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With all the hoo-ha about The Witcher 3 and the replies GOG have given (first being it was never planned, second being they don't know), I finally have an answer from the actual developer of The Witcher 3.

Yeah, I know, I'm writing about this again after saying I probably wouldn't, "please make it stop" and all that.

This is the first time CDPR have ever actually communicated with me directly.

QuoteHey Liam,

Thanks for getting in touch.

I'm afraid we have nothing to communicate about this at this point in time.

Best,
Robert

I replied right after this, and immediately got an out of the office auto-reply. Hmmm.

There you go, an official comment from the developer of The Witcher 3. It clears up nothing, it's a flat-out denial to answer my basic and easy to understand questions.

It does raise the question though: why reply at all when you're essentially saying nothing?

I don't think we will ever truly know what happened, I expect no one to talk about it as I imagine both Valve and CDPR want this snafu buried.

I will just leave this here again for posterity, to remind myself and you to never pre-order based on developer promises, not even a big banner on Steam itself:
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107 comments
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wojtek88 Sep 11, 2016
Quoting: ShmerlYep. Keep an eye on this changelog: https://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/history/HEAD:/dlls/d3d11/device.c
I will, definitely. Of course thanks Shmerl for testing, I really admit work of both - active developers and all the community that gives feedback.
meraco Sep 11, 2016
Why they need 10 years for D3D11?
wojtek88 Sep 11, 2016
Quoting: meracoWhy they need 10 years for D3D11?
I hate such a comments. But I will answer your question anyway.

Why?
1) First of all, DirectX11 was released in 2009. So it's been 7 years since the day of release.
2) When DirectX 11 was released, we did not even had correct support for DirectX 9 (previous major release, that most of the games and programs used to use). What's more - we still don't have golden support for DirectX 9 in Wine.
3) DirectX is not open-sourced, so develpers have to somehow achieve the same functionality as DirectX. According to wikipedia, Wine uses Black box testing. It is hard and time consuming. Even if some contributors decompile DirectX code, the code that is decompiled is hard to work with, because it is not the same code like the code that was written by the programmer - it is a decompiled version, that has not meaningful variable names, has some code optimizations that normally compiler does (developer does not have to write it explicitly), has no comments etc. And it is illegal in some cases.
4) All the programmers that code in Wine project are just a contributors - they have other jobs, it's not their primary job (Of course, there are a companies, like CodeWeavers, that have commercial interest in Wine evolution, so it's safe to assume that many contributors are paid / employed by this company, but in general Wine is developed by people who are not paid for it).

And even if it takes them 20 years, if they manage to achieve their goal, you should be thankful, because they do it for community (including you).
[email protected] Sep 12, 2016
Quoting: wojtek88
Quoting: meracoWhy they need 10 years for D3D11?
I hate such a comments. But I will answer your question anyway.

Why?
1) First of all, DirectX11 was released in 2009. So it's been 7 years since the day of release.
2) When DirectX 11 was released, we did not even had correct support for DirectX 9 (previous major release, that most of the games and programs used to use). What's more - we still don't have golden support for DirectX 9 in Wine.
3) DirectX is not open-sourced, so develpers have to somehow achieve the same functionality as DirectX. According to wikipedia, Wine uses Black box testing. It is hard and time consuming. Even if some contributors decompile DirectX code, the code that is decompiled is hard to work with, because it is not the same code like the code that was written by the programmer - it is a decompiled version, that has not meaningful variable names, has some code optimizations that normally compiler does (developer does not have to write it explicitly), has no comments etc. And it is illegal in some cases.
4) All the programmers that code in Wine project are just a contributors - they have other jobs, it's not their primary job (Of course, there are a companies, like CodeWeavers, that have commercial interest in Wine evolution, so it's safe to assume that many contributors are paid / employed by this company, but in general Wine is developed by people who are not paid for it).

And even if it takes them 20 years, if they manage to achieve their goal, you should be thankful, because they do it for community (including you).

It's 'meraco'. He's a troll. Ignore him.
Mblackwell Sep 13, 2016
Quoting: wojtek88
Quoting: meracoWhy they need 10 years for D3D11?
I hate such a comments. But I will answer your question anyway.

Why?
1) First of all, DirectX11 was released in 2009. So it's been 7 years since the day of release.
2) When DirectX 11 was released, we did not even had correct support for DirectX 9 (previous major release, that most of the games and programs used to use). What's more - we still don't have golden support for DirectX 9 in Wine.
3) DirectX is not open-sourced, so develpers have to somehow achieve the same functionality as DirectX. According to wikipedia, Wine uses Black box testing. It is hard and time consuming. Even if some contributors decompile DirectX code, the code that is decompiled is hard to work with, because it is not the same code like the code that was written by the programmer - it is a decompiled version, that has not meaningful variable names, has some code optimizations that normally compiler does (developer does not have to write it explicitly), has no comments etc. And it is illegal in some cases.
4) All the programmers that code in Wine project are just a contributors - they have other jobs, it's not their primary job (Of course, there are a companies, like CodeWeavers, that have commercial interest in Wine evolution, so it's safe to assume that many contributors are paid / employed by this company, but in general Wine is developed by people who are not paid for it).

And even if it takes them 20 years, if they manage to achieve their goal, you should be thankful, because they do it for community (including you).

There was also a rewrite of the Wine D3D structure to allow themselves to go fairly cleanly from D3D10 to 11 since the API changed a lot from D3D9. Took time, and was also why CSMT wasn't implemented sooner.


Anyway, about the heap size thing: Basically TW3 crashes as post-patch the game tries to allocate more than Wine's virtual heap size allows. Unless the function is updated to allocate dynamically or the size is doubled this will be a barrier to success even once D3D11 support improves enough to render more of the game properly.
Shmerl Sep 13, 2016
Is there a way to request this increased virtual heap patch to be included in wine-staging?


Last edited by Shmerl on 13 September 2016 at 3:33 pm UTC
MadVillain Sep 15, 2016
This game is made with DX11, so if their engine was not capable of supporting OpenGL at the moment of development (which I really doubt) then Linux port would take a tremendous amount of time (and thus money) to make. Using Wine wrapper or whatever is also not an option, because it would lag like hell( and not only lag). So maybe one day we will see Cyberpunk 2077 on Linux, but definitely not Witcher 3.
Shmerl Sep 15, 2016
I don't think Wine will lag. They expect DX11 performance in their translation not to be any worse than their DX9 one. Of course implementing it all is a major task.


Last edited by Shmerl on 15 September 2016 at 4:49 pm UTC
Aryvandaar Sep 15, 2016
Maybe they are working on adding Vulkan support to their engine.
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