In the ensuing months, I dabbled with Trespasser and Winex 2.2, and could never get it to run any better than in software at 640x480, and none of the buttons that operated the options worked. Every time you would press one, the game would crash. I spent the next six months mostly playing and perfecting the play of Half-Life, Opposing Force, and Team Fortress. To my great surprise, my pings with Team Fortress were consistently far superior running under Winex than anything I ever got running the on line multi-player under Windows. You can't use the anti-cheating software, "Cheating Death" with Winex though, which excludes you from playing on servers that require it. I have never been able to convince any of these servers that I'm playing as a Linux client! They usually say something like, "Yeah right!" and then you're gone.
Anyway, back to Trespasser. In the Spring of 2003, Transgaming rushed Winex 3.0 to it's download section, which was designed to address problems and issues players were experiencing with distros using glibc 2.3. I downloaded the new version, and to my surprise and disappointment, Winex3 didn't run Team Fortress nearly as well as the older version. Fortunately though, it's possible to run both 2.2 and 3.0 independently for whichever game works best with each.
Around the first of July 2003, I thought I'd give Trespasser another try, but really didn't expect any improvement in it's performance. After all, Transgaming tailors it's Wine for the most popular games and Trespasser, for some mystifying reason, is not one of them!
I pulled up a terminal and cd'ed to the Dreamworks/trespasser directory and typed in:
"winex3 trespass.exe"
The game came up as usual, so I tried the options. "Hey, they work!!" I changed the resolution to 800x600, pressed start game, and it came up in full screen! As impatient as I am, I wanted to know that it WOULD break somewhere, so I went back into options, changed to hardware at high resolution, and resumed. The progress bar came up..."Impossible!!" In another moment, I was on the beach bobbing in the water! The Nvidia card was rendering!! "Trespasser is now running under Winex3 in hardware!!!" Pretty cool stuff when you love Linux and Trespasser and very much dislike Windows! My first thought was to log into the TreCom forum and tell everyone my big news! Then on second thought, I realized the only person who might really be interested was Troodon since he is a Linux user and the first to create a new Trespasser level. I decided to address my post to him..
http://dynamic5.gamespy.com/~trescom/bo ... ght=winex3
Next installment: first screens!