Cedega: Where Democracy Doesn't Work
Posted by Trejkaz Thu, 20 Oct 2005 01:15:00 GMT
An article on Slashdot today talks about a new software shader engine made by Transgaming, which will certainly become part of Cedega.
I used to be a Cedega subscriber. I was creating my own builds from CVS for a while using a poached Gentoo ebuild, and eventually subscribed. I subscribed not only because TransGaming “asked” Gentoo to remove the ebuild, but also because I thought that I could vote to try and swing things away from that “must port Counter-Strike and EverQuest and nothing else” mindset that the entire Cedega community seems to have.
Graphically, the thing is great. Games like Diablo 2 ran remarkably smoothly in most cases. But the game Oni, for instance, one of the more simple games that you would expect to work perfectly, won’t run under Cedega with sound turned on, thanks to Cedega’s shit support for DirectSound3D.
However, the way it works in the Cedega community, is that votes go on the games, not on the bugs. Never mind how many other games are affected by this one bug, if they’re all separate games, each of which a few people like, the votes get spread out and games like EverQuest get all the attention. Hell, I saw them putting attention on Doom 3, when there was a week (A WEEK!) left until the native Linux release.
Reasons like this were what made me stop paying for the subscription… I’m sure they’ll figure out the Right Way of handling voting at some point in the future (please, take some cues from Bugzilla and basically any other open source bug tracking, okay?) but until then, I’ll be content with dual booting to play my Windows games even though it means turning off my torrents..
Anyway, it’s comforting to see that they’re still focusing entirely on the graphics end, while the sound subsystem silently rots away.