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Adventures in Wine

A few months ago I started experimenting with Wine support in the launcher for EVE Online on Mac. We announced this on the EVE forums and players have slowly started migrating over to using the Wine wrapper. I want to use this blog to share my experience with using Wine, and describe my process of finding and fixing issues with running EVE under Wine on the Mac.

Who am I?

If you follow the EVE forums you may know me as CCP Snorlax - I have worked at CCP since 2007, doing all sorts of stuff, mostly low-level graphics and other systems. Lately I've been working on the launcher for EVE - redoing it from scratch with proper support for multiple accounts and logging in to test servers, as well as rethinking the patching mechanism used for updating the EVE client. As I mentioned above, the last few months I've been working on Wine support on Mac.

Before joining CCP I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area - I worked for Electronic Arts (Maxis) on various Sims titles, and even before that I worked for Midway Games West (used to be Atari Games). Somewhere in between I started up my own game development studio with 3 very good friends - we didn't make it, but it was quite an experience and we stayed friends.


Open source software

All of us have used open source software to varying degrees - EVE Online uses a fair number of packages and CCP strives to do that properly, according to its license as appropriate. There's more to this, though, than just honoring the license and getting free software - the point of open source software is to be useful to the world and when using it, you should think of ways to give back. I'm hoping that by documenting my experience it may be useful to the developers of Wine, and I'm certainly planning on contributing my code fixes to Wine (when they're not too EVE specific, that is).

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