I don't that is what is being implied. From what was said above they may have modified some of the approaches they were using to draw certain graphical elements that wine wasn't handling in their original state. Such tweaks don't mean they would have had to do anything near as radical(and often impractical) as a DX to OGL engine conversion.

That said the fact that they have a version that works well with wine means it is extremely likely it would work under Linux. The reasons why they haven't taken advantage of that reality is up in the air. It could just be because that version is linked to Steam, it could be that there are additional technical issues getting in the way, or it could just be they are afraid Linux is too disjointed to offer a reliable product on.

You misunderstood. You are right about what I was saying about the Witcher 1, but shmerl in post 75 is asking about The Witcher 2. The Witcher 2 is being released with a native Mac version according to the CDPR conference - i.e. not a WINE version. So I assume, yes, the TW2 RED engine must be being ported to OpenGL. That seems like a huge effort, but I am glad of it.

I guess they must be re-making the engine in OpenGL, which is ... a lot of work. At the moment they've only announced a Mac version. As to where they'll sell it, I don't know. So far, the Mac version of TW1 is exclusive to Steam. Maybe The Witcher 2 when it arrives will be the first non-Windows game sold on GOG, but they haven't announced anything yet regarding distribution of the Mac version of the TW2.

Ah, I see. I'm definitely not in the know when it comes to what they were doing, but if the game was made using DX then they would have to convert it, which is a quite a big deal.

From what I can find it's all a custom engine, and given the results they must have a hell of a crew. Hats off to them if they are willing to dig back in and do it all over again for a handful of extra sales. Hopefully they planed for it up front which would make it easer.

They can always try using the OpenGL version even on Windows. Situation with it is not as bad as it used to be.

Yeah I hope they planned to make the code as portable as possible. Companies are devoted to making native Mac ports of games (Feral, Aspyr, etc ...) so while the economics of doing so must work out or those companies couldn't exist, I agree, even so it must be a big effort and I am surprised/glad they are doing it.
True maybe future Witcher/CDPR games will be OpenGL, but XBOX versions must be DX, no?

I believe so, but it is possible to create engines that are somewhat agnostic. For example Ogre is a free engine that has been used in PC/Xbox games and lets you choose what API you want to use. There is somewhat of a catch in that a game's shaders tend to be API specific. Retooling shaders can be a pain, and modern games make heavy use of them for just about everything.

True. Unfortunately MS uses that to lock developers into using DirectX. I'm not a console user, but that market grew pretty big, so those who target that market segment are forced to use DX already. But as gooberking pointed out, well crafted engines separate the generic part from the specific one (OpenGL or DirectX) to minimize porting efforts. Though it's not trivial at all.

I think that the reason for this is that Mac gamers are effectively a minority of a minority; while I think it's pretty safe to say that most Linux users are interested in gaming to some extent, the same sadly isn't true for Mac users; for example, compare the number of Mac users who consciously think of gaming when they use their Macs, vs. Apple's customers in education, media production, and science. This sadly, is what's always hamstrung the Mac gaming market (sales numbers were the ultimate reason why the practically complete Mac port of Half-Life got cancelled at the last minute).

I think things have gotten better though, with the clear success of Mac gaming seen in the HIB, Steam, and the MAS showing that there is indeed money to be made in Mac games.

They aren't really as important as before though, with companies like EA and Ubisoft taking responsibility for their own ports. Aspyr used to be really good, but they've been stagnating as of late compared to Feral, who's been regularly knocking out some really great native ports (I'd actually suggest that CDPR go with Feral for their future Mac porting efforts).

And not to trivialize the effort it takes to port from x86/Win32 to x86/OS X, but things have been a hell of a lot easier for ports since Apple's transition from PPC. (Let alone OS 9!)

True on all counts. Still, it takes quite a lot of effort to port a game, so it's interesting to see CDPR, a mid-size developer, doing their own native port of a rather large game. I assume it helps that they wrote the original engine and shmerl and gooberking mentioned there are ways to minimize porting efforts, but even so color me impressed.
I totally agree that while the numbers of Mac users is higher, the proportion of Linux users that are also gamers is higher, so everything at the very least balances out (at least according to HIB sales numbers in which Linux and Mac roughly come out as equal #'s of sales). I would also add that GOG being a PC-only store probably drives off more OSX than Linux users as Linux users are more used to porting games/applications themselves than waiting for official or native ports. But I could be wrong about that. If it hadn't been for threads and GOGmixes (especially yours) I wouldn't have started have porting my own GOG games - I didn't even really know it was possible as I'd only vaguely heard of WINE (I'd heard of Transgaming's CIDER) and never heard of Boxer.

*raises hand*

I'm a Linux user exclusively since '96, currently running Debian Sid at home (and Ubuntu at work but that's another story :p)

I agree that Wine improved a lot in gaming area lately, still, it's a hard challenge and regressions aren't that rare (for a recent example for Thief 2 + DDFix is noticeably faster with Wine 1.3.37 than with any 1.4 or 1.5.x release, up to current 1.5.6 at least), sometimes you need weird tricks (most weird I came across is I think that Age of Wonders 3 only works perfectly when the wineserver process is reniced... yes, when it's priority is lowered!).

So I do not agree that users (and there's more and more novice Linux users) can "just use the AppDB and be done with it", and least not all and not yet.
I'm not sure that everything can be automated either, for example there's lots of issues with poor video drivers, poor gaming platforms like Ubuntu Precise (pulseaudio getting in the way, Unity interface not playing nice will full screen apps), to name a few.
That being said, I'm still convinced that Wine installation automation is worth it. In last October or November I came across the PlayOnLinux project, and since then I wrote many installer scripts (94 released to this day, some more still in testing, plus some failures), at first for my own usage, but I hope they're convenient for others too.
PlayOnLinux main author recently added support for native DOSBox and ScummVM, so games using either, after being installed using Wine, run using the native emulators. So PlayOnLinux is not just a Wine frontend anymore.

I'd be very pleased for any feedback on those installers (did I mention PlayOnLinux also works on Macs under the name PlayOnMac? Sadly I can't test my scripts on Mac).
Also, contributors are welcome, if anything because I don't own all GOG games :D

Regards,
Pierre.
(nickname petch on http://www.playonlinux.com/)

Indeed. Usually, it's a sign that a developer's been forward thinking enough to work in at least a fair amount of portability at the foundation of the game's core technology, and for that CDPR deserves yet more props for being awesome. :) In any case, I guess that's totally reasonable, given that the RED Engine was developed in-house. While the Aurora Engine's been ported to OS X before, it was my impression that it was so thoroughly modified and iterated by CDPR that it was essentially a different beast altogether from what we saw in NWN and KOTOR.

Sadly, I think that's totally spot-on. Mac users in general aren't fond of fine-tuning and tinkering with their software the way Linux users are, so the mere idea that you can get Windows software running with an (overall!) modicum of effort is a really foreign concept to most Mac users. Even Mac-savvy users aren't usually aware of what you can do with WINE and DOSBox, and some F/OSS ports. Hence things like the series I'm trying to write for Inside Mac Games and my own (semi-broken!) GOGMix. Which reminds me, I need to double-down on the Mac compatibility articles I planned on writing for the GOGWiki...

Awww. You're making me blush. WINE has sadly gotten something of a bad rap with Mac gamers due to Cider (and from what I've heard, Cider's analogue on Linux, Cedega, isn't that good either). While I don't think it's all bad (Freeverse/Transgaming's Cider-ized "port" of HOMMV is superior in performance on the Mac vs. HOMMV on WINE 1.5.x through Wineskin), I do think that it's about time that more people realized that WINE-wrapped games can work very well on the Mac. Especially with today's hardware being more powerful than ever.

I'm gonna jump in here, despite being a Debian fan, Ubuntu is fucking terrible for taking out support (aka drivers) for old video cards. I had a Radeon 9700 Pro in one machine and in upgrading to 8.04 (or maybe it was 8.10) I found out they had killed off support for that chipset. All I wanted to do with that machine was play DDO on it, which it was more than capable of doing with said card.

Ubuntu is fine on my Dell machines, I know it'll work (except with some older laptop wifi cards) but it's terrible if you're using something that's not right off the shelf. I hate, hate, hate trying to do anything complex on Ubuntu. Debian is a much better choice for so many reasons.

And, since I've been forced to use OpenSUSE so much lately... WHY? LINUX GODS, WHY? Wtf is wrong with yast2?!!! Oh the pain!

Okay, this is quickly digressing, I'll just stop now.

In general I found experience with Nvidia to be much easier on Linux, so I avoid ATI altogether. But with closed drivers there is always a risk that they'll go out of support, and even if some releases of them will be preserved (like Debian does for older Nvidia cards), they might become incompatible with never breaking changes in X.org and without backported changes from Nividia such things become a real mess. So at some point there is always a question of upgrading the card.

I use Macs and will try to get wine working with GOG games myself. I will go to Windows if I have to(My Mac has a small XP Partition and I have other PCs in the house) but my natural inclination is to want to play in OS X even if its translated(WINE).