Star Wars: The Old Republic Forum

does anyone know if they're working on support for this game at all?

I'm not holding my breathe. In the two years that I've had CrossOver Games I've literally never used it. Since none of the "good" or "high profile" games ever end up being officially supported. If you look, most of the games that are "listed" as compatible usually have "Unsupported" medals. Still, I'm sure that someone in the community will eventually figure out how to get this one running.

Though, to me, that's besides the point. I find two things fishy with this product myself. First, that most games use the same system items. Such as DirectX, Audio, etc. So it should, at least in theory, be a simple thing to make an environment where most of these things are emulated in a fairly consistent manner compared to an actual Windows OS environment.

And second, that it should be an easy thing for CodeWeavers to approach BioWare with some kind of proposition like: "Hey, with some technical help from you guys we could help you get even more customers in the game and be a win-win for both of us..."

At any rate, I personally, am not planning on extending my support when it's up later this month. Seeing as I've had such little use for the product. Good luck if you decide to hold out on CrossOver.

Ugh, to be honest, Codeweavers do tell us which games are supported and which ones are not. So it's not like they tricked anyone into buying their product.

A similar partnership as you propose was struck between EA and the Cedega folks a long time ago. The catch, well, Apple had a lot to say in it because there weren't many AAA type games for Mac OS X at that time.

I still cannot believe that, despite the huge success that indie developers are seeing with deals such as the humble bundles, big companies just shrug off Linux as a gaming platform.

... crossover is an extension of wine technology, and as such
bounded by what wine can and cannot do - that said...;

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=24528

..so this title isn't even running in wine yet, ergo, it's
unlikely to work in crossover either...

Cheers!

This actually is not the case. If you read through the winehq post in more detail, you'll see that several people actually got the game running just fine. Now that the game has been released, I'd expect it to be supported in WINE within a month or two. As for CrossOver Games, who knows.

It would be nice if someone at Codeweavers - this is their website after all - could spare a few minutes to say whether or not they are even working on trying to get this game to run. I'm using Bootcamp to play just now, but it kind of makes me wonder why I bought Crossover if it is a non-functioning product.

Crossover Games works with a lot of commonly played games. New games takes time. This game was very recently released. It is unlikely that a lot of work will have been done yet.

You certainly are within your right to complain, but it seems highly inappropriate this early. The best thing to do would be to vote for this application and/or pledge money to it. Letting Codeweavers know this game is in interest [, politely] would be helpful information to them.

search results: http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=Star+Wars%3A+The+Old+Republic+winehq+appdb

The post-release entries: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=25022

The pre-release entries: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=24528&iTestingId=68313

Like I said, I understand you paid for the product, and that should entitle you to some expectations, but all the posts made here seem premature at this stage.

Roger Gay wrote:

It would be nice if someone at Codeweavers - this is their website
after all - could spare a few minutes to say whether or not they are
even working on trying to get this game to run. I'm using Bootcamp
to play just now, but it kind of makes me wonder why I bought
Crossover if it is a non-functioning product.

...crossover is a very functional product - I use it every day
with one of more than 300 apps/games I have. Just because this
title doesn't work with crossover, doesn't make crossover a non-
functional product ; in fact, compared to other win32 titles, it's
SWTOR that's the non-fuctional product ; it doesn't work with winetech...

...at any rate, I do know for fact that the codeweavers devs/ninjas
have been looking into getting this game running, but, it's not
going to happen in crossover-10 -- this game has been released at
an unfortunate time in the crossover development cycle, and if it
is going to run in crossover, it's going to be with crossover-11
(when it's released), not now ; you are simply wasting your time in
trying to get it run in crossover-10....

... the last I heard, cx-11 is slated for release sometime late Jan
or early Feb 2012 (I'll bet that's wrong, but, it's what a Ninja said
in the forum recently), and so, currently, that leaves you with a
limited amount of options....

1 - if you want to live the 'dream' and wouldn't run Windows even if
someone paid you to -and- you wanted to help crossover/wine in that
endearing process, you could be trying SWTOR with the latest wine-devel
build and/or the current crossover nightly builds (if you're an advocate),
and be trying to help identify/eliminate the bugs this game is still
subject to in the newer wine trees... (they should be called 'vines' =)...

2 - use the 'Microsoft OWNS me' approach 8^)

Cheers!

First, we are working diligently on this game. We would love to add support for it or at a minimum release a build that specifically targets Star Wars: The Old Republic (something we've done in the past for titles that work under certain conditions that might adversely affect other titles). Should we do either, we'll certainly post here.

Next, adding support for a title is not so simple as it needs these components on Windows, so it must be easy to get it to work. Not only does it need those components that do work with CrossOver/Wine, it also needs some pieces that are not implemented. Without those pieces, SWTOR is unable to connect to the servers properly via any Wine solution. No connection means no joining a server regardless of the Wine solution that is in place. This is the problem that currently plagues SWTOR; if it is running for anyone on Wine or a wine spin, they are being exceptionally quiet about it. Anyone is welcome to not only checkout the problem for themselves but also certainly contribute to the effort. All work is being tracked here:

WineHQ 29168

If it is simple to "make an environment where most of these things are emulated in a fairly consistent manner", we would love to have your help with that. I think you will find that that theory is simply untrue. What Wine (and any spin off of it does) is very remarkable. It takes the Microsoft libraries (calls, commands, directions) and translates them to talk to Mac and Linux computers. They each speak a different language and without a translator (like Wine), they have a very difficult time communicating with each other. Computers all do very similar tasks and the hardware within them makes them "capable" of doing the same things. But the language they know prevents them from carrying out tasks they are "capable" of.

I would compare it to someone who has never before seen a computer in their life. They are capable of touching the keyboard, the power button, the mouse or any other piece of it... but even turning it on could pose a potential problem for that person. Attempting to ask them to search for items on the Internet or play solitaire or plug in a new monitor (while simple to us) could baffle them completely. They are "capable" but they have no way of knowing how to do any of it. Put another very patient person with them that has used computers for their whole life and it would take some time but eventually the person who had never used the computer would begin to learn it. It would take them years and years to be proficient with multiple tasks, but they could learn it. This is what Wine is like, it is taking it years and years (20+) to teach Mac and Linux systems how to interpret Microsoft/Windows instructions. Wine is just coming to a point where there is more than a 50% chance that an application will run without much tweaking. When I started working for CodeWeavers (three and a half years ago), the chance that would happen was about 20%; we have come a long way.

The next point... it is never easy approaching a company to say 'oh hey, do you mind helping us make your application run on a platform you never intended for it to run on?'. I'm not saying we haven't done that (we have done that with many titles), but I am saying that there are applications and developers who have effectively said "NO!". Supporting a large group of Windows users with a vast multitude of Windows versions (Windows XP, Vista, 7, 32 & 64 bit) is quite a large task. Adding the same variety with Linux or Mac users adds a much more complex support problem and while we'd all think they should be able to say "go talk to CodeWeavers and if it's our problem they will talk to us" but the reality is that their customers will inevitably come to them regardless of their running platform. Thus, their Support Teams would need increase their knowledge exponentially to assist customers properly. Note that it happens the same sort of way here... we are not "support" for World of Warcraft, e-Sword, Wizard 101, Outlook or any others but we often end up walking people through setting those things up because if it "doesn't run" it "must be because of CrossOver" and not because of any number of other items that come into play. We are always happy to give this assistance to our customers and prospective customers, it is how we help build a positive community (and we have a great community in my opinion). It is just that it's such an important fact that so many factors come into play when an application does not run.

And the next point is in regards to high profile games. High profile games are "high profile" because they are bleeding edge. They make use of the newest (newer) graphic styles and graphics cards, rendering engines, sound and of course security. Keeping up with that is difficult at best. We have looked at supporting more "high profile" games than what we've actually added support for. With that in mind, Are the following titles not "high profile" or not "good"?

Left 4 Dead 2
Star Trek Online
Starcraft II
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Rift
Wizard 101
Civilization V

The truth is that we are working very, very hard on supporting this game. We want it to work with Wine as badly as anyone in this thread and in the Wine community do. We will push forward with work on it until we are certain one way or the other. There are no promises that we can make to add support for Star Wars: The Old Republic. All that we can promise is what we have always promised and all we can do is try. My sincerest apologies if anyone has a different impression.

Finally, the best news about the game is that before its official release it ran beautifully. It is hampered by communication from and to the game servers. If we can get this solved, the game will run beautifully again.