Interesting bit of news today, folks, as the teams behind the widely popular PlayOnLinux and PlayOnMac applications have announced their new service, PortMyApps. The website gives a short list of reasons why one would want to port to Mac/Linux as well as a system that also allows you to test out your specific program for free.
Those familiar with WineSkins on Mac OS X may be familiar with the methodology.
Basically, it just wraps your Windows program in a standalone Wine environment which doesn't require any additional configuration or setup on the intended platform (in theory).
This service is obviously geared toward software publishers, but any program can be "ported." There is even an online feature that allows you to upload a Windows program via a zip and see if it will work with their solution (Linux support soon).
Overall, I'm pleased to see this program/service exist. I feel as if this could convince more developers to port their games and programs, even if it's not native. What do you guys think?
Source: http://en.portmyapps.com/
UPDATE: One of the people involved with PortMyApps wrote the following in the article comments:
Those familiar with WineSkins on Mac OS X may be familiar with the methodology.
Basically, it just wraps your Windows program in a standalone Wine environment which doesn't require any additional configuration or setup on the intended platform (in theory).
This service is obviously geared toward software publishers, but any program can be "ported." There is even an online feature that allows you to upload a Windows program via a zip and see if it will work with their solution (Linux support soon).
Overall, I'm pleased to see this program/service exist. I feel as if this could convince more developers to port their games and programs, even if it's not native. What do you guys think?
Source: http://en.portmyapps.com/
UPDATE: One of the people involved with PortMyApps wrote the following in the article comments:
tinouAs a developer of PlayOnLinux, and by reading some comments, I want to make things clearer;Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
This tool is noway made to discorage use of native ports. In fact, you cannot use it port games because it is limited 50Mo.
It is designed for very specific apps (like the one we ported) that could not and would not be ported in other way, or very old game (in general the source code is lost).
Games that can be natively ported won't be ported with PortMyApps, it is not planed for the moment. (And there are no point for that!)
Anyway, we do not have enough resources to bring profesional support for a game played by million of users, so clearly we won't take this risk ...
Also, you'll notice that the website is called PortMyApps, and not PortMyBrandNewGame ;-) ...
Wine's results are too variable for us to afford the risk to work for very big companies ...
Game editors that are interested in Linux do not want to give a bad image of their brand by bringing a low quality support for a title. Valve has proven it by not using wine for Steam.
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You can download windows games with steam. Easy as pie with Steamcmd.
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD#Cross-Platform_Installation
I used it to get the files for Doom3bfg and 7daystodie. So I could use the data for native versions.
I do worry that some game companies will see this as an easy way out, but for small companies and older software it makes sense.
off topic- what happened to the Sims 3 script for PoL? :(
Nice! I've bookmarked it for when I need it again. While this will work... an option in the Steam GUI should be there IMO.
Releasing source code is not enought when there are no devs to work on it. There are many games with source available but no one to work on porting them :( Like this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6iv2530phw
Its a unholy mix of shells-scripts and python that uses some helper scripts to install the program in its own WINEPREFIX, add some dlls etc.
I tried to hack it once, but ended up writing my own cli-program in pure python that basically did the same. It was just to much work to try to understand, and it made no sense why it had all that horrid shell code in there.
They do have a nice repository of precompiled wine-versions though.
Well, the usual argument applies that if you want to change that the source code is out there, etc...
Still, if there are no developers that are willing to work on it then all that really shows is that the game does not have enough to hold someone's interest long enough to keep it from being abandoned.
And it is a bit of a stretch to point to one example and then say there are "many games" like that.
Unholly and horrible shell code, but also hours and hours of tests. Making an app run with wine with zero configuration on a large number of very different computers is not easy task, believe me. And when I see some wine based "ports", I can tell you that some mistake could be avoided. Why chosing a mix of Bash and Python? Simply because it's easier for beginers to write scripts in bash than in Python. (See supported apps section for further information). Also, the first version was fully written in Bash. Python came one year after to add a GUI. We kept the bash base, that's why the program does not follow a MVC model, that's why you might find strange things in the code. We are aware of that. We've started working on that for the fifth version, but it takes time, as everything...