. Please send the most comment as you can and talk freely. Please provide arguments with your commentary so that we can progress.

Now the time has come to vote!

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