14 DAY TRIAL // Wine developers have announced that a new version of their application has been released, bringing a few new features and various improvements for Windows apps and games, including one for Hearthstone from Blizzard.
Even if it might seem like this latest version of Wine is not an interesting one, there is at least one line in the changelog that should be very interesting for many users, specifically fans of the Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.
It's been a while since the latest stable branch of Wine was made available, but it doesn't look like the devs are in any hurry to make that happen. They are now concentrating on this branch, which has been getting many changes in the past few months.
There are two changelogs for each release. The main one details some of the major features, and the secondary one shows smaller fixes for games and apps.
There is hope for Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
New games don't usually work with Wine unless some changes are made to accommodate them. Hearthstone was released a while ago, and it worked for a while, but updates to the game changed all that, and it would no longer start. The good news is that the Wine devs have finally pushed a fix for Hearthstone, which means that the problems are being worked on. For now, Hearthstone works again.
According to the changelog, dynamic timezone information is now supported, initial desktop shell window support has been implemented, more Direct2D support has been added, and various bug fixes have been implemented.
Wine 1.7.42 features fixes for the following Windows games and tools: Anarchy Online, DeusEx: Invisible War, Guild Wars 2, Hearthstone, Evernote, XCOM: Enemy Within, Unigine Heaven 4.0, Chessmaster, Visual Studio Express 2013, and SolidWorks.
More details about this release can be found in the official changelog. You can download Wine 1.7.42 source packages right now from Softpedia. It's possible to compile the package by yourself, but there are quite a few dependencies, and it will take a while.