Release 1.4.

[wine/multimedia.git] / ANNOUNCE

The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 1.4
is now available.

This release represents 20 months of development effort and over
16,000 individual changes. The main highlights are the new DIB
graphics engine, a redesigned audio stack, and full support for
bidirectional text and character shaping.

It also contains a lot of improvements across the board, as well as
support for many new applications, notably Microsoft Office 2010. See
the release notes below for a summary of the major changes.

This release is dedicated to the memory of Gé (Greg) van Geldorp, who
passed away in May 2011. Greg single-handedly designed, built, and
maintained the Wine Testbot, which has become a cornerstone of our
development process. The high quality of this release owes a lot to
his work. He is greatly missed by us all.


The source is available from the following locations:

  http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/system/emulators/wine/wine-1.4.tar.bz2
  http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.4.tar.bz2

Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:

  http://www.winehq.org/download

You will find documentation on http://www.winehq.org/documentation

You can also get the current source directly from the git
repository. Check http://www.winehq.org/git for details.

Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.

----------------------------------------------------------------

What's new in Wine 1.4
======================

*** Graphics

- There is a new graphics engine for rendering into Device Independent
  Bitmaps (DIB). DIB rendering no longer requires access faults or
  round-trips to the X server, which yields large performance gains in
  DIB-intensive applications.

- The DIB engine can also be used for fall-back implementations of
  some graphics primitives, like alpha blending, when the display
  driver doesn't support them directly.

- All possible color formats are supported by the DIB engine, so DIB
  operations are no longer limited by the color resolution of the
  display. Rendering of the various palette formats is also improved.

- Custom styles of dashed lines are supported.

- Cosmetic pens using hashes or patterns are supported.

- Gradients use dithering on low color resolution devices for a nicer
  appearance.

- The XRender extension is used for gradients when supported.

- PostScript output quality is improved, particularly for bitmaps and
  paths.

- Rotated text works better for all output device types.

- GdiPlus supports more image formats, including formats that are not
  supported through GDI.

- More image codecs are implemented, including support for TGA and CMYK
  JPEG decoding, as well as BMP, TIFF, PNG, and ICNS encoding.


*** Audio

- The audio stack is completely redesigned, based on the Vista
  model. WinMM and DirectSound are implemented on top of the new
  MMDevAPI library.

- The Alsa, OSS, and CoreAudio drivers have been rewritten to use the
  new model. They now serve as back-ends to the MMDevAPI dll, which no
  longer needs to rely on the OpenAL library.

- The Jack, NAS, AudioIO, and ESD audio subsystems are no longer
  supported. Version 3 of the OSS subsystem is no longer supported
  either, version 4 is required.

- The Audio tab in the Wine Configuration tool has been redesigned for
  the new audio subsystem. The appropriate driver is automatically
  selected and no longer needs to be configured manually.


*** Input devices

- The XInput 2 extension is used to provide better mouse control in
  games and other full-screen applications.

- The mouse is automatically clipped to prevent it from leaving a
  full-screen window when running in desktop mode. Switching to a
  different application with Alt-Tab releases the mouse. Clipping can
  be disabled through the Wine Configuration tool.

- Animated mouse cursors are fully supported.

- Joystick action mapping is supported, including a configuration dialog.


*** Internationalization

- Bidirectional text rendering is fully supported.

- Font shaping and reordering is supported for all the scripts
  specified in the Unicode standard.

- Bidirectional text editing is supported in the standard edit
  control.

- Vertical fonts (e.g. for Japanese) are supported.

- Mirroring of windows, menus, and window controls for right-to-left
  languages is fully supported.

- All resources (strings, menus, dialogs, accelerators) contained in
  Wine can be translated through standard gettext-style po files.

- The Unicode character data tables have been updated to version 6.0
  of the Unicode standard.

- Wine is translated to French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch,
  Swedish, Finnish, Portuguese, Catalan, Hungarian, Polish, Russian,
  Slovenian, Lithuanian, Japanese, and Korean. It has partial
  translations for another fifteen languages.


*** User interface

- The new Vista style of file dialogs is supported.

- Common controls are improved, particularly the calendar, tree view,
  system link, and image list controls.

- Parts of the Game Explorer API are implemented.

- Wine can take advantage of the GStreamer framework for audio and
  video playback. This makes it possible to support all formats that
  have a GStreamer codec. On Mac OS X, the QuickTime framework is used
  for the same purpose.


*** Desktop integration

- System tray notification balloons are implemented.

- The system tray is displayed as a task bar at the bottom of the
  screen in desktop mode.

- The system tray is automatically registered again when the Unix tray
  manager is restarted.

- The standard mouse cursors are remapped to the cursor theme of the
  Unix desktop.

- Drag & drop of OLE objects across applications is supported.

- Icons for menu entries are exported in multiple sizes and in PNG
  format.

- Icons are displayed for the Unix desktop "Open with..." menu
  entries.


*** Internet and networking

- The built-in Internet Explorer has a user interface, including a
  menu, an address bar, a tool bar, and configuration dialogs.

- There is an "Internet Settings" control panel that allows
  configuring various aspects of web browsing, as well as managing
  security certificates.

- The VBScript language is fully supported.

- The built-in (Gecko-based) web browser engine supports ActiveX.

- The Gecko engine has been updated to the version from Firefox 8.

- The Gecko engine is packaged as an MSI file, and its installation
  can be managed from the "Add/Remove Programs" control panel.

- The Gecko engine is available on 64-bit.

- Persistent HTTP connections are supported.

- HTTP proxies are better supported, including PAC scripts.

- Changing network passwords is supported.

- The HTML Help support is improved, including a nicer user interface
  and better navigation support.

- Asynchronous I/O on network socket is improved, particularly
  asynchronous accepts. This helps with various networked games.


*** Direct3D

- Reloading sRGB textures uses either EXT_texture_sRGB_decode or FBO
  blits when available. This is much faster. This affects Source
  Engine games and Unreal Engine 3 games in particular.

- WineD3D supports multisample anti-aliasing.

- D3D8 and D3D9 properly support v-sync / swap intervals.

- The WineD3D blitter code is improved both for correctness and
  performance.

- The WineD3D graphics card database has been updated to recognize new
  graphics cards and Mesa drivers.

- WineD3D no longer uses COM for its implementation. This makes it
  much nicer to work with.

- The context management code is improved. The window being destroyed
  while the WineD3D device is still active in particular is handled
  much better.

- There have been some performance improvements related to WineD3D
  state management and resource updates.

- Focus and device window handling work better for D3D8 and D3D9. This
  mostly affects things like changing graphics settings, switching
  from full-screen to windowed and back, etc.

- NVDB is supported on cards that support GL_EXT_depth_bounds_test.

- The INTZ and NULL formats are supported.

- Depth surface blits are implemented in WineD3D.

- Depth bias handling is improved. This fixes flickering shadows and
  decals in a couple of games, like Mass Effect 2 and Unreal
  Tournament 2004.

- GL_ARB_draw_elements_base_vertex is supported. This allows draws to
  be more efficient in some cases.

- GL_ARB_map_buffer_alignment is supported. This allows for more
  efficient mapping of textures and buffers in some cases.

- Handling projected textures works better in early shader model
  versions.

- Shaders are strictly checked against the hardware capabilities. This
  means we won't try to create e.g. a shader model 3 shader on shader
  model 2 hardware.

- D3D9EX texture creation from system memory is supported. This
  affects some Source Engine games like Team Fortress 2.

- The D3DX9 shader assembler is mostly finished. It is now part of the
  new d3dcompiler dll.

- Various parts of D3DX9 are more complete, including:
  - The surface / texture loading functions.
  - The mesh creation and manipulation functions.
  - The vertex declaration handling functions.
  - The effects framework, binary effect parsing in particular.


*** DirectDraw

- OpenGL is used by default for DirectDraw as well, just like D3D8 and
  D3D9. For most applications this is an improvement, but nevertheless
  the old GDI renderer may still work better for specific applications
  or if the graphics driver's OpenGL implementation is inadequate.

- Flips are properly supported. The back buffer now contains the front
  buffer contents after a flip instead of being undefined.

- Improved support for viewports in early versions of DirectDraw that
  include an extra clipspace transformation. This affects the original
  Half-Life.

- Fixes for cooperative levels and associated window handling and mode
  changes.

- DirectDraw clippers are supported.


*** Kernel

- DOSBox is used to run DOS applications on platforms that don't
  support vm86 mode.

- The Windows console is emulated as best as possible on Unix
  terminals without requiring switching into curses mode.

- Volume label and serial number can be retrieved from UDF filesystems
  (used on DVDs).

- Side-by-side manifests are installed for a number of built-in
  libraries to make them more compatible with applications using
  manifest resources.

- The Wine preloader is also used on 64-bit for a more compatible
  address space layout.


*** Installer support

- Applying installer patches is supported. This is needed for various
  Service Pack installers, particularly for the .NET ones.

- Installing side-by-side assemblies is supported.

- Rollbacks of failed installs is supported.

- Installing services is better supported.

- MSI installers can be created entirely under Wine, using the
  'cabarc' and 'winemsibuilder' tools.


*** Build environment

- The IDL compiler (widl) can generate format strings for both
  old-style and new-style COM interpreted stubs.

- Registrations for dlls and typelibs are based on scripts generated
  at compile time, for faster Wine prefix creation and updates.

- The Resource Compiler (wrc) and Message Compiler (wmc) can generate
  translated resources from po files, as well as create po files from
  existing translated resources.

- Fake PE dlls are generated and installed for all built-in dlls,
  since many applications expect to find the PE dlls on disk.

- The ARM platform is supported by the Wine tool chain.

- The windows.h header can now be used in Wine code, the compile time
  gains are no longer worth the header incompatibilities.

- Some headers have been modified to make them easier to share with
  the Mingw-w64 project.


*** Platform-specific changes

- Wine compiles on ARM platforms.

- On Mac OS X, the secure channel implementation uses the Security
  framework instead of the GnuTLS library.

- On Linux, dynamic device management can use the new UDisks service
  in addition to HAL.

- Stubless OLE proxies are supported also on 64-bit platforms.


*** Built-in applications

- The new 'cabarc' program allows manipulation of cabinet files,
  including creation of new cabinets.

- The new 'wscript' program implements the Windows Script Host, to run
  VBScript and JavaScript scripts.

- The new 'taskkill' program allows killing Windows processes by name
  or process id.

- The new 'ipconfig' program displays the IP configuration seen by
  Windows programs.

- The new 'hostname' program displays the hostname seen by Windows
  programs.

- The 'explorer' program implements a shell namespace explorer instead
  of launching the file manager.

- The 'view' program can display enhanced metafiles.

- The 'dxdiag' tool outputs real information about the system.

- The new 'winemsibuilder' tool allows creating MSI installers; it is
  used to build the Gecko add-on package.

- Almost all built-in applications are fully Unicode.

- All applications installed to /usr/bin have a manual page.


*** Quality assurance & debugging

- The test suite no longer attempts to support Win9x platforms, this
  was too much effort for little benefit.

- The Wine debugger offers to save crash information to a file, to
  make it easier to provide good information in bug reports.

- Parsing of debugging information from various object file formats is
  improved, which should yield better quality crash information,
  particularly for 64-bit.


*** Miscellaneous

- XML support is improved, including support for schemas, namespaces,
  MSXML version 6, and an XML file writer. This is particularly useful
  for the new Microsoft Office XML-based document formats.

- The new "secure" versions of the C runtime functions are almost all
  implemented.

- There is an initial implementation of the Microsoft C++ standard
  class libraries, including string, locale, and stream classes.

- Creation of compressed cabinet files is supported.

- There is an implementation of the OpenCL library, as a wrapper
  around the equivalent Unix library.

- Print jobs are submitted to CUPS directly instead of requiring the
  'lpr' command-line tool.

- There is support for managing multiple .NET runtime versions and
  their corresponding Mono versions.


*** New external dependencies

- The XInput 2 library is used for mouse control in games.

- The libopencl library is used by the OpenCL wrapper dll.

- The libgettextpo library is optionally used at build time to update
  po files from the rc sources.

- The msgfmt tool (from the gettext library) is used at build time to
  compile po files.

- The zlib library is used to implement cabinet file compression.

- The libfreetype library needs to be at least version 2.2, older
  versions are no longer supported.

- The libdbus library is used for the UDisks device support on Linux.

- The smbpasswd tool (part of Samba) is used for changing network
  passwords.

- DOSBox is used to run DOS applications. It is recommended to use the
  latest SVN version of DOSBox since it contains some Wine-specific
  improvements.


*** Useful configuration options

Note: More details abouts these and other configuration options can be
      found at http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys

- The correct audio driver is detected automatically, but can still be
  overridden through the HKCU\Software\Wine\Drivers\Audio key like in
  previous versions. It is recommended to delete this key entirely to
  enable the auto-detection.

- Multisample anti-aliasing can be disabled by setting "Multisampling"
  to "disabled" under HKCU\Software\Wine\Direct3D.

- Setting "AlwaysOffscreen" to "enabled" under
  HKCU\Software\Wine\Direct3D simplifies sharing depth / stencil
  surfaces between on-screen and off-screen render targets in
  WineD3D. This will likely become the default for the next release.

- The DirectDraw renderer can be switched back to the old GDI mode by
  setting "DirectDrawRenderer" to "gdi" under HKCU\Software\Wine\Direct3D.


*** Known issues

- Support for PulseAudio is improved, but very recent versions of
  PulseAudio (>= 1.0) and alsa-plugins (>= 1.0.25) are required for
  good results, since older versions contain various bugs.
  See http://wiki.winehq.org/Sound for details.

--
Alexandre Julliard
julliard@winehq.org